But does this mean that ‘safer’ and ‘less safe’ is meaningless for someone choosing a car? I mean, if I have never driven ‘for real’, without the instructor and with people I like very much sitting next to me, I do want a safer car; but I have no way to know if I am, on average, ‘more reckless’ or ‘less reckless’ than other drivers. And with all of these balancing effects, if I have previously found myself leaning towards buying a Volvo, now I have to doubt, vaguely, whether I want a Volvo because I actually think it would give me more leeway to drive poorly, which is, given my inexperience, even more dangerous. It would seem then, that not only ‘safe’ doesn’t cut reality at its joints, but ‘reckless’ doesn’t cut it, too, and I suspect that if we separate ‘recklessness’ into things like ‘rileability’, ‘doggedness’, ‘attention’, ‘speed of reaction’, whatever, they would turn out to not work that well… And how am I supposed to decide upon something as ‘high level’ as ‘what car to buy’?
But does this mean that ‘safer’ and ‘less safe’ is meaningless for someone choosing a car? I mean, if I have never driven ‘for real’, without the instructor and with people I like very much sitting next to me, I do want a safer car; but I have no way to know if I am, on average, ‘more reckless’ or ‘less reckless’ than other drivers. And with all of these balancing effects, if I have previously found myself leaning towards buying a Volvo, now I have to doubt, vaguely, whether I want a Volvo because I actually think it would give me more leeway to drive poorly, which is, given my inexperience, even more dangerous. It would seem then, that not only ‘safe’ doesn’t cut reality at its joints, but ‘reckless’ doesn’t cut it, too, and I suspect that if we separate ‘recklessness’ into things like ‘rileability’, ‘doggedness’, ‘attention’, ‘speed of reaction’, whatever, they would turn out to not work that well… And how am I supposed to decide upon something as ‘high level’ as ‘what car to buy’?