[anon373839]

> My question is why does anybody have to be liable at all?

This question mistakes what civil law is doing. A more accurate framing would be, “why does anybody have to bear the loss?”. But of course, somebody must. So the task of civil law here is to determine who. Certain policy choices will align better or worse with a sense of fairness, better or worse with incentives that could reduce future losses, etc.

[mindslight]

"The loss" is already performing an abstraction to create something generic that can/must be assigned. The person who died is dead regardless of the creation of that assignable loss.

If there are too many instances of people dying in such situations, then the fundamental way to solve that is to prevent such situations from existing. A specter of civil financial liability is but one way of trying to do this, and having judges create common law theories is but one way of assigning that liability. Relying on those methods to the exclusion of others is not a neutral policy choice.