In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following:
>Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.
I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior?
Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there.
So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.
> Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars.
This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives.
> A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool.
I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers.
I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.
> I think we can do better.
Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.
Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation incidents are fungible for the purposes of this discussion. That segues right into the question of relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick google search brought up this article from the washington post [0] which gives the following:
Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles
Car: 7.28
Ferry: 3.17
Train: 0.43
Subway: 0.24
Bus: 0.11
Plane: 0.07
Granted this is skewed by cars being the only viable last-mile rural transportation method but we can examine that too. According to USDOT, urban motor vehicle crash deaths overtook rural crash deaths in 2016 in a reversal of the previous longstanding trend of deaths being 60% rural and 40% urban [1]. You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car. That's almost 90 lives saved per day if we all rode the bus. I suspect this rate is tied to CDL and bus maintenance standards and would remain largely unchanged if buses became the transportation method of the majority.
>I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence.
I'd love to see some data but given what I've seen of the local street racer scene and how they view certain movie franchises that glorify their subculture I think the influence is significant. Would society be better if we straight up banned everything that shows people doing bad stuff? Probably not, but media still has a tremendous impact on how people behave. It's again a case where an industry offloads negative externalities onto society.
>I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.
Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no? I used to be a vocal proponent of not yielding an inch of freedom as well but I'm less and less convinced about that as time goes on. Just because the harm isn't as immediate as people getting trampled 30 seconds after one yells fire in the crowded theater doesn't mean it's still not real harm that could've been avoided. There's a significant amount of internal propaganda here in the US about how amazing freedom is but I'm really not sold on the idea that the average person's life here is better as a result of it compared to a society that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of the world and responds to it with structure rather than "individual freedom" and a literal world-leading number of people sitting around making license plates in jail.
> You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car.
These numbers don't reflect the absolute difference in safety between these modes of transportation. Imagine a world in which buses replace cars as the primary mode of transportation. You've now got many, many more buses on the road. So, if there is a collision, rather than probably being car-on-car or car-on-bus, it's most likely to be bus-on-bus. That will raise the fatalities per billion passenger miles in two ways: (1) The amount of energy in a bus-on-bus collision will be quite a bit larger than when a car hits a bus or a car hits a car. (2) When there is a fatal collision, the number of fatalities is likely to be higher. (It takes no stretch of the imagination to imagine if one person on a bus dies in a collision, his fellow passengers are more likely to also die.)
You also have second-order effects, like vastly reduced visibility for bus-drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists...
> Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no?
No. Not if they don't actually have any control or responsibility over the externality, like in the case of drunk driving, which was my original point. The only things a manufacturer could do in that case is fight for prohibition or install a breathalyzer in every car. The former was tried and turned out to be pretty bad for society. The latter probably would destroy the industry and/or be trivially worked around by the dedicated drunk.
>Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?
For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things.
There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).
>Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.
I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior?
Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there.
So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.