Congeries of cross connected concepts
Are lawsuits the modern form of witch hunting? In primitive societies, if something bad happened that it was presumed to be caused by some sentient agency. Frequently this would be a witch, who would then be accused and persecuted. As the West became more knowledgable about the physical world the awareness grew that witchcraft simply didn’t work and therefore couldn’t be the cause of tragedies.
Yet the desire to find an agency (and not just a cause) for any tragedy is still with us, we just use different terms and means to perform a modern witch hunt.
One aspect of this is conspiracy theories. The essence of any such theory is that all of the evil and suffering in the world isn’t the natural result of the world being full of flawed human beings, but because some evil “witches” are manipulating the state of things to bring about the bad results. Sometimes this is for their own benefit while in other theories the “witches” are just evil. But the basic mindset is the same.
I think the current legal climate in the US is another aspect. If a tragedy occurs, then it is presumed to be caused by some specific agency who must be punished via the legal system. One can see this in that immediately after a tragedy the lawsuits are filed, before any investigation. That’s symptomatic of the presumption of agency. In a less witch hunting atmosphere one would expect that causes to be investigated and the lawsuits filed after it had been established (or at least plausibly claimed) that the cause was human agency. But that kind of deliberation seems infrequent. This isn’t something that bodes well for tort reform, but perhaps the success of this meme is in fact related to the success of the legal strategy. In a sense this kind of witch hunting “works” in that it benefits its practitioners. The first step to making it a superstition again is to eliminate the benefits of suing first, asking questions later.
| Defenestrator Monday, 27 October 2003 at 13:08 |  |
Most of the lawsuits that prevail are those that allege negligence rather than agency. Some one is always presumed to have the power and hence the responsibility to prevent bad things from happening. One employee bad-mouths another employee and the employer is sued because the employer has to power to control the speech of its employees.
How often is “an Act of God” still a winning defense?
| Annoying Old Guy Monday, 27 October 2003 at 20:00 | |
There’s also some “good vs. perfect” bits in there, where if you do anything to help it had better be perfect (not just better than not helping, but perfect) or you’re liable.
