|
Third-party property insurance (TPPI) protects insured drivers who accidentally damage an expensive car from the threat of financial ruin. Perhaps more importantly though, TPPI also protects the victims whose losses might otherwise go uncompensated. Ought responsible drivers therefore take out TPPI? This begins by enumerating some reasons for why a rational person might believe that they have a moral obligation to take out TPPI. It will be argued that if what is at stake in taking responsibility is the ability to compensate our possible future victims for their losses, then it might initially seem that most people should be thankful for the availability of relatively inexpensive TPPI because without it they may not have sufficient funds to do the right thing and compensate their victims in the event of an accident. But is the ability to compensate one's victims really what is at stake in taking responsibility? The second part of this will critically examine the arguments for the above position, and it will argue that these arguments do not support the conclusion that injurers should compensate their victims for their losses, and hence that drivers need not take out TPPI in order to be responsible. Further still, even if these arguments did support the conclusion that injurers should compensate their victims for their losses, then (perhaps surprisingly) nobody should to be allowed to take out TPPI because doing so would frustrate justice. Introduction In 1998 there were a staggering 17,228 casualty-producing car accidents in the state of Victoria; this does not include car accidents which did not involve casualties, and it does not include car accidents within other states. Of those accidents, 2% were fatal and 29% resulted in serious injury, but just about all of them would have involved some sort of losses1 . Losses and accidents go hand-in-hand, but since nobody likes to suffer losses, a question which comes up when accidents occur is: who should bear the cost of the accident2 ? Some of the time the answer to this question seems relatively simple. For example, when a person backs their car into an inanimate object such as a tree or a boulder, and nobody cares about the damage to the inanimate object, then as long as the object did not find its way into that spot through someone else's negligence or malice, it would seem appropriate that the car's driver should be liable for their own loss since they were responsible for the accident. On the other hand, when one car is back-ended by another car whilst dutifully waiting at an intersection for the traffic lights to turn green, the appropriate thing would seem to be to make the injurer liable for the victim's compensation because the injurer was responsible for the accident3 . In these cases it seems unproblematic to say that the costs of accidents should be borne by those who are responsible for causing the accidents. However on other occasions the simple rule, that liability ought to fall on the party responsible for causing the accident, appears more problematic. Consider how this rule would fare if the second of the two above examples was modified so that instead of one car, there were two stationary cars waiting at the intersection, and when the second car was hit from behind, it was pushed into the car in front which would also have suffered considerable damage. Who should bear the costs of this accident? There is little doubt that the damage to the car at the front of the intersection was caused by the car directly behind it, but is the driver of the second car also morally responsible for this damage? After all, none of this would have happened had the third driver shown a duty of care towards other road users. Although in a purely causal sense the driver of the second car is responsible for this accident, in another very important sense they were not really responsible for this accident because it was not their fault. So should the driver at the front of the intersection be compensated by the driver of the stationery vehicle directly behind them, or should both of these drivers be compensated by the driver of the moving vehicle which initiated this pile-up? What becomes apparent in considering this example is that there is a lot more to the concept of responsibility than merely causation. The concepts of moral responsibility, fault and duty of care are also crucial in the determination of who should bear the costs of accidents. For this reason it is critical to understand what these concepts mean, and how facts about moral responsibility, fault and duty of care relate to conclusions about who should bear the costs of particular accidents. Jonathan Glover suggests that when we say that a person is morally responsible for some state of affairs, what we mean is that they can be praised or blamed for that state of affairs4 . Therefore when someone says "that accident was not my fault" or "I am not responsible for that accident", what they mean is something like "I am not to be blamed for that accident". Similarly, when they say "it was my fault that the accident happened" or "I am responsible for that accident", what they mean is something like "I am to be blamed for that accident". With this in mind, we could now say that although the driver of the second car was causally responsible for the damage to the car at the front of the intersection, it would appear that the driver of the third car is a better candidate for blame andhence for fault and moral responsibility. Greg Pynt characterises the concept of a duty of care as "a non-delegable duty to ensure that care is taken" to avoid causing losses to others5 . This raises such questions as under what circumstances do people have duties of care to one another, whether people should ever take any risks, if so then which risks is it reasonable to take, and to what lengths should one go to prevent losses from occurring. These issues are however beyond the scope of this ; the present point is merely that a driver's duty of care is simply a duty to take reasonable care to avoid causing losses to others - to be a safe, careful and conscientious driver, which is apparently what the driver of the moving car in the third example did not do. However if the concepts of fault, responsibility, and duty of care were defined as above, then what would force or even justify the conclusion that injurers should compensate their respective victims for their losses? Although the duty of care prescribes behaviour which is appropriate for road users, and the concepts of fault and responsibility tell us who should be blamed, neither of these concepts says anything about what (other than finger pointing) should be done when accidental losses come about. What should happen when someone's behaviour did not comply with their duty of care and when they are to blame for an accident? How do we move from the observations that a person's behaviour did not manifest a duty of care and that they are to blame for an accident, to the conclusion that they therefore ought to compensate their victims for their resulting losses? Losses that come about in accidents can be very burdensome, but since placing burdens onto people is a form of evil, we should not shift losses from victims onto injurers lightly. If we believe that injurers should be liable for their victims' compensation, then we must offer reasons for why this burden should fall specifically on injurers rather than, for example, being left on victims. The next section of this will concern itself with the question of how the conviction that injurers should be liable for their victims' compensation could be justified, at least in those cases where the victim is innocent and the injurer is responsible (in all of the senses mentioned above) for the accident. Why injurers should compensate their victims One might initially argue that the reason that injurers should compensate their victims is simply because it would be wrong to let innocent victims go uncompensated. Such an argument could draw on Joel Feinberg's principle of weak retributive justice which aims to protect innocents6 . This argument would tender that if a victim's conduct was not dangerous or in some way deserving of their loss, and someone else was in fact responsible for causing this loss, then why should the victim have to be the one to suffer this undeserved burden? If a choice has to be made between either the victim or the injurer, then surely the injurer is a better candidate for carrying this burden? But although it might indeed be wrong for innocent victims to be burdened with undeserved losses, this does not explain why injurers per se should be the ones to provide this compensation. It is not satisfactory to reply to this question by saying that injurers should bear this burden by default because it would be unfair to expect some third party to provide this compensation7 , because although that might show that everybody other than an injurer should not have to provide the compensation, it would still not explain why the obligation to compensate the victim should fall specifically onto the injurer. Placing such burdens onto injurers by default is unjust because ignorance of positive reasons for abstaining from this course of action is not a substitute for the provision of positive reasons for doing so. Furthermore, the above argument does not show that it is right for injurers to bear such burdens, but rather it merely assumes this, but since this is precisely what we are trying to justify, we should therefore avoid such assumptions since they are circular. 网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，保留一切法学追诉权。()，英语论文题目，英语论文 |
