I think there is a clear line. If you take the job at 20 hours/day, you know what you’ve signed up for. You didn’t sign up to be injured in an accident. The liability for that needs to fall somewhere.
(You could argue that workers signed up for certain risks, and this is exactly what employers used to argue in many cases. And I’m not 100% sure that’s wrong. So I am still slightly ambivalent about this.)
You could argue that workers signed up for certain risks, and this is exactly what employers used to argue in many cases.
Is a person’s level of responsibility for the risks they assume proportional to the level of knowledge they had about those risks in advance?
Here’s a line of thinking we might imagine in the mind of a worker taking full personal responsibility for an unknown level of risk:
I need a job, and working in the steel mill seems like good-paying work. But I know that people get hurt or killed there, sometimes. I’ll try to be careful, but I can’t control what other people do, and the equipment isn’t too reliable either. Plus, I might have a bad day, be forgetful, and cause a disaster. I don’t want to die for this job. But I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll get hurt or killed, and it’s hard for me to say whether or not, if I really knew my true chances, I’d feel this was the job for me… I guess I’ll do it, though. What am I going to do otherwise? Something else that’s just as dangerous? Or lower-paying?
This line of thinking seems like a plausible account of how a cautious person might have tried to do a risk assessment for factory work. I don’t look at it and think “clearly, this man is fully liable for anything that happens to him in the steel mill.” Nor do I look at it and think, “anything that happens to this man is his employer’s moral and fiscal responsibility.”
Instead, I tend to think that we should do our best to get an expert assessment of the risk, make the factory as safe as we can, create a culture of safety, and take care of people who get hurt—both for their sake and so that we can keep a feeling of relative confidence in the workers who will continue to do the job after one of their colleagues suffers an accident. Having the moral debate is a symptom that your system has broken down and can’t find a satisfactory deal for everybody. It feels like camoflage for a business negotiation rather than a true intellectual debate. Real progress is having to have fewer moral debates.
I think there is a clear line. If you take the job at 20 hours/day, you know what you’ve signed up for. You didn’t sign up to be injured in an accident. The liability for that needs to fall somewhere.
(You could argue that workers signed up for certain risks, and this is exactly what employers used to argue in many cases. And I’m not 100% sure that’s wrong. So I am still slightly ambivalent about this.)
Is a person’s level of responsibility for the risks they assume proportional to the level of knowledge they had about those risks in advance?
Here’s a line of thinking we might imagine in the mind of a worker taking full personal responsibility for an unknown level of risk:
I need a job, and working in the steel mill seems like good-paying work. But I know that people get hurt or killed there, sometimes. I’ll try to be careful, but I can’t control what other people do, and the equipment isn’t too reliable either. Plus, I might have a bad day, be forgetful, and cause a disaster. I don’t want to die for this job. But I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll get hurt or killed, and it’s hard for me to say whether or not, if I really knew my true chances, I’d feel this was the job for me… I guess I’ll do it, though. What am I going to do otherwise? Something else that’s just as dangerous? Or lower-paying?
This line of thinking seems like a plausible account of how a cautious person might have tried to do a risk assessment for factory work. I don’t look at it and think “clearly, this man is fully liable for anything that happens to him in the steel mill.” Nor do I look at it and think, “anything that happens to this man is his employer’s moral and fiscal responsibility.”
Instead, I tend to think that we should do our best to get an expert assessment of the risk, make the factory as safe as we can, create a culture of safety, and take care of people who get hurt—both for their sake and so that we can keep a feeling of relative confidence in the workers who will continue to do the job after one of their colleagues suffers an accident. Having the moral debate is a symptom that your system has broken down and can’t find a satisfactory deal for everybody. It feels like camoflage for a business negotiation rather than a true intellectual debate. Real progress is having to have fewer moral debates.