หน้า8 She nor toolsinc is at fault

หน้า8 She nor toolsinc is at fault we can say simply that neither is responsible and thus neither is morally obligated to pay for the harm now in practice this does normally mean that if ann wants her injuries fixed she will have to pay however and this is perhaps where mccall goes wrong to say this is not to say or imply that ann is responsible and thus morally obligated to pay it is merely to say that since no one is responsible and thus presumably nobody else will pay (since in the absence of responsibility nobody but ann has a reason or motive to pay)if she wants the requisite medical treatment she will have to be the one to pay but this result is not only completely nonparadoxical but so far as any argument yet given is concerned entirely reasonable thus mccall has faied to show that crp is “inapplicable” and thus he has faied to undermin cra The only way to undermine cra in my view is to mount a direct frontal attack on crp this is what I shall now attempt to do specifically I shall argue first that there are a number of cases (cases that do not involve product liability and thus are not question begging in the present context) where the claim that the relevant agent is properly held responsible even without fault or voluntary agreement seems entirely noncontroversial cases that thus show clearly that if we do not simply reject crp we do at least acknowledge a significant class of exceptions and second that these cases share a number of features with product liability cases and thus give positive support to the view that crp class of exceptions properly includes product liability cases in short that these cases give positive support to the view that sl is not unjust I shall assume that in all the following cases there was no voluntary agreement to take responsibility and shall thus focus on the (2)cluse of crp the issue of fault
Consider to begin with the responsibility that is standardly ascribed to principals for the conduct of their agents principals are typically held liable for the misdeeds of their agents even where they (the principals) are not negligent or in any other way at fault even where that is they have taken all reasonable care in the selection training and supervision of those agents
หน้า9 admittedly the liability of principals for their agents might be regarded as an arbitrary legal convention and thus as a less than compelling exception to crp but the same cannot be said for my next example the responsibility standardly ascribed to parents for the conduct of their children if ann and bill young son Charlie carelessly breaks a neighbor window with a baseball then virtually everyone would agree that ann and bill are properly held responsible and are thus obligated to pay for the windows replacement and this is true again even if ann and bill are in on way at fault for example they have done all that could be expected by way of teaching Charlie to respect other people property and to be careful when playing with potentially harmful objects like baseballs also on the subject of children a quite different sort of case where we have no qualms about assigning responsibility where there is no fault is a case where the child himself is harmed by nature in a way that imposes unusually heavy burdens on his caregivers thus if Charlie were born with serious spinal problems that required a series of operations and special time consuming therapy from ages two to ten there would be on question but that ann and bill would be responsible for providing that special care even if the problems in no way resulted from any fault of theirs
Further just as faultless parents parents are responsible for the behavior of their children so faultless pet owners are responsible for the behavior of their pets if ann and bill have a rambunctious dog who manages to escape from his fenced in area and then tears up a neighbors garden then even if ann and bill have taken all reasonable care to ensure that such escapes do not happen virtually all of us would agree that ann and bill are responsible for the harm and obligated to pay for the needed repairs and what goes for pets goes also for the “behavior” of one’s inanimate possessions for example if ann and bill have a tree that falls over onto their neighbor’s house severely damaging the roof we would again agree that ann and bill are responsible for paying for the damage even if they were in no way at fault (though the tree was presumably defective we can suppose that the defect was a hidden one that was not discoverable even by conscientious oversight)
In all of these sorts of cases then we routinely ascribe responsibility to faultless agents hence according to standard apparently noncontroversial moral views and practices it is not invariably unjust to ascribe