A preferable standard would require people to avoid harms that, even if they haven't actually thought about, they should have thought about had they been reasonable. For example, presumably McDonald's did not actually think that their customers would be severely burned by coffee. But had they thought about what people who are driving cars when served coffee might do to hold their cups when they drove away from the window, they could have foreseen the likelihood of spills. The fact that McDonald's had received over seven hundred prior burn claims about their coffee suggests that a reasonable person would have concluded that this was a dangerous practice. This "rea¬sonable person" standard is the one most often used in legal cases and seems to better capture the ethical goals of the very concept of negligence. People are expected to act reasonably and are held liable when they do not.