I was mostly speaking from anecdata, but that’s really interesting. Though I can’t say it’s very surprising, because I think this relates to the various sneaky connotations of the word “hurt”. I expect modern parents to be more horrified if a child got punched in the face than if the child passed out from too much training, even if the latter did way more physical damage.
That sounds plausible; it may relate to the same sort of consideration that comes into play in trolleylike dilemmas, “who do I assign responsibility for this?”
If a kid blows out their elbow from being made to pitch too many balls without adequate rest, that feels like something that just happened to them, but if a kid gets their nose bloodied being punched in the face, that’s something someone did to them, which makes it seem worse and more in need of prevention despite being comparatively trivial.
Yep, and right before their elbow blows out, it’s “training” or “work” and not “a fight”. Afterwards it’s an “accident.”
You know, I kinda want to have a more general discussion about when the “responsibility” model falls apart. It seems to be really useful for some situations and then just lead to a guilt-riddled, counter-productive blame game of awfulness. It would be nice to generalize those so we can just run an analysis of the situation and stop talking about responsibility if the analysis says it’s useless.
Also, your earlier point is why I refused to talk about the Olympics with people. I kept insisting that it wasn’t relevant to me personally what the superhuman athletes were doing. Just because they happened to be from my country doesn’t mean we have anything in common and cheering for them doesn’t make me any more gifted at sports or them any more absurdly good at things they’re already absurdly better at than everyone else in the world. I guess I should have been saying “Imagine how awful their life was when they were children?”
I was mostly speaking from anecdata, but that’s really interesting. Though I can’t say it’s very surprising, because I think this relates to the various sneaky connotations of the word “hurt”. I expect modern parents to be more horrified if a child got punched in the face than if the child passed out from too much training, even if the latter did way more physical damage.
That sounds plausible; it may relate to the same sort of consideration that comes into play in trolleylike dilemmas, “who do I assign responsibility for this?”
If a kid blows out their elbow from being made to pitch too many balls without adequate rest, that feels like something that just happened to them, but if a kid gets their nose bloodied being punched in the face, that’s something someone did to them, which makes it seem worse and more in need of prevention despite being comparatively trivial.
Yep, and right before their elbow blows out, it’s “training” or “work” and not “a fight”. Afterwards it’s an “accident.”
You know, I kinda want to have a more general discussion about when the “responsibility” model falls apart. It seems to be really useful for some situations and then just lead to a guilt-riddled, counter-productive blame game of awfulness. It would be nice to generalize those so we can just run an analysis of the situation and stop talking about responsibility if the analysis says it’s useless.
Also, your earlier point is why I refused to talk about the Olympics with people. I kept insisting that it wasn’t relevant to me personally what the superhuman athletes were doing. Just because they happened to be from my country doesn’t mean we have anything in common and cheering for them doesn’t make me any more gifted at sports or them any more absurdly good at things they’re already absurdly better at than everyone else in the world. I guess I should have been saying “Imagine how awful their life was when they were children?”