You could argue that workers signed up for certain risks, and this is exactly what employers used to argue in many cases.
Is a person’s level of responsibility for the risks they assume proportional to the level of knowledge they had about those risks in advance?
Here’s a line of thinking we might imagine in the mind of a worker taking full personal responsibility for an unknown level of risk:
I need a job, and working in the steel mill seems like good-paying work. But I know that people get hurt or killed there, sometimes. I’ll try to be careful, but I can’t control what other people do, and the equipment isn’t too reliable either. Plus, I might have a bad day, be forgetful, and cause a disaster. I don’t want to die for this job. But I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll get hurt or killed, and it’s hard for me to say whether or not, if I really knew my true chances, I’d feel this was the job for me… I guess I’ll do it, though. What am I going to do otherwise? Something else that’s just as dangerous? Or lower-paying?
This line of thinking seems like a plausible account of how a cautious person might have tried to do a risk assessment for factory work. I don’t look at it and think “clearly, this man is fully liable for anything that happens to him in the steel mill.” Nor do I look at it and think, “anything that happens to this man is his employer’s moral and fiscal responsibility.”
Instead, I tend to think that we should do our best to get an expert assessment of the risk, make the factory as safe as we can, create a culture of safety, and take care of people who get hurt—both for their sake and so that we can keep a feeling of relative confidence in the workers who will continue to do the job after one of their colleagues suffers an accident. Having the moral debate is a symptom that your system has broken down and can’t find a satisfactory deal for everybody. It feels like camoflage for a business negotiation rather than a true intellectual debate. Real progress is having to have fewer moral debates.
Is a person’s level of responsibility for the risks they assume proportional to the level of knowledge they had about those risks in advance?
Here’s a line of thinking we might imagine in the mind of a worker taking full personal responsibility for an unknown level of risk:
I need a job, and working in the steel mill seems like good-paying work. But I know that people get hurt or killed there, sometimes. I’ll try to be careful, but I can’t control what other people do, and the equipment isn’t too reliable either. Plus, I might have a bad day, be forgetful, and cause a disaster. I don’t want to die for this job. But I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll get hurt or killed, and it’s hard for me to say whether or not, if I really knew my true chances, I’d feel this was the job for me… I guess I’ll do it, though. What am I going to do otherwise? Something else that’s just as dangerous? Or lower-paying?
This line of thinking seems like a plausible account of how a cautious person might have tried to do a risk assessment for factory work. I don’t look at it and think “clearly, this man is fully liable for anything that happens to him in the steel mill.” Nor do I look at it and think, “anything that happens to this man is his employer’s moral and fiscal responsibility.”
Instead, I tend to think that we should do our best to get an expert assessment of the risk, make the factory as safe as we can, create a culture of safety, and take care of people who get hurt—both for their sake and so that we can keep a feeling of relative confidence in the workers who will continue to do the job after one of their colleagues suffers an accident. Having the moral debate is a symptom that your system has broken down and can’t find a satisfactory deal for everybody. It feels like camoflage for a business negotiation rather than a true intellectual debate. Real progress is having to have fewer moral debates.