Are you responsible?

[The Grand Nudger]

We commonly believe that a person can be accountable for what other people do with their property, even their stolen property.  That this person was involved in the chain of events that lead to misery is inarguable.   The extent to which their action (or inaction) lead to some negatively valued outcome roughly describes how we view that person..but isn't always a one for one exchange in whether we think that some action should be taken against them (or how).  Responsibility and desert are related but distinct concepts.  There's a thought experiment that describes the peaks and troughs in desert as it relates to accountability.   Three men are sitting on a dock, the first man grabs the second and drowns him, the third merely watches it happen.  

The end result of both mens actions is a dead body.  The body is floating, this much is inarguable.  So both men were involved in this chain of events.  The man who did the drowning is fully responsible, and we're likely to think that if we threw the book at him he would deserve every ounce of it.  He's a bad man, getting what he deserves.  We generally don't think that the third man is fully responsible - but we're similarly unlikely to give the guy a full pass.  His level of accountability (some would argue for greater accountability and some for less) would suggest that he be placed somewhere on the spectrum of blame if this were the only thing we considered in desert.  This is a notion called comparative desert.  It's an appeal to equality which states that similar actions deserve similar outcomes (be they official legal outcomes, or social condemnation).  If responsibility were a scale of one to ten, with lashes being handed out for unit of responsibility - we can see the man who drowned the other as a ten..but regardless of whether we see the man who watched as a .5 or a 9.5..we're discussing some amount of lashes under a comparative desert scheme.

-But that's not how we act, nor is it the only thing we consider.  Particularly when it comes to law.  We operate on a non-comparative scheme where, in any scenario that a person could be over compensated or under compensated negatively, we hold it to be axiomatically true that under compensating them would be best.  So, a person could have a responsibility level of .5 or 9.5....but so long as it isn't 10, and even accepting that this person is to a greater or lesser extent responsible for what happened..we nevertheless opt out of retribution or opt out of the greater level of retribution, leaving their welfare level higher than they would comparatively deserve.  We'll still think that they're a piece of shit and that they should have done something (different), and often enough we think that their offset level of comparative welfare is just another reason that they;re a piece of shit - they got off with a warning - but we're not willing to add a fourth mans after the fact actions to that comparison.

TLDR version...yeah, ofc you can be responsible if someone takes your car and runs some poor fucker over with it, but that doesn't mean that we see no difference between you and the person who ran that fucker over, or that we're willing to punish you for whatever level of responsibility you can certainly possess.