Defending the Klutz

Ripstein, laying out the libertarian view, summarizes two methods of assigning responsibility for incursions against property rights: voluntarism and causalism. Voluntarism leaves all losses where they lie unless they are the result of force or fraud. Causalism leaves all losses where they lie unless they are caused by one person to another, regardless of intention, in which case compensation is owed by the person who caused the loss to the person who experienced it.

To illustrate voluntarism, Ripstein provides an example of a clumsy person hitting another: “If I mean to hit you on the shoulder, and I instead hit you on the head, I escape liability, and you are left to bear the costs of my clumsiness, because I did not mean to be clumsy” (31). Under voluntarism, the person who was hit is the one who loses because the loss falls where it lies (his injured head). Under causalism, the clumsy person is the one who loses because the loss would be transferred back to him in the form of compensation owed to the person who was hit. In each of these scenarios, there exists a “misfortune” (the head being hit instead of the shoulder) and both accounts tell us that the loss from this misfortune should fall on different people.

Ripstein, and libertarians, discuss voluntarism at minimum because it is “normatively unattractive” and not “intuitive” (32). The “more familiar” and “prominent” position among libertarians, which Ripstein discusses more at length, is causalism (ibid.). However, I believe that Ripstein should not be so quick to dismiss voluntarism.

Misfortune is inevitable and prominent. At times in his examples, Ripstein refers to people who frequently experience misfortune, those who are “clumsy” (31, 41). Whether or not some people are more prone to misfortune than others is not proven by popular research, but Ripstein—and society by its invention of the word “clumsy”—seem to think that misfortune may not always be evenly distributed across the population.

Causalism requiring the transfer of loss to someone who accidentally or unintentionally harmed someone else because of misfortune, such as the person who hit the head instead of the shoulder, means that those who more commonly experience misfortune also more commonly experience loss. From this, it seems like the best way to deal with the randomness and inevitableness of where misfortune falls is to evenly distribute it across everyone.

I hate to lobby for insurance companies, but they seem very attractive here. We could live in a voluntarist world, where losses caused by misfortunes are left where they lie, and all pay equally into a system that compensates those who experience loss caused by misfortune. If I am punched in the head rather than the shoulder, or if my house is burnt when someone trips into it with a lit match in their hand, or I experience any other loss because of the misfortune of myself or someone else, I can make a claim to be compensated—not by the person who was prone to the misfortune, but by everyone. Here, loss from misfortune is equally distributed.