What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt? It seems obvious to me that the scale on which a line has to be drawn somewhere is the extent to which you consider external factors affecting the decision when assigning blame, in which case your “sensible place” is the furthest extreme on the blame end of the scale.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt?
How could such a world possibly exist for more then a couple of years without people noticing that there is a problem?
I’m quite confident it wouldn’t, hence “bizarre”, but I don’t think that matters to the questions I’m actually trying to address with the hypothetical. I just used a drunk driver because that’s what DeVliegendeHollander used.
The point is that traditions, especially long established traditions, generally do in fact contain good advice.
I think the point is weaker: long established traditions do not contain self-destructive advice and contain good advice for the times in which they were created. If the circumstances have changed sufficiently, the advice of ancient traditions could, in fact, be bad.
That tendency exists, and is part of why I’m confident the thing I described as a bizarre alternate universe wouldn’t really happen, but it seems as true-but-irrelevant as the simple fact that such a tradition probably wouldn’t develop.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt? It seems obvious to me that the scale on which a line has to be drawn somewhere is the extent to which you consider external factors affecting the decision when assigning blame, in which case your “sensible place” is the furthest extreme on the blame end of the scale.
How could such a world possibly exist for more then a couple of years without people noticing that there is a problem?
I’m quite confident it wouldn’t, hence “bizarre”, but I don’t think that matters to the questions I’m actually trying to address with the hypothetical. I just used a drunk driver because that’s what DeVliegendeHollander used.
The point is that traditions, especially long established traditions, generally do in fact contain good advice.
I think the point is weaker: long established traditions do not contain self-destructive advice and contain good advice for the times in which they were created. If the circumstances have changed sufficiently, the advice of ancient traditions could, in fact, be bad.
That tendency exists, and is part of why I’m confident the thing I described as a bizarre alternate universe wouldn’t really happen, but it seems as true-but-irrelevant as the simple fact that such a tradition probably wouldn’t develop.