Word: blaming
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Head to the Internet's outer fringes, and the alarm bells start sounding. This (with the exception of that genuinely scary "60 Minutes" report) is where most of the aforementioned horror stories are. Some afflicted Gulf War veterans blame The Shot for their woes, although when you hear how many government pills soldiers popped over there to protect them from Saddam it's hard to figure what might have been responsible for whatever they might have come down with...
...Kyoto treaty commits the U.S. and other industrialized nations to cut their output of carbon-based gases - which governments blame, in part, for global warming - back to their 1990 levels by the year 2012. Right now, though, U.S. output levels are still increasing annually, and cutting them will require some painful sacrifices in the world's most evolved car culture. Short of banning gas-guzzling SUVs and risking a revolution, adding tax remains, as Europeans have found, the most effective way to curb consumption. After all, even at $2 a gallon, gas is still a bargain compared with the inflation...
Such paradoxes pervade the way we think about blame, and few cases have displayed them more clearly than this one. There has been much pondering of whether this child knew what he did was wrong. Well, probably not. But that's often the problem, isn't it--that criminals disagree with society over what is wrong? Shootings often arise out of grievance, a sense of just retribution. And more than a few robbers weave elaborate theories--not always implausible--about why their victims didn't deserve their money in the first place. Should we let these reflective thieves walk...
Consider this child's famously miserable environment. How can we blame a six-year-old who has criminals as role models for his faulty moral compass? Good question. But will it be so much easier to blame him for being morally defective at 16, after another 10 years in that environment? As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined. ("A young child is even more open to cultural and family influence than an older kid," a psychologist told the New York Times. True. But older kids were once young--that is, when they got the firm dispositions, for good...
This is not the place for a discourse on free will. It's a murky issue, and our everyday notions of blame, even if incoherent, do a passable job of punishing the people who, as a practical matter, must be punished for society to stay livable. But I do dissent from the common belief that this murder was unusual in being a "double tragedy." The more you know about what makes bad people bad--whether it is environment, genes or both--the more you realize that all murders are double tragedies...