Scott on Victimology

I think you’re right, sometimes there’s a non-victim. But I offer the clarification that a person may be both the victim and the perpetrator. We aren’t blaming them as victim, we are blaming them as perpetrator. And overall, the perpetrator status precludes them from considered a victim, even though in the direct sense they are also wearing the victim hat.

Maybe this seems normal to me because in tax law, people and entities are often wearing multiple hats at once. For example, a partner may be both an owner and an employee and payments made to the same individual may be made to the employee or the owner, with distinct implications. Or if you sue your employer and win a settlement, the payment might be to you as an employee, you as a tort victim, you as a sufferer of emotional damage, etc. – all with different tax consequences.

So when you wildly swing the chainsaw and hit yourself, you are are both the perpetrator and the victim. We are not blaming you as the victim, we are blaming you as the perpetrator. So I agree with Bryan that we sometimes blame “the victim,” and I propose the added clarification that we typically blame the victim only when the victim is also the perpetrator. But this is just a hypothesis that occurred to me this morning, so I freely accept edits or criticism.

Bryan, I agree with you on the premise that there is such a thing as just desert.

But just desert applies to areas that are matters of moral choice. If you are born naturally intelligent, you don’t get to take moral credit for that and demand that you inherently deserve to be treated better. If two people work equally hard in the same profession, but one does better because he is smarter, I can’t say that the smarter one deserves more wealth.

At the same time however, I reject the Rawlsian premise that this means the smarter one deserves not to have his wealth, that he has a moral obligation to give it to the other guy.

Nobody deserves or morally earned that extra wealth. And I agree with the Nozickian premise that, since nobody deserves it, the one who has it (the smarter one) ought to be able to keep it. Especially since this is better for everyone in the long run.

Whether or not we call the attempted murderer a “victim” or not, the way in which the chain saw severed his hand is still a potentially valid data point in regulating the design of chain saws offered for sale.

Hazel:

Is rape really a “major offense”?

Nobody really gets hurt, except for their feelings, and then only because they’ve chosen to have somewhat irrational feelings about sexual autonomy. One is not required to respond to a rape by breaking down emotionally and calling the police.

(In case it is not absolutely clear, this is a parody of Hazel’s argument.)

@Daniel

The analogy doesn’t work because adultery is a consentual act that occurs between two OTHER adults. Nobody physically does anything to you (which is sort of the point, ahem).

Hazel-
If you have totally different values and expectations than practically everyone else regarding fidelity and deception, and you hold the normal set of values in contempt, it is your responsibility to make that known to your spouse. Ideally before they are your spouse. By cheating and justifying it this way, you declare both your feelings and your values to be more important than your spouse’s, and you take away their ability to make informed decisions regarding their life.

Hazel:

1. What about finding a peephole in a hotel bathroom?

2. Are people so quaint that being left by a (unreasonable and old-fashioned) spouse makes you a victim? I say the guys who are sad about being left had unreasonable expectations of their marriage to begin with. Get with the times!

It seems to me that a victim is more blameworthy for something the more obviously their actions would have led to the harm that they came to, and the more easy it would have been to avoid this action.

So somebody who goes out of his way to skip along the train tracks instead of taking the road is fairly blameworthy when he gets hit by a train. That action was clearly going to lead to that outcome, and was entirely avoidable. Someone who opens his door to find that World War III has broken out, and is promptly mown down by a machine gun, is not at all blameworthy, because there was no way to predict that outcome, and avoiding it would have been very difficult.

I think the reason that this situation – young women and alcohol and parties – incurs so much angry discussion by two sides who can both clearly tell that they are right and the morons on the other side are being deliberately dense, is because of disagreement over these aspects of the situation. That getting drunk in a party full of strangers might lead to bad consequences is obvious. But one group of people consider “don’t go to parties full of strangers and get drunk” to be a completely unreasonable constraint, while the other group considers it to be entirely prudent and easy to follow advice.

“Don’t put yourself into this dangerous situation if you want to avoid possible bad outcomes” reads entirely differently if you like that dangerous situation versus if you don’t.

I’m still trying to make out the importance of why it is important to know who is or is not a victim in interactions in which one should or should not “blame” the victim. Maybe there is more than one dimension involved.

One is, given the victim’s having put himself at risk, what is the consequence of that risk? If Bryan jay-walks and is killed by an automobile, we may feel he is a victim and hesitate to blame him because the consequence seems disproportionate to the risky behavior. And we feel this way even if an accident investigation shows that the driver of the automobile was in no way “to blame” for the accident. All the “blame” falls on Bryan.

Another dimension is whether the risky behavior ought to have been risky. Suppose that in a statistical sense it is riskier for a young black man to dress in baggy pants and a hoodie than in a business suit — he is more likely to have a violent encounter with the police or self appointed neighborhood vigilante. Nevertheless, we do not blame him for his choice of apparel because that choice ought not be more risky.

All this talk of whether one should “blame the victim,” or whether we should consider some people to be “non-victims” is based on the false but all-too-human notion that victims are above criticism. We tend to think, perhaps, that criticism adds insult to injury.

The reality is that the chainsaw guy is a victim–of his own stupidity and violence. That shouldn’t stop us from telling him it’s his own fault. And no, Bryan, you don’t deserve to die for jaywalking. But you’re a victim of your own carelessness if you get hit by a car when you jaywalk. If I care anything about your well-being, then, I will tell you to avoid being stupid and you should stop jaywalking in the future. Is this blaming the victim? Call it what you like, but the reality is that the advice is apparently needed and will be better for you in the long run.

It’s possible to acknowledge that a “victim” caused his own suffering without implying that the resultant suffering is deserved.

Quite frankly, while I don’t necessarily sympathize with the people who were exposed here, in a very legal sense they had an expectation of privacy. This expectation of privacy, in a very legal sense, has been violated by the hackers. “Potential foreseeable consequences” are completely irrelevant here. By the same token, medical malpractice is a potential foreseeable consequence of modern medicine – you are gambling with your life by trusting an imperfect doctor. Yet, when it occurs, doctors get sued, even when the malpractice was an accident. Here, the hackers’ actions were not accidents but intentional malice.

Therefore, the first “moralizing” thought that comes to my mind is not about the morality of the A.M. users, but about the gleeful moralizing of the self righteous vigilantes that are the hackers. The hackers in a word, are easily wronger here than the A.M. users.