[juuular]

You should care (not saying it's bad you don't!), because the philosophy of it helps us distinguish between a system in which people participate in good faith but get mislead and cling to bad behavior out of fear, vs people participating in bad faith thinking they can get away with it.

The difference is in terms of punishment and enforcement mechanisms. The person who keeps doing something bad out of fear that there's no way out is, in a sense, a failure of society as a whole. The person who is doing something bad as a way to get a leg up thinking they can get away with it is a failure of themselves to understand that society comes with a social contract.

The end results and the ultimate suffering are the same. For the first situation, we want to educate people such that they are more aware and can avoid falling into that trap, and give them ways to get out of the trap that minimize damage. For the second situation, we want to isolate the damage they can cause and prevent them from causing more damage because they are fully conscious of what they are doing and what is going on, and that makes them more dangerous.

If you mess up and get into an inextricable situation, there should be a way to resolve that with the promise of personal growth (along with guard rails to prevent repeating the same mistakes). If you deliberately cause an inextricable situation so you can profit off of it, the only resolution is to isolate the person who caused it from committing further harm until they go through personal growth such that they don't want to cause that harm anymore because they understand that harming others also means harming themselves in the big picture.

[wpietri]

There are some cases where I care about intent. Did somebody step on my toes? My reaction will depend on the extent to which I think they meant it.

But for large-scale financial crimes, I think worrying about that too much is not just unknowable and irrelevant, I think it's actively harmful.

As with toe-stepping, we can recognize that a whoopsie moment may not deserve punishment. E.g., if you're out hunting with your buds and accidentally shoot somebody in the face, as with Dick Cheney, that's different than intentionally shooting somebody.

But when somebody intentionally sets up or takes on a position of power, I think there are no whoopsies. Drinking a beer on the couch? Have fun. Drinking and getting in a car? Criminal. Drinking and getting in a car and killing somebody? It may be no more intentional than toe stepping. But at that point I don't really care whether they killed somebody because they meant to or not. The harm's the same.

I think this especially matters when we look at things like the 2008 financial crisis. It caused enormous damage, both in financial and human terms. Yet basically nobody was held accountable. Why? Because they didn't mean it. They were just greedy fuckers in positions of extraordinary power that they used for personal gain without regard to the human impact. Plus they were the sort of people who looked a lot like the people who made the laws. They went to the same parties and had nice friends. So they were all somehow let off the hook. And we did little to make sure they'd get held responsible the next time.

I think the personal growth bit is nice, but hopelessly naive. There are plenty of people who will do the right thing not out of love but of fear. There are worlds where those people are kept from doing harm, such that we can help them grow up to be decent. But we don't live in a world like that. And if we want to create that world, we need to stop the sociopaths and morally deficient goofs from causing massive trauma to those around them. Because I promise you, that will interfere with the victims' personal grwoth.