Gah, sorry D. Margaux.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: DIS: [Referee] Ritual Finger Pointing Proto-Decision
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2019 00:30:06 -0400
From: Jason Cobb <jason.e.c...@gmail.com>
To: D. Margaux <dmargaux...@gmail.com>
I'll point out that in that example, both parties were each committing
an action that was independently illegal, even if it would not have
caused harm if the other parties had not acted. In the case with the
Ritual, a specific person failing to perform the Ritual in a given week
is not in and of itself illegal (or "tortious" in the example). As
evidence, everybody except Falsifian(?) failed to perform the Ritual
last week, but nobody had a Finger pointed at them. Their action only
became illegal when everyone else also decided to do so. Thus the
analogy differs in some significant ways.
Jason Cobb
On 6/4/19 12:20 AM, D. Margaux wrote:
On Jun 3, 2019, at 11:47 PM, Aris Merchant
<thoughtsoflifeandligh...@gmail.com> wrote:
Under the present conditions,
however, each player can quite reasonably claim that someone else should
have performed The Ritual, and that it wasn’t *their* fault that it
wasn’t
performed. Unless the rule explicitly states that the responsibility
falls
on each player jointly and severally (i.e. it’s each player’s
responsibility to see that The Ritual is performed), there is no way to
prove from the text of the rules involved that this should be the case.
I am delighted that you raised the idea of joint and several
liability!That analogy occurred to me too; I didn’t mention it in my
protobecause it’s not a rules based concept. But it did perhaps
influence my thinking somewhat.
This Ritual stuff seems interestingly analogous to a specific
situationin which American law generally *does* recognize joint and
several liability: it is the situation where multiple careless or bad
actors, each acting independently of one another, are each an
independent legal cause ofthe entire harm that is suffered by the
wronged party. For example, imagine that an elderly person walking on
a sidewalk is carelessly bumped into the road by a distracted
pedestrian, and that the elderly person is then struck by a speeding
and reckless drunk driver, and e suffers very serious injuries. The
distracted pedestrian and the drunk driver each were legal causes the
entire harm—if either of them had been acting withdue care, then the
elderly person would not have been struck by the car. And the harm to
the elderly person cannot be apportioned in any principled way as
between the two wrongful actors. So American tort law holds them both
jointly and severally liable, even though each of them individually
would have caused NO harm if the other had not ALSO independently
beenacting wrongfully! See Restatement (2d) of Torts § 879 (“If the
tortious conduct of each of two or more persons is a legal cause
ofharm that cannot be apportioned, each is subject to liability for
the entire harm, irrespective of whether their conduct is concurring
or consecutive.”).
The Ritual strikes me as an analogous situation. Each player’s
inaction is a cause of the harm, and the harm that was caused cannot
be apportioned among the players in a principled way. As a result, it
is not unjust that each player is considered liable for the entire
harm (jointlyand severally as it were), even though (as you said)
“each player can quite reasonably claim that someone else should have
performed The Ritual, and that it wasn’t *their* fault that it wasn’t
performed.” Same with the distracted pedestrian and the drunk
driver—each of them could say that the other should have done the
prudent thing to avoid the accident, and that “it wasn’t their fault”
the injury occurred.
Here, each individual player should have done the prudent thing and
performed the Ritual, and the fact that no other player performed it
does not absolve the others of their moral responsibility. (I suppose
that pointgoes to rebut the supposed injustice of holding people
liable, rather than for whether they violated the Rules.)
