Imprudence and Victim-Blaming

When I was a kid in Peru, we were always told by our teachers not to bring our phones to school. This was way before the time of smartphones and worries about distractions; our phones had one 8-bit clunky game at best. The reason given, instead, was that our phones would be stolen if we brought them to school. The teachers would often add that if our phones were stolen, we’d be to blame for having exposed ourselves to a risky situation. 

There is something very jarring about this last comment; it amounts to a kind of victim-blaming. Meanwhile, the teachers thought they had no way of policing which students were stealing and, in such a risky environment, they thought our acting imprudently could make us blameworthy. Indeed, they’d argue when pressed, if we brought our parents’ phone to such a risky environment and it was stolen, our parents would be right in being upset with us, even if they’d be fine with us taking the phone to a less risky environment.  

We can think of other similar cases. Say that there’s an alley in town into which a company is illegally emitting toxic fumes. I know I shouldn’t walk past, but it’s the quickest way to get where I’m going, and I’ve had a couple of beers. So I go through it, and inhale the fumes. It seems that, for all my imprudence, I haven’t done anything blameworthy. Now consider a case that differs only in that I bring through the alley with me a friend who does not know about the toxic fumes. In this second case, it seems that I have gone beyond imprudence and done something blameworthy. 

These cases illustrate a broader puzzle about victim-blaming. Say that entering some environment greatly raises the risk that someone will be harmed by bad actors. In cases in which the person who is responsible for entering the environment is different from the person who ends up being harmed, we don’t hesitate to blame, at least to some degree, the person who entered the environment. But in cases in which the person who is responsible for entering the environment is the very same person who is harmed, we feel that any amount of blame is a mistake. What could be the morally relevant difference between the cases? 

One hypothesis is that the cases that involve third parties involve some kind of lying or deceit. After all, neither my parents nor my friend knew about the risk they’d incur, but in exposing them to such a risk, I have wronged them. This is why I am blameworthy in both of those cases. On the other hand, in the cases that involve just my phone or my lungs, I’ve only exposed myself to such risk. One might think either that one cannot wrong oneself in general, or that there is something about these cases, perhaps that they involve allowing a harm to happen instead of doing it, that makes it so that there is no relevant self-wronging. Another hypothesis involves standing to blame. According to it, in the cases where only I am harmed I have wronged myself, but only I have standing to blame me. The cases that involve others are different because I have wronged others, and this now generates that more people have standing to blame me. 

At the heart of these hypotheses is the idea that imprudent actions, that is, actions that decrease or risk decreasing my self-interest, are not suitable targets of moral judgment by others. So, in this spirit, I think it’d be natural for defenders of these hypotheses to argue that my mother can’t blame me for (risking) hurting my leg while free-soloing, for while I might have been imprudent, I didn’t wrong myself. 

There’s a lot these hypotheses get right about most cases of victim-blaming. In general, those who engage in victim-blaming in cases where the harm is the result of the actions of other human beings tend to believe those human beings are not blameworthy. Therefore, their victim-blaming typically amounts to a kind of scapegoating. 

However, I think it cannot be right, in general, to block imprudence from the moral judgment of others. First, we often get angry with others that engage in imprudent behavior. Imagine you have a friend who hikes up a mountain for the first time in their life and starts skipping on the edge of a cliff. If you can’t get them to stop, you will eventually get angry at them for their actions. It’s hard to distinguish this reaction from a kind of blame. Second, we often take getting upset in these ways to be a mark of love. If someone was indifferent to hearing that you were incompetently skipping on the edge of a cliff, you’d hesitate to call them a friend. And the cases where we think that indifference is fine are precisely the cases in which the action wouldn’t have been risky; for example, when someone skilled in walking a tight rope had skipped on the edge. So, third, it’s natural to think that we should get angry at, i.e., blame, our loved ones when they’ve engaged in imprudent behavior. 

The risk, of course, is collapsing the distinction between engaging in behavior that is and should be imprudent, like drunk driving, and engaging in behavior that shouldn’t be but is imprudent, like bringing my phone to school in Peru. As mentioned above, people often confuse the two. When it came to my teachers, I often felt that they had given up on stealing, and that they thought this was a normal feature for schools to have. 

However, the problem that some of us who oppose victim-blaming have is that regardless of whether an environment should be risky or not, if it is risky, people will have to navigate it accordingly to avoid harm. Part of this involves not acting imprudently, even if you think that in a better world the very same action would not be imprudent. 

What we should do, first, is offer guidance about such environments in a way that differentiates us from those who take the risk as normal. That is, we can urge others to not act in some way that is contingently imprudent while at the same time making them aware of the injustice in having to not act in this way. This will be particularly salient when what is currently imprudent for someone to do is something that in a better world would increase their well-being. 

Second, and more controversially, we should blame others, even if to a much lesser degree than perpetrators of harm, in the rare occasions when they do act imprudently and raise the chances that others harm them. Not doing so amounts to not being worried that they will contribute to putting themselves in harm’s way, whatever the origin of such harm is. 

In general, environments that are risky because of the presence of bad actors change only with sustained collective action, not with the one-off actions of individuals. If we are to risk harm, it should be only because we stand to gain the end of such harm. In the meantime, we owe it to ourselves and those that love us to act prudently, even while recognizing that the need for such prudence is not always fair.

Contributor

Nurit Matuk

CFCP Affiliated Graduate Fellow