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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 90:

She was aware now that tears were sliding down her cheeks, again. "Harry - Harry, you have to believe that this isn't your fault!"

"Of course it's my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."

"No! You-Know-Who killed Hermione!" She was hardly aware of what she was saying, that she hadn't screened the room against who might be listening. "Not you! No matter what else you could've done, it's not you who killed her, it was Voldemort! If you can't believe that you'll go mad, Harry!"

"That's not how responsibility works, Professor." Harry's voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn't looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. "When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That's why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least."

People really run away from agency/blame when it casts shade on their own actions or their political commitments. This is an incredibly basic egoistic primitive. E.g., when you have an abortion, you're not "killing" it, you're simply removing it from the uterus, and it's not your 'fault' that it doesn't survive out in the elements. Might as well be pushing a stroller off a cliff and blaming gravity.

you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.

That's absurd. You are able to do things that affect, or at least incentivize, other people's actions. You can also change inanimate things which cause problems that are not nontrivially any person's fault.

That’s the point. You can do those things and therefore not doing them is on you.

Or to put it another way, blaming X so that you keep a closer eye on it in future is different from blaming X so you can distance yourself from responsibility.

I feel like the original quote is playing definitional games around 'responsibility' in exactly the way you just laid out. Both of the types of blame you describe are totally coherent and acceptable concepts within the normal understanding of the word. That is, blaming other people can change your actions. Harry's advice to a young child who parents got run over by a drunk-driver would be "it was your fault," and he is clearly a monster. The best thing the kid can do is blame others, blame drunk-drivers, to end friendships with people if they drive drunk, etc. That at least could potentially save other peoples lives. Playing a definitional game such that the kids behavior is defined as 'holding yourself responsible for your parents death' is about as insightful as asking if a hotdog is a sandwich. To say nothing of the emotional component.

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