poll: who's to blame?

[mellowtigger]

Don't google. All comments are screened until I post the results on Wednesday, so you can't be influenced by others' answers.

Scenario: Janet and a friend are kayaking in a part of ocean with many jellyfish. The friend asks Janet if she should go for a swim. Janet has just read that the jellyfish in the area are harmless, and tells her friend to go for a swim. The friend is stung by a jellyfish and dies.

Q: Is Janet morally responsible for her friend's death?

Comments

[chernovog.livejournal.com]

This really depends on the weight people give to intentions.

On the one hand, acting in good faith, she used the knowledge she had and told her friend to go ahead and swim. Her friend took this information as truth without further investigation and died. If her intentions outweigh the consequence, then no, she's not morally responsible.

If consequence is given more weight, then she assumed the random tidbit she heard about the jellyfish was true without further research or effort to determine the facts. She allowed herself to be viewed as an expert on this subject by her friend, gave her friend faulty information, and her friend died because of it. So yes, she is morally responsible.

One step further, though, and we have to ask where in this process either one of them could have done anything different, or in any way been *other* than themselves in that moment and had a different outcome. Moral responsibility assumes a burden of responsibility for the friend's death, and everything from the pair's blithe assumptions to the evolution of poisonous jellyfish is actually responsible for the death.

[litch.livejournal.com]

She allowed herself to be viewed as an expert on this subject by her friend, gave her friend faulty information, and her friend died because of it. So yes, she is morally responsible.

Janet was the local expert, she knew more than anyone else they could contact. And its possible the information was not faulty, maybe the friend was just a llergic or the sting was in an unlikely place that had unexpected consequences.