Prometheus 6

Credit and Blame
Author: Charles Tilly
asin: 0691135789
Binding: Hardcover
List price: $24.95 USD
Amazon price: $16.47 USD

Judgment Call
By ALEXANDER STAR

Tilly suggests that we possess something like an “all-purpose justice detector.” When something good or bad happens, we measure the magnitude of the change, identify an agent who helped bring it about and assess how the agent’s skills, knowledge and intentions figure in the result. How much blame does the Ford Motor Company deserve when an Explorer rolls over on the highway? The answer, Tilly writes, depends on how badly the driver or passenger was injured, whether Ford should have known the crash was likely to happen and whether it intended to build the car the way it did. Lawyers argue this way in civil suits, but couples apply similar rules of thumb when they argue over who left the car windows down.

Of course, lawyers, like the rest of us, use stories in order to apportion credit and blame. And that makes sense, because we respond to just about any sequence of events by evaluating the actors who seem to have brought it about. If we hear a story about an accident or battle or sporting event, our first questions are likely to focus on who deserves honor or dishonor. While stories enable judgment, however, they also distort it. When television news reports about poverty focus on an individual’s situation rather than on poverty more generally, “viewers look for someone (the poor person or someone else) who caused the hardship.” But this, Tilly argues, is to avoid “the whole complicated process that brought someone grief.” Stories call our attention away from chance, the influence of institutions or social structures, or the incremental contributions that different factors typically make to any outcome. And they follow conventions that verge on melodrama: events are caused by individuals who act deliberately, and what those individuals do reflects their underlying character. This, to put it mildly, is not how most things happen.