University of Southern California Law
School
Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Year
Paper
Strict Liability and the Mitigation of Moral
Luck
Gregory C. Keating∗
∗
University of Southern California, gkeating@law.usc.edu
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Copyright c 2006 by the author.
Strict Liability and the Mitigation of Moral
Luck
Gregory C. Keating
Abstract
The general problem of moral luck—that responsibility is profoundly affected
by factors beyond the control of the person held responsible—has two distinct dimensions in the case of accidental injury (and no doubt in many other cases). One
dimension is concerned with attribution of moral blame. Thomas Nagel explains:
“If one negligently leaves the bath running with the baby in it, one will realize, as
one bounds up the stairs towards the bathroom, that if the baby has drowned one
has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless.”
How badly one has behaved and hence how much one should be blamed turns on
consequences beyond one’s control—on luck. The other dimension concerns the
existence and extent of one’s responsibility for having done harm, one’s obligation
to someone harmed to make amends for or repair the harm done. Someone who
has been careless and lucky enough not to injure anyone has no such obligation.
Someone who has been equally careless and inflicted a devastating injury may
well have a ruinous obligation.
In contrast to one another, the first of these dimensions seems distinctively more
moral and the second distinctively more legal. The extent of the agent’s culpability, the degree to which he or she should be blamed, strikes us as predominantly a
matter of moral assessment. We are appraising a person, determining what sort of
mark should be entered on the ledger of his life and character. The existence and
extent of obligations of reparation, by contrast, strikes us as predominantly a matter of legal liability. We are settling the responsibility of an injurer to her victim.
But it would be an error to draw too sharp a distinction between the moral and the
legal. A legal judgment of negligence expresses criticism and disapproval of the
conduct involved, and it is a mistake to purge that legal criticism of any moral dimension. So, too, the legal obligation to repair harm wrongly inflicted imposed by
the tort law of negligence overlaps with a perceived moral obligation of the same
kind, and is no doubt at least partially rooted in and justified by that perceived
moral obligation. Because the moral and the legal interpenetrate in these ways,
our judgments about the role that moral luck should play in on our assessments of
the moral culpability of persons cannot be wholly divorced from our judgments
about the role that moral luck should play in our assessment of the legal liability
of persons.
It is significant, then, that Thomas Nagel in one of the articles naming the problem of “moral luck” condemns strict liability as an “irrational . . . moral position”
in contradistinction to negligence liability, which takes a defensible position on
moral luck. Negligence liability is morally defensible because it holds people “responsible for the contributions of fate as well as for their own—provided they have
made some contribution to begin with.” The comparative irrationality of strict liability, however, cannot turn on the fact that it holds people accountable solely for
fate. It doesn’t. Holding “the contributions of fate” constant for the moment, strict
liability holds people accountable for harms attributable to their agency whereas
negligence liability holds people accountable for harms attributable to their culpable agency. If strict liability is morally irrational it must be because it is irrational
to hold people accountable for the consequences of their agency, as opposed to for
the consequences of their faulty agency. Perhaps there is some reason why this is
the case, though I am inclined to doubt it. But if there is some such reason it is not
rooted in moral luck. On the contrary, one of the distinctive virtues of strict liability is that it is capable—in the social world in which we live—of mitigating the
effects of moral luck. In law, “moral luck”—is in part an artifice of institutional
design. And under conditions common in the modern world, strict liability does
not exacerbate the effects of moral luck, it mitigates those effects.
The standard criticism of strict liability has it exactly backward. This criticism
asserts that strict liability is suspect because of the great burden that it places on
our freedom: We may find ourselves liable for devastating injury no matter how
carefully we proceed, no matter how irreproachably we conduct ourselves. Strict
liability is a sword of Damocles dangling over all of our actions. When the subject under consideration is strict enterprise liability in the law of torts—and when
that subject is under consideration in a characteristically modern social world—
this criticism is wholly misplaced. In a world where the costs of accidents can
be dispersed across the activities which engender them, strict liability protects our
freedom of action by substituting certain but manageable insurance premiums for
unpredictable but potentially catastrophic losses. By subjecting us to a lottery
some of whose spins of the wheel impose financial ruin, it is fault liability that
puts our actions at the mercy of luck.
Tort law may have something to tell us about the sources of moral luck. Thomas
Nagel famously mused that the problem of moral luck may arise out of our ability to adopt both objective and subjective perspectives towards ourselves—to see
ourselves both as objects within the natural world , governed by causal laws and
as actors who cannot help but conceive of ourselves as free. In tort law, the phenomenon appears to arise more proximately from another source: The clash of
individual conceptions of fault with the reality of systemic social risk. What is
luck to the parties involved, is statistically inevitable harm to the activity within
which the accident arises. “Moral luck” is not “luck” at all but the upshot of a mismatch of social reality and institutional form. Moral luck is in part the offspring
of human institutions and it may in part be mitigated by their redesign.
Strict Liability and the Mitigation of Moral Luck
Gregory C. Keating1
The phenomenon of accidental injury appears in both Bernard Williams’ and
Thomas Nagel’s foundational articles on the problem of “moral luck.”2 That
appearance is hardly surprising: Liability for accidental injury turns quite heavily on
“elements which are essential to the outcome but [which] lie outside the[] control”of
those who may be held liable—on “moral luck” as Williams defines it.3 Nagel drives
this point home with an example of a “truck driver who accidentally runs over a
child”—an example he borrows and adapts from Williams:
The driver, if he is entirely without fault, will feel terrible about his role in the
event, but will not have to reproach himself. . . . However, if the driver was
guilty of even a minor degree of negligence—failing to have his brakes checked
recently, for example—then if that negligence contributes to the death of the
child, he will not merely feel terrible. He will blame himself for the death. And
what makes this an example of moral luck is that he would have to blame
himself only slightly for the negligence itself if no situation arose which required
him to brake suddenly and violently to avoid hitting a child. Yet the negligence is
the same in both cases, and the driver has no control over whether a child will
1
William T Dalessi Professor of Law, Gould School of Law, University of Southern
California. An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the conference on The Morality of
Fortune held at the USC Department of Philosophy on March 24-25 2006 under the auspices of
the Center for Law and Philosophy. I am grateful to the participants in the conference for their
comments and reactions, to Andrei Marmor both for valuable exchanges on the paper and for
organizing the conference., and to Martin Stone for commenting on the paper. I also owe
particular thanks to Scott Altman, Ben Zipursky and John Goldberg for valuable discussion and
comments.
2
Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary
vol. I. (1976), 115-35, reprinted in BERNARD WILLIAM S MORAL LUCK , 20-39 (1981). Thomas
Nagel’s “Moral Luck” originally appeared in the same volume of the Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society as a reply to Williams’ paper. Nagel revised it for inclusion in THOMAS
NAGEL , MORTAL QUESTIONS , 24-38 (1979). I shall cite to the 1981 printing of Williams’ paper,
and to the revised, 1979 version of Nagel’s paper.
3
Williams, supra note 2, at 30.
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run into his path.4
As this example makes plain, luck is endemic to negligence liability. Liability in tort
requires harm done and—when risk of injury is at issue—whether harm flows from
careless conduct is normally a matter of luck quite beyond the control of the careless
party. Jeremy Waldron begins a paper entitled Moments of Carelessness and Massive
Loss,5 with the following story:
Two drivers, named Fate and Fortune, were on a city street one morning in their
automobiles. Both were driving at or near the speed limit, Fortune a little ahead
of Fate. As they passed through a shopping district, each took his eyes off the
road, turning his head for a moment to look at the bargains advertised in a
storefront window. (The last day of a sale was proclaimed, with 25 per cent off
the price of a pair of men’s shoes.) In Fortune’s case, this momentary distraction
passed without event. The road was straight, the traffic in front of him was
proceeding smoothly, and after a few seconds he returned his eyes to his driving
and completed his journey without incident. Fate, however, was not so
fortunate. Distracted by the bargain advertised in the shoe store, he failed to
notice that the traffic ahead of him had slowed down. His car ploughed into a
motorcycle ridden by a Mr. Hurt. Hurt was flung from the motorcycle and
gravely injured. His back was broken so badly that he would spend the rest of
his life in a wheelchair. Fate stopped immediately of course to summon help,
and when the police arrived he readily admitted that he had been driving
carelessly.
When Hurt recovered consciousness in [the] hospital, the first thing he did was
instruct his lawyers to sue Fate for negligence. Considering the extent of his
injury, the sum he sought was quite modest—$5 million dollars . . . But modest
or not, it was sufficient to bankrupt Mr. Fate . . . 6
4
Nagel, supra note 2, at 28-29.
5
Jeremy Waldron, Moments of Carelessness and Massive Loss, in PHILOSOPHICAL
FOUNDATIONS OF TORT LAW 387 (David G. Owen ed., 1995). While this is a precisely
constructed example, the phenomenon that it purports to zero in on is very real. A 1970 U.S.
Department of Transportation study reported: “In Washington, D.C. a ‘good’ driver viz. One
without an accident within the preceding five years commits on average, in five minutes of
driving, at least nine errors of different kinds.” U.S. Department of Transportation: Autombile
Insurance and Compensation Study 1970 pp. 177-8, quoted in TONY HONORE , RESPONSIBILITY
AND FAULT , 36-7 (1999).
6
Id.
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The general problem of moral luck—that responsibility is profoundly affected by
factors beyond the control of the person held responsible—has two distinct dimensions
in the case of accidental injury (and no doubt in many other cases). One dimension is
concerned with attribution of moral blame: “If one negligently leaves the bath running
with the baby in it, one will realize, as one bounds up the stairs towards the bathroom,
that if the baby has drowned one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one
has merely been careless.”7 How badly one has behaved and hence how much one should
be blamed turns on consequences beyond one’s control—on luck. The other dimension
concerns the existence and extent of one’s responsibility for having done harm, one’s
obligation to someone harmed to make amends for or repair the harm done. Fortune
has no such obligation and Fate has a financially ruinous obligation, even though their
actions were equally careless.
In contrast to one another, the first of these dimensions seems distinctively more
moral and the second distinctively more legal. The extent of the agent’s culpability, the
degree to which he or she should be blamed, strikes us as predominantly a matter of
moral assessment. We are appraising a person, determining what sort of mark should
be entered on the ledger of his life and character.8 The existence and extent of
obligations of reparation, by contrast, strikes us as predominantly a matter of legal
liability. We are settling the responsibility of an injurer to her victim. But it would be
an error to draw too sharp a distinction between the moral and the legal. A legal
judgment of negligence expresses criticism and disapproval of the conduct involved,
and it is a mistake to purge that legal criticism of any moral dimension. So, too, the
legal obligation to repair harm wrongly inflicted imposed by the tort law of negligence
overlaps with a perceived moral obligation of the same kind, and is no doubt at least
partially rooted in and justified by that perceived moral obligation.9 Because the moral
and the legal interpenetrate in these ways, our judgments about the role that moral luck
should play in on our assessments of the moral culpability of persons cannot be wholly
divorced from our judgments about the role that moral luck should play in our
assessment of the legal liability of persons.
7
Nagel, supra note 2, at 31.
8
Put differently, we are in the domain of moral worth, in contrast to the domains of the
right and the good.
9
Williams discussion of accidental injury emphasizes that the duty to repair arises as an
appropriate moral response to having done harm. See Williams supra note 2, at 28-29.
Competence as a moral agent is exhibited in part by recognizing that when unintentional and
even faultless injury has “happened as a consequence of one’s acts . . . the cost of its happening
can . . . fairly be allocated to one’s account.” Some kind of “reparative” action is a proper and
perhaps necessary way of acknowledging this recognition of responsibility.
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It is significant, then, that Thomas Nagel condemns strict liability as an
“irrational . . . moral position” in contradistinction to negligence liability, which takes a
defensible position on moral luck. Negligence liability is morally defensible because it
holds people “responsible for the contributions of fate as well as for their
own—provided they have made some contribution to begin with.”10 The comparative
irrationality of strict liability, however, cannot turn on the fact that it holds people
accountable solely for fate. It doesn’t. Holding “the contributions of fate” constant for
the moment, strict liability holds people accountable for harms attributable to their agency
whereas negligence liability holds people accountable for harms attributable to their culpable
agency. If strict liability is morally irrational it must be because it is irrational to hold
people accountable for the consequences of their agency, as opposed to for the
consequences of their faulty agency. Perhaps there is some reason why this is the case,
though I am inclined to doubt it.11 But if there is some such reason it is not rooted in
moral luck. On the contrary, one of the distinctive virtues of strict liability is that it is
capable—in the social world in which we live—of mitigating the effects of moral luck.
And it seems that there is a larger lesson lurking here: In tort, moving from highly
10
N
AGEL , supra
note 2, at 31.
11
Some unease with strict liability arises from contemplating it as a form of criminal
punishment and condemnation, not tort liability. See e.g., TH OM AS M. SCANLON , WH AT WE
OW E TO EA CH OTHER , 266-67 (1998) (noting that attaching “legal penalty . . . to selling
contaminated milk” even in the absence of fault may be permissible “[b]ut this enlargement of
[punishment] to include morally unobjectionable activities . . . makes such laws more difficult
to justify.”) For reasons that should become clear, the form of strict tort liability that I am
concerned to defend in this paper, does not resemble the criminal strict liability that Scanlon
has in mind. Strict enterprise liability in tort protects people against unavoidable and harsh
penalties.
The writings of a number of important tort theorists voice even greater unease. These
theorists accuse strict liability of suffocating individual liberty and effacing human agency by
imposing unmanageably expansive responsibility for harm to others. See e.g., ARTHUR
RIPSTEIN , EQUALITY , RESPONSIBILITY AND LUCK , 50 (1999) (citing the “the problem of strict
liability, in which each person’s liberty is wholly subject to the vulnerability of others.”)
Similar sentiments are expressed in ALAN BRUDNER , TH E UNITY OF TH E COMM ON LAW , 190
(1995) and in ERNEST WEINRIB , TH E IDEA OF PRIVA TE LAW , 182-83 (1995). This claim is forcefully
and challenged by John Gardner, Obligations and Outcomes in the Law of Torts in JOHN GARDNER
& PETER CANE , EDS . RELATING TO RESPONSIBILTY 111, 133 (2001). Following a path blazed by
Tony Honore, Gardner argues that “[a] regime of strict liability represents the starkest possible
reaffirmation of our agency and its importance in the world.” Id. (emphasis in original). While I
believe that Gardner gets he better of the argument, one of my principal points in this paper is
that—in a characteristically modern social world—strict enterprise liability places less of a
burden on individual liberty than traditional fault liability does.
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individual to more collective conceptions of responsibility is one way of diminishing
both the practical significance of, and the moral dissonance created by, “moral luck.”
Or so I shall suggest.
My argument begins by sketching an argument that strict liability in its modern
form—usually known as “enterprise liability”—is more fair than negligence liability.
This detour will prove long but it is, I think, necessary. The (or even a) principal point
of the law of torts cannot be to mitigate moral luck.12 The point of the law of torts is to
protect us against various forms of harm—in the case of the tort law of accidents the
point is to protect us against physical harm. Beyond that, the law of torts must protect
us against physical harm on terms that leave sufficient scope for us to pursue our other
ends and which articulate appropriate relations among us as free and equal democratic
citizens. Put differently, tort accident law protects—and struggles to reconcile—two
preconditions of rational agency, namely, liberty (or freedom of action) and security (in
the form of the physical integrity of the person). The mitigation of moral luck matters
only insofar as the exacerbation or muting of moral luck by the design of the
institutions of accident law can itself work a kind of harm, by exposing us unnecessarily
to crushing blows at the hands of fate.
The argument therefore begins by setting out a fairness framework for
appraising the choice between negligence and strict liability. It then proceeds to make
an argument for the greater fairness of strict liability. This argument rests importantly
on an understanding of the social world within which accidents arise. In our world,
accidents characteristically arise out of organized activities, not out of discrete acts. A
fundamental part of what makes enterprise liability more fair than negligence
liability—and more protective both of our freedom of action and of our security—is that
enterprise liability mitigates the effects of “moral luck” by attributing accidents to the
activities which are pervasively responsible for them rather than to individual actors
who happen to occasion them. Last, I suggest that there may be a larger lesson here
concerning the attractions of comparatively collective conceptions of responsibility, in
contradistinction to comparatively individual ones. Negligence liability exacerbates the
role of luck because it attributes accidents which are the inevitable consequences of
large, collectively conducted, activities to the individual persons whose acts occasion
those accidents in an essentially random way. Strict enterprise liability diminishes the
role of moral luck because it attributes accidents more collectively, and because it
charges accidents to activities not to individuals.
12
Cf. Elizabeth Anderson, What is the Point of Equality?, 109 ETHICS 287-337 (1999).
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I. A Fairness Framework
A. The Contours of Fairness
The fairness conception that I shall sketch has a number of elements. One of
these is a conception of persons. It supposes that we are each equal, independent
persons, self-governing agents with purposes to pursue and lives to lead.13 We each
have the capacity to lead our lives in accordance with some conception of their point,
and a deep interest in living under institutions that enable us to do so. To make our
lives answer to our aspirations for them, we need a substantial measure of security—of
freedom from accidental injury and death at the hands of others. “Security,” John
Stuart Mill remarked, “no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all
our immunity from evil and the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing
moment, since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if
we could be deprived of everything the next instant . . .”14
Our need for security, however, is only half the story. We also need a substantial
measure of liberty—of freedom to put others at risk of physical harm in pursuit of our
own ends—if we are to pursue projects and make our lives answer to our aspirations
for them. When we act we put others at peril, even if only very slightly and even when
we act with appropriate caution. If we cannot put others at peril—cannot endanger
their security—we cannot act and so cannot pursue our ends and lead our lives.
Maximal security extinguishes liberty and maximal liberty extinguishes security. Yet
substantial measures of both liberty and security are essential if we are to have the
chance to make our lives answer to our aspirations for them. This is the dilemma at the
heart of accident law.
When the law of accidents licenses the imposition of a risk, it enhances the
freedom of some and imperils the security of others. Those who impose the risk are set
free to pursue ends and activities that they value, and their pursuit exposes others to
risks of physical harm. When the law of accidents forbids the imposition of some risk, it
does the reverse—it curbs the freedom of prospective injurers and enhances the security
of potential victims. Risk impositions thus pit the liberty of injurers against the security
of victims and the law of accidents sets the terms on which these competing freedoms
13
This is a commitment that the fairness conception shares with more libertarian ones.
See, e.g., CH ARLES FRIED , RIGHT AND WRONG 28-29 (1978) (“Respect for Persons”).
14
JOHN STUART MILL , UTILITARIANISM 53 (1979) (George Sher, ed.) (originally published
in 1861).
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are reconciled. The task of the tort law of accidents is to reconcile liberty and security
on terms that are both favorable and fair. Favorable terms enable people to pursue their
aims and aspirations over the course of complete lives; fair terms reconcile the
competing claims of liberty and security in ways that even those they burden cannot
reasonably reject.15
The question of how best to reconcile the pursuit of activities we value with the
physical and psychological integrity that those activities can jeopardize is, of course, an
issue that each of us must face individually. What ends are worth the risks they entail?
Are the risks of death and disfigurement that are the price of scaling Mount Everest
worth the sense of accomplishment that comes from standing on its summit? Are
increased risks of cancer worth bearing as the price of performing groundbreaking
medical research? Are increased risks of cancer worth bearing as the price of earning a
living? This kind of individual choice is not, however, the chief concern of the law of
accidents. The problem of accidental harm is a problem of how best to reconcile the
competing claims of liberty and security for a plurality of persons.
More fully, the problem of accidental harm requires reconciling the competing
claims of liberty and security for a plurality of persons, each of whom is free, all of
whom are equal, and among whom diverse and incommensurable conceptions of the
good flourish. Because people are equal and independent, the terms of accidental risk
imposition must be ones that equal people might freely accept as legitimate for the
governance of their lives in common. Diverse and incommensurable ends and
aspirations flourish among free and equal people because the range of valuable
activities and valuable ways of life is diverse. We value different things in life, and hold
different hopes for our lives. Because people have distinct lives to lead, and because
their aims and ends diverge, the principles of social choice differ markedly from the
15
This conception of the problem of accidental harm has its roots in the social contract
tradition in political theory, especially as carried on by contemporary philosophers such as John
Rawls, Tim Scanlon and Thomas Nagel. “Liberty” and “security” in the sense used here,
however, do not identify “primary goods” lexically superior to income and wealth in the
manner of the liberties covered by Rawls’ first principle of justice. “Liberty” and “security” are
general cover terms designed to characterize, at a fairly high level of generality, the stakes in
accidental risk imposition. The burdens and benefits of risk include increases and losses in
wealth and income, so there is no question of these freedoms being lexically prior to the
primary goods of wealth and income. Thus, in judging the reasonableness of various risk
impositions or liability rules, we should assess the significance of gains and losses in wealth
and income in terms of their impacts on liberty and security
Why characterize the interests at stake in risk impositions as interests in freedom at all?
Because risks and their reduction affect the space that we have to form, evaluate and act upon
our aims and aspirations.
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principles of individual choice. Individually, it may be rational to expose ourselves to
risks that it would be unreasonable—unfair—to impose on others.
1. Rationality and Reasonableness
The distinction between reasonableness and rationality is one drawn by ordinary
discourse.16 Rationality requires the intelligent pursuit of one’s ends, whatever those
ends are. Reasonableness requires taking the impact of one’s conduct on other people
into account as a circumstance capable of influencing one’s decisions, and being
prepared to govern one’s conduct on a basis acceptable to others whom one’s conduct
affects. Rationality and reasonableness may well diverge. It may be perfectly rational
for a party in possession of dock to demand exorbitant compensation for permitting a
ship to tie up at the dock during a gale.17 It may be equally rational for the shipowner
to pay such compensation; after all, the alternative is a very high likelihood that the
ship will be completely destroyed. But it is also unreasonable for the dock owner to
insist on such exorbitant compensation. The principle expressed in the dock owner’s
demand—“You, shipowner, should pay me a penny less than the loss you stand to
suffer if I refuse you permission to dock”—is not an acceptable basis for unforced
cooperation among shipowners and dock owners. This sort of hard bargaining is
rational, but unreasonable, because it does not count the property interest of the
shipowner as equal in importance to the dockowner’s own property interest.
Drawing on this ordinary distinction between rationality and reasonableness, it
makes sense to say that risks impositions may be at once rational and unreasonable. We
may say, for example, that the rationality of exposing oneself to a risk depends on the
end furthered by the exposure, the importance that one attaches to furthering that end,
and the efficacy with which the exposure will further the end. The canons of rationality
thus give wide rein to individual subjectivity, and are naturally expressed in the
language of efficiency. Individuals are free to value the burdens and benefits of risks by
any metric they choose, and it is surely natural for them to value burdens and benefits
by their own subjective criteria of well-being. It is also rational for individuals to run
risks whenever—by their own lights—the expected benefits of so doing exceed the
expected costs, and to decline to run risks whenever the expected costs exceed the
16
See W.M. Sibley, The Rational Versus the Reasonable, 62 PH ILOSOPH ICAL REVIEW , 554
(1953). Sibley’s description of rationality, which the text follows, is a basic and familiar one, but
probably not the only way of specifying the concept, even at a very general level.
17
The circumstance (though not, so far as I know, the bargaining) arose in Vincent v.
Lake Erie Transportation Co., 124 N.W. 221 (Minn. 1910). In this circumstance, the doctrine of
private necessity applies, which extinguishes the property right to exclude and entitles the dock
owner only to compensation for harm done.
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benefits.
The rationality of a risk imposition is not, however, enough to guarantee its
reasonableness. It is not necessarily reasonable for people to expose others to risks
because—by the potential injurer’s own evaluation of the end furthered by the risk
imposition—the benefits of imposing the risk exceed the burdens of having to bear
exposure to it. Rational risk impositions are not necessarily reasonable ones because
other people have different values and distinct lives. The distinctness of human lives
matters because the separate lives of different people cannot be collapsed into a single
life that reaps both the burdens and the benefits of rational risk impositions, because
some people will die at the hands of risk impositions whose benefits will accrue to
others. The diversity of values matters because, in a world of distinct persons who
affirm diverse and incommensurable conceptions of the good, there is no reason to
assume that those who are put at risk value the ends pursued through the relevant risk
impositions in the way that those imposing the risks do. The fact that you may be
prepared to run enormous risks for the advancement of medical knowledge does not
mean that I am prepared to do so. The diverse aims of a plurality of persons cannot be
converted into a single scale, so that we may make collectively the same kinds of
judgments that we each make individually. Because lives are distinct and values
diverse, “sacrificing another for one’s own purposes must be viewed as different from
sacrificing oneself.”18
2. Reasonableness Refined
Contractualist moral and political philosophy19 elaborates on the general idea of
reasonableness in a number of ways. First, it supposes that reasonableness and
rationality are (in a certain form) complementary notions. Reasonable people have
diverse ends—diverse conceptions of their own rational advantage, of what it is that
they intend to realize in cooperation with others. Second, contractualism supposes that
reasonable people share the common aim of reaching unforced agreement on fair terms
of cooperation—terms that are fair for people who are both independent and equal and
who have diverse conceptions of their own rational advantage.
18
F
RIED , supra
note 13, at 191.
19
I am drawing here principally on the discussions of reasonableness in JOH N RAW LS
POLITICAL LIBERALISM 48-54 (rev. ed. 1996), and SCANLON , WH AT WE OW E TO EA CH OTHER , supra
note 4 at 191-97 (1998). The view I am bringing to bear is also developed in JOHN RAW LS , A
TH EORY OF JUSTICE (rev. ed. 1999), TH OM AS NAGEL , EQUALITY AND PARTIALITY (1991); CHRISTINE
M. KORSGAARD , CREATING TH E KINGDOM OF ENDS (1996) and BARBARA HERMAN , TH E PRACTICE
OF MORAL JUDGM ENT (1993). The idea of reasonable agreement is at the center of this strand of
political philosophy.
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The interactions of reasonable people are thus different from the interactions of
purely rational actors. Rational egoists interacting with other rational egoists seek to
determine the course of action which will best advance their own interests, given the
existence of other rational agents seeking to advance their own interests as best they
can. Purely rational agents are led to cooperate on terms that are mutually
advantageous—on terms that make everyone better off with respect to their preexisting
situation, in the way that Pareto-superior transactions do. Reasonable people, by
contrast, do not interact with other reasonable people by seeking their own greatest
advantage. Reasonable people seek to cooperate on fair terms with other—equal,
independent and reasonable—people.
Fair terms do not necessarily advantage everyone they affect in the sense of
making everyone they affect better off than they were under the preexisting distribution
of advantages. Measured against the baseline of preexisting entitlements, the move
from an unfair—or an unjust—situation to a more fair—or more just—one does not
improve the situation of those who benefitted from the unfairness or injustice which is
rectified. For example, the enfranchisement of some previously disenfranchised group
on the ground that members of that group are equal persons entitled to the political and
civil rights accorded equal citizens, does not improve the lot of those who benefitted
previously from the subordination and disenfranchisement of the group.
Reasonableness is thus linked to an idea of mutual benefit, but not to the idea of mutual
advantage against a preexisting baseline of entitlements. Reasonableness is linked to
reciprocity—to terms that define appropriate terms of cooperation among equals.
Among equals, fair terms of cooperation are determined not by comparing
advantage and disadvantage against the baseline of preexisting entitlements but by
comparing burdens and benefits to those affected under alternative possible principles
of cooperation. The reasonableness of preferring a regime of strict liability to one of
negligence, for example, depends on comparing burdens to victims under negligence to
burdens to injurers under strict liability—not on comparing the advantages to some and
disadvantages to others of moving from a regime of negligence to one of strict liability.
On it face, negligence places greater burdens on victims than strict liability does because
negligence liability leaves the costs of non-negligent accidents on the victims of those
accidents, whereas strict liability shifts the costs of those accidents onto injurers. On its
face, then, strict liability places greater burdens on injurers than it does on victims.
Prima facie, it is reasonable to ask injurers to bear the greater burdens that strict liability
imposes on them only if those greater burdens are less than the greater burdens that
negligence liability places on victims.
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3. Interpersonal Comparison
Because the reasonableness of possible terms of cooperation turns on their
distribution of the burdens and benefits of cooperation, some criteria for comparing
burdens and benefits are necessary. When people affirm diverse and incommensurable
ends, acceptable criteria of interpersonal comparison must be “mutually acceptable to
people whose preferences diverge.”20 The overlap in people’s needs (in contrast to the
divergence in their aspirations, preferences and wants) makes mutual acceptability
possible. People whose preferences diverge may well still need many of the same
things: liberty, security, health, income and wealth, for example. The ambition behind
Rawls’ specification of “primary goods” is to identify the institutional conditions (equal
basic liberties) and “all purpose goods” (wealth and income) essential to the pursuit of a
wide variety of aims and aspirations. The aim is to identify the goods that people need
to pursue their final ends and more transient preferences, and to base interpersonal
comparisons on these goods.21
Freedom of action and security are preconditions of effective moral agency.
They are, therefore, conditions on whose importance people with diverging ideals and
preferences can agree. Their importance does not depend on affirming any particular
preferences, on holding any particular set of ends and aspirations. Their importance
depends on having ends and aspirations, and on having a fundamental interest in being
able to realize those ends and aspirations over the course of a normal life span.
Freedom and security are essential conditions for the pursuit of most of the ends human
beings do hold, especially when we think of pursuing ends over the course of a lifetime.
Risks of physical harm materialize into physical harm, and even when physical harm
does not end in premature death, it can profoundly disrupt the pursuit of people’s aims
and aspirations. Serious physical injury can render the realization of some ends
impossible and severely impede the pursuit of others. Conversely, freedom of action is
prima facie enabling of the pursuit of one’s ends, whatever they are. Being forbidden to
20
T.M. Scanlon, Preference and Urgency, 72 J. PH IL . 655, 668 (1975) [henceforth cited as
Scanlon, Preference and Urgency].
21
J OHN RAW LS , POLITICAL LIBERALISM 178-90 (rev. ed. 1996). In the parlance of the
interpersonal comparison literature, these are generally described as “objective” criteria of
interpersonal comparison, in contradistinction to “subjective” ones. “Subjective” criteria of
interpersonal comparison evaluate “the level of well-being enjoyed by a person in given
material circumstances or the importance for that person of a given benefit or sacrifice . . . solely
from the point of that person’s tastes and interests.” Scanlon, Preference and Urgency, 656.
Objective criteria appraise burdens and benefits in terms that are “the best available standard of
justification . . . mutually acceptable to persons whose [aims, ends and] preferences diverge.”
Id. at 668.
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act at all—because the risk of physical injury to others is too great—would cripple the
pursuit of almost any end. Being forbidden to act in certain ways—because those ways
endanger other people too much—tends to impede the pursuit of at least some ends.
The reasonableness of risks impositions thus turns on the way that they reconcile
the competing claims of liberty and security. Risk impositions are reasonable when the
freedom to impose a risk is more valuable than the foregone security that is the price of
that risk imposition. They are unreasonable when the security lost is more valuable than
the freedom of action gained. More concrete categories are necessary when we make the
judgments about the reasonableness of particular risks and precautions, as we do in
negligence law for example.22 The question before us, however, is different. We are
concerned with the reasonableness of choosing negligence over strict liability, and viceversa. In this context, the relatively abstract account of the interests at stake given by the
terms “liberty” and “security” seems sufficient. The choice between negligence and
strict liability is a highly general one, and it is natural to think about it in highly general
terms. Getting a grip on this question requires not that we make the categories of liberty
and security more concrete, but that we characterize these two competing forms of
liability for accidental injury.
Before we turn to this task, however, it is worth noting that the framework
sketched here departs from much (though not all)23 recent philosophical writing on the
law of torts, because it does not place corrective justice at the center of its understanding
of tort law.24 Placing corrective justice at the center of tort law, however, puts the cart
before the horse.25 “Reasons of corrective justice are reasons for or against restoring
22
For discussion of how the common law of negligence proceeds in this regard, see
Gregory C. Keating, Reasonableness and Rationality in Negligence Theory, 48 STAN . L. REV . 311, (1996); CH ARLES FRIED , AN ANATOM Y OF VALUES , 191-93 (1970).
23
T ONY HONORE , RESPONSIBILITY AND FAULT (1999) may be the counterexample to the
trend closest in perspective to the perspective of this paper.
24
Important instances of recent philosophical writing on the law of torts which do place
corrective justice at its (and their) center include ALAN BRUDNER , THE UNITY OF TH E COMM ON
LAW (1995); JULES COLEMAN , THE PRACTICE OF PRINCIPLE (2001); JULES COLEMAN , RISKS AND
WRONGS (1992); ARTH UR RIPSTEIN , EQUALITY , RESPONSIBILITY AND LUCK (1999); ERNEST WEINRIB ,
TH E IDEA OF PRIVATE LAW (1995); and Martin Stone, On the Idea of Private Law, 9 CAN . J.L. &
JURISPRUDENCE 235 (1996). These varying accounts share the idea that the idea corrective justice
is, as Coleman puts it, the “overarching ambition or purpose” of tort law. (RISKS AND WRONGS ,
395)
25
See Hanoch Sheinman, Tort Law and Corrective Justice, 22 Law and Philosophy, 21, 4147 (2003).
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people’s relative positions to what they were before, or would have been apart from,
some action or series of actions.”26 The identification of those actions which require
correction takes precedence over their correction, and that logicially prior task is more
fundamental to the law of torts. “The principle that the plaintiff is entitled to be made
whole” as Ben Zipursky has observed, “lies at the level of remedies, applicable once a right of
action is already recognized.”27 The primary role of the law of torts—and of the law of
accidents more generally—is not to correct but to protect.28 The primary role of the law of
torts is to reconcile the competing claims of liberty and our security in a way which
secures favorable conditions for the exercise of our rational agency.
There is, then, a world of difference between a conception of tort law constructed
around the idea of corrective justice and a conception constructed around the concept of
mutual justifiability. The idea of mutual justifiability invokes the legacy of the social
contract tradition and asks what regime of rights and obligations those affected by risks
of injury and their reduction might reasonably agree to.29 At the center of this approach
is an understanding of tort law which gives precedence to the protection of competing
interests in liberty and security on fair terms, thus giving both protection and “riskdistributive justice” priority over corrective justice.30 Risks of physical injury involve
26
John Gardner, Discrimination as Injustice, 16 OXFORD JOURNAL OF LEGA L STUDIES , 353,
357 (1996).
27
Benjamin C. Zipursky, Civil Recourse, Not Corrective Justice, 91 GEO L. J. 695, 749 (2003).
28
On the contrast between correction and protection and the priority of protection see
Sheinman, supra note 25, at 67-73.
29
Because it gives mutual justification priority over mutual protection, this position falls
on the Kantian side of the divide between Kantian and Humean (or Millian) theories of political
morality. A justified tort regime is one that everyone governed by its terms could reasonably
accept. But the idea of reasonable acceptability itself incorporates mutual protection of vital
interests: A tort regime that everyone affected by it might reasonably accept is one which
protects everyone’s interests in liberty and security on fair terms. For this general conception
see SCANLON , WH AT WE OW E TO EA CH OTHER , supra note 11, at 268-72. Scanlon argues that
reasonable rejectibility understood in contradistinction to reasonable acceptability should be
placed at the center of a reasonableness based view. Essentially, he argues that the idea of
reasonable rejectability is decisive because what people might reasonably reject sets the
boundaries of reasonable cooperation. He may well be right but, for purposes of this paper, we
need not take a stand on the distinction.
30
T
ONY HONORE , RESPONSIBILITY AND FAULT , supra note 29, at 9, 78-82, 86, 90-91
explicates the idea of “risk-distributive justice.” As Honore shows, a conception of tort built
around “risk-distributive justice” makes room for corrective justice as a dependent aspect of the
law of torts—dependent because the rectification of injustices is subordinate to the specification
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both burdens (principally precaution costs and injuries) and benefits (the gains won by
imposing risks). The law of accidents determines the terms on which risks may be
imposed and so distributes the burdens and benefits of risk imposition. The corrective
justice conception of tort, by contrast, either assumes a prior account of the wrongs that
tort law rectifies or mistakes secondary duties of reparation for the primary norms of
tort law.
B. Fairness and the Choice Between Negligence and Strict Liability
The tort law of accidents is now, and long has been, divided between realms of
negligence and realms of strict liability. The choice between these rival principles of
responsibility for harm done is, arguably, the most fundamental choice in the tort law of
accidents. Particular conceptions of liability—such as the enterprise liability conception
of strict liability—articulate these regimes in specific ways. But a general
characterization of the difference between them can still be given. The essential
distinction between the two forms of liability (on my view31) is that negligence liability
criticizes conduct, whereas strict liability criticizes merely the failure to make reparation
for harm done. The imposition of negligence liability on a defendant condemns the
defendant’s conduct as wrongful. Negligent conduct is unreasonable conduct,
insufficiently careful conduct.
of the just terms whose violation triggers an obligation of repair. The risk-distributive character
of tort law should be amply illustrated by the discussion of tort law in the next few pages of the
paper.
31
Although the division of the law of accidents between realms of negligence and realms
of strict liability is a longstanding one, how best to understand the difference between these
competing principles of responsibility remains a contested matter among tort scholars. There
are, for example, scholars who see strict liability as essentially a surrogate kind of negligence
liability, and scholars who see it as distinct and competitive form of liability. Richard Posner
may be the preeminent example, though some of Arthur Ripstein’s remarks suggest this
position as well. See Richard A. Posner, A Theory of Negligence, 1 J. LEGA L STUD . 29, 42-44 (1972),
RIPSTEIN , supra note 24, at 70-72 (“Courts addressing [certain recurring situations subject to
strict liability] can be thought of as adopting conclusive presumptions of negligence when
injuries ensue from such actions.”). Guido Calabresi and Robert Keeton are among those who
see it a distinct and competitive kind of liability. See GUIDO CALABRESI, TH E COSTS OF
ACCIDENTS : A LEGAL AND ECONOM IC ANALYSIS 68-134 (1970); Robert Keeton, Conditional Fault in
the Law of Torts, 72 HARV . L. REV . 401 (1959). The best characterization of the distinction
between the two forms of liability may well depend in part on the best justification for the two
forms of liability is. The characterization offered here should therefore be viewed as a
contestable one.
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Strict liability, by contrast, does not condemn the conduct responsible for the
infliction of injury. It condemns—calls unreasonable—only the failure to compensate for
the infliction of injury. The injury-inflicting conduct subject to strict liability is not itself
wrong. It is tortious only when injury is inflicted and reparation is not made for the
harm thereby done. The wrong is harming without repairing. Negligence liability is
liability for wrongful conduct; strict liability is liability for conduct which is wrongful
only because (and only when) reparation for harm done is not made promptly and
voluntarily. Put differently, the fundamental difference between strict and negligence
liability is that under strict liability the payment of damages to those injured by the
characteristic risks of an activity is a condition for the rightful conduct of an activity,32
whereas under negligence liability, the payment of damages is a matter of redress for
wrongful conduct—for the wrongful infringement of the property and physical integrity
of others.33
The choice between negligence and strict liability is thus a choice both between
leaving non-negligent accident costs—costs arising out risks reasonably imposed—on
the victims who suffer them and shifting such losses back to the injurers who inflict
them, and between reasons for imposing liability. Negligence is liability for
unreasonable risk imposition; strict liability is liability for reasonable risk imposition.
The reasonableness of preferring negligence to strict liability (and vice-versa) depends
initially on comparing burdens and benefits under these competing principles. Prima
facie, negligence places greater burdens on victims because negligence requires victims
to shoulder the costs of nonnegligent accidents whereas strict liability places prima facie
greater burdens on injurers, because strict liability requires injurers to shoulder the costs
of nonegligent accidents. Initially, we are asking when it is reasonable to place greater
burdens on victims and when it is reasonable to place greater burdens on injurers.
32
Legal doctrine and rhetoric often come very close to putting the matter this way. For
example, Koos v. Roth, 652 P.2d 1255, 1262 (Or., 1982), a leading case on abnormally dangerous
activity liability, explains that, under strict liability “the question is not whether the activity
threatens such harm that it should not be continued. The question is who shall pay for harm
that has been done.” Loe v. Lenhardt, 362 P.2d 312, 317 (Or., 1961), explains the basis of
abnormally dangerous activity liability in language that comes even closer to the language of
conditional fault embraced in this paper: “The element of fault, if it can be called that, lies in the
deliberate choice by the defendant to inflict a high degree of risk upon his neighbor, even
though the utmost care is observed in so doing.” The Comment on Clause (c) to §520 Abnormally
Dangerous Activities of the RESTATEM ENT OF TORTS , SECOND (1977) observes that “the utility of
[the injurer’s] conduct may be such that he is socially justified in proceeding with his activity,
but the unavoidable risk of harm that is inherent in it requires that it be carried on at his peril,
rather than at the expense of the person who suffers harm as a result of it.”
33
See Keating The Idea of Fairness in the Law of Enterprise Liability , 95 MICH . L. REV . 1266,
1308-12 (1997) [hereinafter Keating, Idea of Fairness].
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1. Benchmarks of Fairness
Judgments regarding the fair distribution of the costs of non-negligent accidents
do not arise in a vacuum, because accidents themselves do not arise in a vacuum.
Accidents arise, for the most part, out of mutually beneficial activities carried out by
legal equals. Cooperative practices among equal persons give rise to natural focal
points, or benchmarks, of fair division.34 To see this, consider the case for the difference
principle in its simplest form.
In its simplest form, the case for the difference principle depends on: (1) the
general idea of society as a cooperative venture among equal persons; and (2) on
particular features of the basic structure of society, namely, the pervasive effects that the
basic structure of society has on the life prospects of those who live under its
institutions.35 Prima facie, equal participants in a system of social cooperation should
share equally in the system’s benefits (and burdens). Reasonable people, participating as
equals in a practice which creates both burdens and benefits, would take equal division
as the presumptively fair benchmark—the focal point—from which their deliberations
about the apportionment of burdens and benefits of social cooperation should start.36
The “priority of those worst off”which characterizes the difference principle—the fact
that the distribution of income and wealth has to be justified especially to them—arises
against this benchmark. The claims of those worst off under institutions which permit
economic inequalities take on a certain priority, both because those worst off are
receiving less than equal shares of the benefits to which they have a prima facie equal
claim, and because principles governing permissible inequalities of wealth and income
with respect to the basic structure of society have a pervasive and profound effect on the
life prospects of those subject to them.
Risks of physical injury likewise arise in the course of social cooperation among
equal persons. Equality of division is likewise the presumptively fair benchmark when
the burdens and benefits of those practices affect those touched by them equally. But
34
Rawls introduces the idea of a “natural focal point” in explaining why the difference
principle expresses a principle of reciprocity. JOHN RAW LS , JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS : A
RESTATEM ENT , 123 (2001) [henceforth cited as RAW LS , RESTATEM ENT ]. He takes the idea from
TH OM AS SCHELLING , TH E STRATEGY OF CONFLICT (1960)
35
See T.M. SCANLON , Contractualism and Utilitarianism in TH E DIFFICULTY OF TOLERANCE ,
124, 149-50 (2003); RAW LS , RESTATEM ENT , 10-12,52-57, 97-101 (2001).
36
R AW LS , RESTATEM ENT , 124 (“. . . the difference principle expresses the idea that,
starting from equal division . . . “)
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practices of risk imposition rarely affect every member of society equally.37 Risk of
physical injury is pervasive in a technologically advanced society, but the activities
which give rise to it are diverse and often quite particular. The injuries that preoccupy
accident law arise from a variety of sources—from driving and flying, from milling,
mining and manufacturing, from producing and consuming pharmaceuticals, from
playing sports and playing with toys. These activities rarely affect every member of
society in equal ways. They tend to benefit some more directly than they benefit others,
and to burden some more directly than they burden others.
The fact that most activities responsible for risks of physical injury burden and
benefit people differentially both sets the subject matter of accident law apart from the
basic structure of society that is the concern of Rawls’ theory of justice, and affects the
presumptively fair benchmark from which reasonable people would begin deliberating
about the distribution of accident costs. The basic structure of a society has a pervasive
and profound effect on the life prospects of every member of society. Practices of risk
imposition generally do not. This differential distribution of burdens and benefits affects
the natural focal point from which deliberation about fair division begins. When the
benefits of a practice are differentially distributed, the presumptively fair way for equals
to distribute the burdens of that practice is in proportion to those (differentially
distributed) benefits. Those who benefit form the imposition of risks should bear the
costs of the accidents which result from those risks.
2. Risk Impositions Within and Between Communities
Because benefit and burden should presumptively be proportional, it is useful to
distinguish two fundamental kinds of cases where practices of risk imposition distribute
burden and benefit differently. In the first kind of case, risk impositions occur within
“communities of risk.” In the second, risk impositions take place between communities.
A “community of risk” is present in its strongest form when potential injurers are
also potential victims, and equally so. (In tort law, the risks of the road are often taken
to be a rough approximation of a perfect community of risk.) Each member of the
community then has her security compromised by having to bear risks imposed by
37
Practices of risk imposition can have pervasive and profound effects on the life
prospects of those they endanger when they involve the imposition of significant risks of death
or devastating injury. When this is the case, stringent precautions for the protection of those so
endangered, analogous to the priority that the difference principle gives to the claims of those
worst off, are appropriate. See Keating, Pricelessness and Life 64 MARYLAND L. REV . 159 (2005).
But it is the existence of pervasive effects on a discernible class of potential victims that is
critical in these cases, not the existence of equal and pervasive effects on every member of
society.
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others, but each also has her liberty enhanced by being able to impose risk on others.
Within a community of risk, risks may be fairly imposed and mutually beneficial in a
particularly strong way. When each member of a community is equally a potential
injurer and a potential victim, risks will be fairly imposed: Each member of the
community will be exposed to equal risks by each other member of the community, and
will imposes equivalent risks on each other member of the community. (In an idealized
community of the highway, for instance, each driver will be equally at risk and equally
putting others at risk.) If the risks imposed are reasonable ones—if the freedom to
impose the risks is worth more than the foregone security that is their price—then each
member of the community will also benefit from the right to impose those risks. (Each
driver will gain more from the mundane freedom to take his or her car on the road, for
example, than he or she loses from have to bear the risks created by the presence of other
cars on the road.) Within a perfect community of risk, the burdens and benefits of
accidental risk imposition are fairly distributed because they are equally distributed. In
a community of equals, equal division is prima facie fair—prima facie reasonable.
Risks are imposed by members of one community on members of another
community when potential injurers and potential victims engage in distinct activities,
which do not impose equivalent risks on one another. When potential injurers play
cricket and potential victims walk through their yards,38 members of one community
(cricket players) are imposing greater risks on members of the other community
(homeowners or pedestrians) and bearing less in the way of exposure to risk. When one
party mills and the other party mines,39 because water is a resource for milling and a
detriment to mining, the milling party is imposing greater risk on the mining party and
bearing less in the way of exposure to risk. Even if the risks that the cricket players and
the millers impose are reasonable, the burdens and benefits of those reasonable risks are
not fairly distributed.
Practices of risk imposition which are intermediate between these two poles are
both easy to conjure up and common. For example, given the importance of driving to
our daily lives (this from someone who lives in Los Angeles), we may all stand to benefit
from the practice of transporting large quantities of gasoline over the roads in tanker
trucks, even though this method of transport creates risks of massive explosion, and
even though most of us never expect to make use of the legal right to transport gasoline
38
Bolton v. Stone, 1951 A.C. 850 (appeal taken from C.A.).
39
Fletcher v. Rylands, 159 Eng. Rep. 737 (Ex. 1866), aff’d 3 L.R.-E. & I. App. 330 (H.L.
1868) (appeal taken from Ex.).
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in this manner.40 Residents of Manhattan, for example, generally gain nothing of value
from the right to haul gasoline by tanker. Indeed, they may drive so infrequently that
they gain far less than Angelenos do from this method of transporting gasoline.41 But
even Manhattanites may benefit indirectly from the enterprise of transporting gasoline
by tanker trucks, even if they do not impose risks on gasoline tankers equivalent to the
risks that gasoline tankers impose on them, and even if they benefit less than Angelenos.
Their life prospects may be improved by virtue of the prosperity created and sustained
by the practice of transporting gasoline by tractor trailer, and even Manhattanites may
benefit through the use of private automobiles that the practice enables.
In all of these cases, the fairest—most reasonable—distribution of the costs of
accidents is open to argument. But the antecedent distribution of burdens and benefits
by a practice of risk imposition bears on deliberations of fairness in an important way.
The antecedent distribution of burdens and benefits by a practice of risk imposition sets
the benchmark or focal point from which deliberations about fair distribution begin. It is
presumptively reasonable—presumptively fair—for the burdens of a risky activity to be
borne by those who benefit from it. Prima facie, burden and benefit should be
proportional. Prima facie, losses should be shifted if their shifting would improve the
distribution of burden and benefit. And this is (prima facie) true even if the risks which
resulted in those losses were reasonably imposed.
Let us retrace our steps. Reasonableness requires (1) taking the impact of one’s
conduct on other people into account as a circumstance capable of influencing one’s
decisions, and (2) being prepared to govern one’s conduct on a basis acceptable to others
whom one’s conduct affects. Reasonable people seek to cooperate on fair terms with
other—equal, independent and reasonable—people. Fair terms enable each person to
pursue his or her own aims and ends on terms that all those affected by them could
accept. When risks of physical injury are at issue, the terms on which risks are
permissibly imposed and accident costs distributed reconcile competing claims of
liberty and security. Liberty and security enable people with diverse aims and ends to
realize those ends, whatever they happen to be. A substantial measure of each is
necessary for people to realize their particular plans and aspirations. The predicament
40
The transport of gasoline in this manner precipitated the death of the victim in Siegler
v. Kuhlman, 502 P.2d 1181, 1187 (Wash. 1972).
41
It is tempting to think that they are also exposed to proportionately less risk from this
practice of transporting gasoline so that their lesser benefit is matched by lesser burden. But it
is not clear to me that they are at as much less risk from the practice. Tractor-trailers towing
gasoline may create risks of especially great harm in the confined quarters and crowded spaces
of Manhattan, even if there are fewer of them. The risks posed by tractor-trailers hauling
gasoline may not diminish commensurately with the frequency of tractor-trailer trips.
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of accident law is that, when risks of physical injury are at stake, liberty and security
conflict and the task of accident law is to reconcile liberty and security on terms that are
fair and therefore acceptable to those they affect.
Presumptively, fair terms of cooperation are equal terms. In a cooperative
venture among equal persons, it is prima facie fair to distribute burdens and benefits
equally. Equal persons should be entitled to impose equal risks on one another, and to
share equally in the benefits and burdens of risk impositions. Deliberation about the fair
terms of cooperation begins from this starting point. Deliberation about the fair
distribution of accident costs, however, moves away from the benchmark of equal
division, because practices of risk imposition generally benefit and burden those they
affect differentially. When burden and benefit are distributed differentially by a practice
of risk imposition, proportionality of benefit and burden—not equality of benefits and
burden—is the natural focal point or benchmark from which deliberation over fairness
begins. Prima facie, burdens should be shared in proportion to benefits.
II. The Fairness of Strict Enterprise Liability
Within the modern law of torts, strict liability ideas find their fullest and most
distinctive expression in the theory of enterprise liability.42 The theory of enterprise
liability asserts: (1) that accident costs should be internalized by the activity responsible
for them; and (2) that accident costs should be both dispersed—not concentrated—and
distributed among the participants in the activity responsible for them. The various
forms that enterprise liability takes—both within the common law of torts and in
administrative alternatives to the common law—reflect different judgments of whether
the pertinent activity is firm-wide (as with respondeat superior and workers’
compensation); or industry-wide (as with black lung disease and nuclear power) or
defined by an identifiable activity (as with no-fault automobile insurance); or society
wide (as with the New Zealand compensation scheme).43 Whereas negligence liability
42
Enterprise liability conceptions do sometimes surface within negligence law, though
negligence liability thwarts their full realization. See Gregory C. Keating, The Theory of
Enterprise Liability and Common Law Strict Liability, 54 VAND . L. REV . 1285, 1329-33 (2001).
43
See Gregory C. Keating, Rawlsian Fairness and Regime Choice in Tort Theory, 72
FORDH AM L. REV . 1857, 1861-62, 1890-1912. (2004) [henceforth cited as Rawlsian Fairness].
Compare HONORE , RESPONSIBILITY AND FAULT , supra note 53, at 90-91. For present purposes,
the point is that the law constructs the enterprise, through the exercise of political and juridical
judgment. The attribution of accidents to activities which is part of this construction requires
the use of various tests designed to identify the “characteristic risks” of an activity (e.g., in the
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typically attributes accidents to faulty actions, enterprise liability typically attributes
accidents to enterprises.
At first glance, the comparative fairness of negligence and strict liability turns on
whether it is fairer to place the costs of accidents which should not have been prevented
on those whose actions have occasioned them, or to leave those costs on the victims who
have suffered the accidents. But the very statement of the idea of enterprise liability
transforms the question. Enterprise liability embodies a particular idea of fairness, an
idea centered on the distribution of the burdens and the benefits of risky activities.
Enterprise liability expresses the idea that the burdens of accidental injury should be
distributed across those who benefit from the risks which result in those injuries. This is
a distinctively collective conception of responsibility and it is paired with a particular
way that the “scope of employment’ test in vicarious liability law seeks to identify the
characteristic risks of a firm’s activity). See Keating, Rawlsian Fairness., at 1861, 1900-01, 1909-12.
and Keating, Idea of Fairness, supra note 32, at 1287-95.
The evaluative nature of these tests bears underscoring. Because all accidents arise at
the intersection of two or more activities, several first-rate tort theorists assert that “general
strict liability” is conceptually impossible. The thought is that strict liability is liability for harm
caused and harm is always caused by more than one activity. See e.g., Stephen Perry, The
Impossibility of a General Strict Liability, 1 CAN J.L & JURISPRUDENCE 147 (1989); RIPSTEIN , supra
note 24, at 32-53. Perry and Ripstein conclude therefore, that we cannot attribute accidents to
activities without employing fault criteria. This is a nonsequitur. Some nonfault rules for
attributing accidents to activities—the “scope of the employment” test in the law of respondeat
superior, the scope of the risk test for abnormally dangerous activities, the manufacturing
defect test in product liability law, and the “in the course of employment” test in workers’
compensation law—connect accidents and activities very effectively. These “nonfault
attribution rules” are, however, evaluative: They express normative judgments about the
character of an enterprise. The lesson here is that Perry and Ripstein are right to think that
rules for attributing accidents to activities must be evaluative, but wrong to think that all
evaluative judgments are judgments of fault.
Perry and Ripstein’s error has its roots, I believe, in the fact that they take Richard
Epstein’s important theory of strict liability as their target. See RICHA RD EPSTEIN , A THEORY OF
STRICT LIABILITY (1980). Epstein was first criticized for causal indeterminacy by John Borgo,
Causal Paradigms in Tort Law, 8 J. Legal Stud. 419 (1979). Perhaps because the very act of
evaluating competing liberty and security interests strikes Epstein as an impermissible burden
on individual liberty, his theory of strict liability eschews evaluative judgments in attributing
harms to actors. It is therefore vulnerable to Borgo’s Perry’s and Ripstein’s critique. The
attribution rules which characterize strict liability in the law are, however, evaluative. The
arguments that Perry and Ripstein successfully deploy against Epstein do not have the same
purchase on strict liability in the law. For strict liability in the law, the problem of attributing
accidents to activities sometimes is and sometimes is not soluble. See Keating, Rawlsian
Fairness, supra note 42, at 1909-12.
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conception of the social world within which accidental injuries arise. That social world
differs sharply from the social world presupposed by traditional fault liability and its
more individualist understanding of responsibility.
1. Two Social Worlds
Writing in 1897, Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that “our law of torts comes
from the old days of isolated, ungeneralized wrongs, assaults, slanders and the like . . .”
whereas “the torts with which our courts are kept busy to-day are mainly the incidents
of certain well-known businesses. . . . railroads, factories, and the like.”44 Implicit in
Holmes’ remark is a distinction not just between two kinds of accidents, but between
two kinds of social worlds. Stylizing and simplifying, we can call these two worlds the
“world of acts” and the “world of activities,” respectively. The “world of acts” is
Holmes’ world of “isolated, ungeneralized wrongs.” The “world of activities” is the
world in which accidents are the “incidents” of organized enterprises.
In the “world of acts,” risks are discrete. The typical actor is an individual or a
small firm which creates risk so infrequently that harm is not likely to materialize from
any single actor’s conduct. The typical accident materializes out of the activity of
isolated, unrelated actors, acting independently (i.e., natural persons or small firms
separately engaging in activities on an occasional basis). Taken as a whole, the activities
of these individual actors are diffuse and disorganized, and quite possibly actuarially
small. The dogfight that precipitated Brown v. Kendall45 is a representative tort in this
world: It arose out of a chance encounter between unrelated parties, neither of whose
activities were large enough to make such misfortunes commonplace and expected. In
the “world of acts,” then, risks are isolated, “one-shot” events. Harm, when it
materializes, is a misfortune. Because actors are small, and risks independent and
uncorrelated, liability rules shift—but do not disperse—losses. In this world, the
imposition of strict liability on reciprocal risks merely “substitute[s] one form of risk for
another—the risk of liability for the risk of personal loss, ” as George Fletcher says in his
44
O.W. HOLM ES , The Path of the Law, in COLLECTED LEGA L PAPERS 167, 183 (1954
[original publication date, 1920). The paper itself was originally delivered in 1897. For further
discussion see JOHN WITT , Widows, Actuaries, and the Logic of Social Insurance, TH E ACCIDENTAL
REPUBLIC , 127-51, esp. at 139-41 (2004) (discussing this passage from Holmes in connection with
the rise of a statistical approach to thinking about accidents” and the rise of workers’
compensation schemes).
45
60 Mass. (6 Cush) 292 (1850).
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famous paper on fairness and utility in tort theory.46 A fair distribution of the costs of
accidents—of harm—is hard to come by because the distribution of the costs of accidents
across the activities that generate them depends upon the underlying activity satisfying
basic criteria of insurability. Foremost among these criteria is the law of large numbers.47
In the purest form of the “world of acts,” both actors and activities are small.
At the opposite pole from the “world of acts” is the “world of activities.” In the
“world of activities,” risks are generalized and systemic. Systemic risks arise out of a
continuously repeated activity (the manufacture of Coke bottles, the supplying of water
by a utility, the transport of gasoline) that is actuarially large. “Accidental” harm is
statistically certain to result from such risks: If you make enough Coke bottles some are
sure to rupture,48 if you transport enough gasoline, some tankers are sure explode,49 if
you leave water mains uninspected in the ground long enough, some are sure to break;50
if you turn enough sailors loose on shore leave, some of them are bound to return to
their ships drunk and wreak havoc.51 In the “world of activities,” both actors and
activities are large. The cost of accidents can therefore be dispersed and distributed.
In the “world of activities,” the typical injury arises not out of the diffuse and
disorganized acts of unrelated individuals or small firms, but out of the organized
activities of firms that are either large themselves, or small parts of relatively well46
George Fletcher, Fairness and Utility in Tort Theory, 85 Harv. L. Rev. 537, 547 (1972).
47
For discussion see MEH R , CAM M ACK AND ROSE , SOM E PRINCIPLES OF INSURANCE (8th ed.
1985), as excerpted in KEETON ET AL ., TORT AND ACCIDENT LAW 724-731 (2004). For case law
exposition see: Ocean Drilling & Exploration Co. v. U.S., 988 F.2d 1135 (1993); see also Sears,
Roebuck and Co. V. C.I.R., 972 F.2d 858 (1992).
48
Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 150 P.2d 436 (Cal. 1944).
49
Siegler v. Kuhlman, 502 P.2d 1181 (Wash. 1972).
50
Lubin v. Iowa City, 131 N.W.2d 765 (Iowa 1964). The waterworks chose to leave its
cast iron pipes in place until they burst, because it was inefficient to inspect the mains for signs
of incipient breakage and then to replace them before they broke.
51
The suit in Ira S. Bushey & Sons Inc. v. United States, 398 F.2d 167 (2nd Cir. 1968) arose
out of an incident in which a drunken sailor, returning from shore leave late at night to his
Coast Guard ship, which was being overhauled in a floating drydock, opened the valves and
flooded the drydock causing the drydock to sink and the ship to sink partially. The court, in an
opinion by Judge Friendly, affirmed that the conduct was within the scope of employment,
because the risk of drunkenness was a risk increased by the Coast Guard’s “long-run activity in
spite of all reasonable precautions” on its part, and hence was fairly charged to the Coast
Guard.
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organized enterprises. The waterworks which is the defendant in Lubin v. Iowa City is
large in the first sense: A single entity is responsible for the piping of water through
underground pipes, for laying and maintaining those pipes, for charging consumers for
the water so transported, and so on. The transportation of large quantities of gasoline in
tractor trailers on highways is large in the second sense: The firms that do the
transporting may (or may not be) small and specialized but they are enmeshed in
contractual relationships with those who manufacture and refine the gasoline, those who
operate gasoline stations, those who manufacture tractor trailers, and so on.52
In the “world of activities,” accidental harms can be spread across the enterprises
that engender those harms. When the law of large numbers is met, risks are not only
certain to issue in harms, they are also very likely to issue in harms with predictable
regularity. When activities are actuarially large, the accidents that they engender will
likewise be predictable and regular, and the costs of those accidents can be factored into
the costs of conducting the enterprise. The costs of manufacturing and distributing Coke
can include the costs of injuries from exploding Coke bottles; the costs of supplying
water to households and businesses can include the costs of the damage caused by
broken water mains.
The move from the “world of acts” to the “world of activities” thus changes the
question of fairness presented by the imposition of strict liability on fairly distributed
risks. In the “world of acts,” strict liability, as George Fletcher says, “merely substitutes
the risk of liability for the risk of loss”—it yields a different, but no fairer, distribution of
the financial burdens and benefits of accidental harm. In the “world of acts,” negligence
is preferable to strict liability because negligence reconciles the competing claims of
liberty and security as fairly and less expensively than strict liability does. In the “world
of activities,” strict—enterprise—liability is fairer than negligence. Under enterprise
liability, those who benefit from the imposition of particular systemic risks—from the
risks of selling Coke in pressurized bottles, or the risks of leaving water mains
undisturbed until they break—also bear the financial burdens of the accidents that issue
from these risks. In the “world of activities”, unlike the “world of acts”, the extra
burdens that strict liability places on the liberty of injurers are less than the extra
burdens than negligence places on the security of victims. Negligence leaves
concentrated harms on injurers; enterprise liability disperses concentrated loss and
distributes it across all the beneficiaries of an enterprise.
In the “world of acts,” it is unreasonable to impose strict liability on risks that
potential injurers and victims impose equally on each other. In a world of unorganized
52
The perception that the separate actors form a connected enterprise surfaces very
explicitly in Siegler, 502 P.2d at 118.
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risk, it is not possible to distribute (the financial costs of) harm fairly, and reasonable
injurers may object that the move to strict liability imposes as great a burden on their
freedom of action as negligence imposes on the security of victims. Under negligence,
the concentrated costs of non-negligent accidents strike victims like lightning; under
strict liability those costs strike injurers like lightning. Because strict liability yields a
distribution of accident costs which is no fairer than the distribution under negligence
liability, it is reasonable to maximize the size of the pie by preferring the cheaper liability
regime. In the world of activities, by contrast, the burdens are asymmetrical. Enterprise
liability distributes the costs of non-negligent accidents through injurers across those
who benefit from the underlying risks. Negligence liability leaves the costs of those
accidents concentrated on unlucky victims. It may be rational to want to reap the
benefits of a risky common enterprise without sharing in its burdens, but it is not
reasonable to do so.
2. The Facets of Fairness
The fairness case for enterprise liability is not fully captured by the statement that
it distributes the costs of accidents across those who benefit from the underlying risks.
Indeed, four distinct facets of the fairness case for enterprise liability can be
distinguished. The first of the four facets of enterprise liability fairness is fairness to
victims. It is unfair to concentrate the costs of characteristic risk on those who simply
happen to suffer injury at the hands of such risk, when those costs might be absorbed by
those who impose the characteristic risk. Fairness prescribes proportionality of burden
and benefit. Victims who are strangers to the enterprise derive no benefit from it and it
is therefore unfair to ask them to bear a substantial loss when that loss might be
dispersed across those who participate in the enterprise and therefore do benefit from it.
Victims who are themselves participants in an enterprise share in its benefits, but not in
proportion to the detriment they suffer when they are physically harmed by the
enterprise. Here, too, enterprise liability is fairer than negligence. It disperses the costs
of enterprise-related accidents and distributes them within the enterprise, so that each
bears a proportionate share.
Second, enterprise liability is fair to injurers because it simply asks them to accept
the costs of their choices. Those who create characteristic risks do so for their own
advantage, fully expecting to reap the benefits that accrue from imposing those risks. If
those who impose characteristic risk choose wisely—if they put others at risk only when
they stand to gain more than those they put in peril stand to lose—even under enterprise
liability they will normally benefit from the characteristic risks that they impose. If they
do not, they have only their poor judgment to blame, and society as a whole has reason
to penalize their choices. The Coast Guard lets its sailors loose on shore leave for its own
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benefit (as well as for theirs) and it reaps the rewards of their shore leave.53 If the costs of
shore leave are greater than the benefits, the Coast Guard has only itself to blame for the
practice and society has reason to discourage it. Imposing risks whose expected costs
exceed their expected benefits is negligence.
The conception of responsibility invoked in the last paragraph is a familiar and
widely accepted one. We take if for granted, for example, that “the person to whom the
income of property or a business will accrue if it does well has normally also to bear the
risk of loss if it does badly. In the law of sales, when the right to income or fruits passes
to the buyer, the risk of deterioration or destruction normally passes to him as well.”54
The same point might be made about the purchase of stocks, or even lottery tickets. It is
fair to ask agents who choose to act in pursuit of their own interests and stand to profit if
things go well to bear the risk of loss when things go badly. Enterprise liability is fair to
injurers.
Third, enterprise liability is fair because it exacts a just price from injurers for the
freedom tort law confers upon them. Tort law permits potential injurers to put others at
risk without their knowledge or consent, and for the private benefit of potential injurers.
Indeed, tort law requires potential victims to entrust their lives and limbs to persons and
entities who stand to profit by imperiling them. This power is of great value to potential
injurers: They stand to reap rewards by imposing risks in part because they can choose
to impose those risks in circumstances that maximize the benefit they gain from doing
so. The price that enterprise liability exacts for this freedom and power is financial
responsibility for physical harm, when that harm is either characteristic of the injurer’s
activity or occasioned by the injurer’s careless exercise of its power. To induce potential
injurers to exercise their power over others responsibly—and to safeguard the security
of those others—enterprise liability taxes the exercise of the power to put others at risk
when it goes awry and issues in physical harm.
Negligence liability taxes the exercise of the power to imperil others only when
the injurer has exercised that power without sufficient care.55 Accidental harms
attributable to activities that are conducted carefully but at an excessively high level of
intensity, or without undertaking justified research that would yield safer ways of
proceeding, tend to escape the reach of negligence liability. Strict accountability induces
53
54
Bushey, 398 F.2d 765.
T
ONY
HONORE , RESPONSIBILITY AND FAULT 79 (1999).
55
The ideas in this paragraph draw on Shavell, Negligence versus Strict Liability, 9 J. LEG .
STUD . 1 (1980) and Guido Calabresi & Jon T. Hirschoff, Toward a Test for Strict Liability in Tort, 81
YALE L.J. 1055 (1972).
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potential injurers—particularly large enterprises—to conduct their activities more
carefully. By taxing every exercise of the power to imperil others that issues in an
accident characteristic of the enterprise in question, enterprise liability induces injurers
to comb through their activities in search of risk reducing precautions. Worthwhile
precautions whose omission escapes the eye of negligence law may be induced by the
imposition of enterprise liability.
The fourth facet of fairness returns us to the general idea of burden-benefit
proportionality: Enterprise liability distributes accident costs among actual and potential
injurers more fairly than negligence does. Negligence liability does not require that the
costs of accidents—even negligent ones—be spread among those who create similar
risks of harm, whereas enterprise liability does. Enterprise liability asserts: (1) that
accident costs should be internalized by the enterprise whose costs they are; and (2) that
those costs should be dispersed and distributed among those who constitute the
enterprise, and who therefore benefit from its risk impositions. Negligence liability, by
contrast, holds that injurers have a duty to make reparation when they injure others
through their own carelessness. Negligence liability justifies shifting concentrated losses
where enterprise liability justifies dispersing and distributing concentrated losses. To be
sure, nothing in negligence liability forbids injurers from insuring against potential
liability, but nothing in negligence liability requires it, either. Insurance is not integral to
negligence liability, even though insuring against negligence liability is standard
modern practice.
It is, moreover, important in this regard that insuring against negligence liability
makes negligence liability fairer precisely because it moves negligence towards
enterprise liability. Negligence liability is often harsh, and problematically so.56 In part,
negligence law is harsh because it justifies shifting potentially devastating losses from
injurers to victims on the basis of relatively modest acts of wrongdoing. A moment’s
carelessness behind the wheel of a car can inflict millions of dollars of harm, and that is
enough to bankrupt most drivers. The price that negligence liability exacts can thus
seem quite disproportionate to the wrongfulness of the conduct whose blameworthiness
justifies the exaction. The ordinary negligence of natural persons is a relatively innocent
sort of wrongdoing: The failure to foresee a risk clearly enough, calculate its probability
accurately enough, concentrate well enough, or execute a course of action precisely
56
“Average reasonable person” doctrine shows this side of negligence liability most
clearly. See KEETON ET AL ., TORT AND ACCIDENT LAW 345-368 (4th ed. 2004). PROSSER & KEETON
ON THE LAW OF TORTS , 173-193 (4TH ED . 1984). Comparative negligence tends to mitigate some of
this harshness, because it takes the particularities of the parties and the context of the accident
into account in apportioning fault. See e.g., the Commissioner’s Comment “Percentages of
Fault” to the Uniform Comparative Fault Act, 12 Unif. Laws. Ann., a model statute promulgated
in 1977 by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.
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enough, are all instances of ordinary negligence. We are all prone to such mistakes,
human frailty being what it is. Yet negligence law is unforgiving. Failures to act as a
reasonable person would act in similar circumstances are enough to support liability,
even if those failures are the product of normal human frailty. And the extent of the
ensuing liability can be devastating.
So long as we restrict our gaze to the apportionment of costs between a particular
injurer and the victim of her negligence, negligence law is exacting and intolerant, but
justifiably and fairly so. The activities that negligence liability regulates are unforgiving.
Small mistakes can explode into serious injuries. Momentary lapses of attention behind
the wheel of a car—or at the helm of a ship or the controls of a plane—can and do
destroy human lives. The seriousness of the harm risked by ordinary negligence is good
reason to hold actors to strict standards of conduct. And the failure to conform to a
norm of reasonable care is a kind of wrongdoing, even if not a particularly egregious
one. Wrongdoing fairly exposes wrongdoers to responsibility to repair the harm that
they have done. Forgiving wrongful lapses in concentration and failures of foresight
would allocate the losses these frailties cause even more unfairly. Why should injured
victims absorb the costs of the carelessness that harmed them? Shifting the costs of a
negligent injury to the wrongdoer whose inadvertence caused it may be harsh, but it is
fairer than letting the loss lie where it fell. Finally, forgiving lapses in concentration and
failures of foresight might well encourage carelessness. Forbearance tends to foster the
objects of its indulgence.
Holding actors accountable for the harmful consequences of their understandable
errors is, then, fairer than excusing them. But does this does not settle all questions of
fairness, nor undermine the argument that enterprise liability is fairer still. The small
lapses that very occasionally precipitate large injuries are common indeed. Most of us
occasionally let our minds wander behind the wheel, give some small risk insufficient
consideration, or fail to execute some all too familiar precaution with the precision that it
requires. Most of us also escape without injuring anyone else. Yet the luck of the draw
is all that distinguishes those of us who get away without injuring anyone from those
who do not. Fate singles an unlucky few out for liability—often massive liability—and
fortune spares the rest.
Those unlucky few who inflict injury cannot, on balance, claim that they are
unjustly held accountable for the harm that their wrongdoing has caused, but they might
justly complain that a system under which they alone bear the costs of the injuries they
inflict is less fair than one which pools those losses among all those who create similar
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negligent risks.57 Negligence mitigated by the institution of liability insurance is fairer
than negligence detached from that institution. Liability insurance distributes the costs
of negligence among all those who are, over the long run, similarly negligent, and that is
fairer than leaving the costs of negligence on those whose misfortune it is to have their
negligence issue in injury. Luck and luck alone separates the negligent who cause injury
from the negligent who do not. It is fairer to neutralize the arbitrary effects of luck than
to let it wreak havoc with people’s lives.
Just as negligence with the institution of liability insurance is fairer among actual
and potential victims than negligence liability without that institution is, so too
enterprise liability is fairer than negligence liability with insurance. Once negligence
liability operates against the background of liability insurance, all that divides it from
enterprise liability is its treatment of those accident costs that flow from reasonable risk
impositions. Both negligence liability and enterprise liability pool the accident costs that
issue from negligent risk impositions among those who are similarly negligent.
Negligence liability, however, leaves the non-negligent accident costs of an activity on
their victims whereas enterprise liability distributes those costs across the
enterprise—across all those who impose the characteristic risks that lead to these
accidents. Under negligence liability, victims may disperse the costs of an activity’s nonnegligent accidents by purchasing loss insurance, but they will not distribute those costs
across those who impose similar risks.
When reasonable risk results in accidental harm, chance and chance alone
separates those who injure and are injured from those who do not and are not. To leave
non-negligent losses on those whose misfortune it is to suffer them, when we might
readily spread these losses among all those who create similar risks of injury, is unfair.
When the concentrated costs of non-negligent accident might easily be dispersed and
distributed across those who benefit from the creation of the relevant risks, the victims of
such accidents might reasonably object to a principle of responsibility that leaves the
costs of those non-negligent accidents concentrated on victims. Those who benefit from
the imposition of the relevant risks but escape injury at their hands, by contrast, cannot
57
They might also complain that their liability under negligence is out of proportion to
their culpability. When corrective justice violates the retributive principle that the penalty
should be proportional to the wrong, corrective justice violates our sense of justice. See Jeremy
Waldron, Moments of Carelessness and Massive Loss, supra note 5 at 389-91 (voicing this kind of
objection) and at 401-405 (discussing whether a form of fault based corrective justice which
concentrates devastating losses on the unlucky few can be justified as fair by an application to
tort law of David Lewis’s defense of criminal liability as a penal lottery); TONY HONORE ,
RESPONSIBILITY AND FAULT , supra note 53,at 89-90 (arguing that corrective justice is flawed when
it violates the retributive principle requiring a “rough proportion to be preserved between the
degree of fault and the burden of the sanction.”)
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reasonably object to having non-negligent accident costs dispersed and distributed
across all those who benefit from the imposition of the relevant risks. It may be rational
to seek to appropriate the benefits of recurring risk imposition for oneself and to thrust
the burdens of those risk impositions onto others, but in it is not reasonable to do so.
Dispersing the non-negligent accident costs characteristic of an activity across
pools of victims who are bound together only by their actuarial similarity is likewise less
reasonable than dispersing them across the injurers who create similar risks and benefit
from doing so. People who do not benefit from an activity may reasonably object to
bearing its costs when those who do benefit might be made to bear its costs with equal
ease. In short, fairness favors dispersing the costs of blameless accidents among all those
who create similar risks of such accidents, just as much as it favors dispersing the costs
of accidents precipitated by wrongdoing among lucky and unlucky wrongdoers.
Pooling the risks of negligent accidents, but not the risks of non-negligent accidents, is
presumptively less fair than pooling both sets of risks.
This last argument of fairness highlights both the fact that enterprise liability
relaxes the requirement of causation, and also the fact that the logic of fairness at work in
enterprise liability criticizes—as arbitrary and unfair—the traditional tort insistence that
a specific actor—not an activity—be held causally responsible for the harm. When cause
and cause alone distinguishes those who injure from those who do not, luck and luck
alone distinguishes those who bear liability from those who escape it. The requirement
of causation cannot bear the weight of the justification that it must bear in these
circumstances. There is no good reason why a person unfortunate enough to have her
carelessness issue in massive injury should bear massive loss, while many others who
have been identically culpable are spared all responsibility.58
This conclusion is resisted mightily by many (though not all59) corrective justice
theorists. Act causation, they insist, can be dispensed with only at the price of moral and
conceptual incoherence. Ernest Weinrib—perhaps the preeminent proponent of this
view—explains the asserting by saying: “Corrective justice involves the intrinsic unity
of the doer and sufferer of the same harm.”60 Therefore, “the requirement that the
58
With small numbers, this is the lesson of Summers v. Tice, 33 Cal.2d 80, 199 P.2d 1
(1948).
59
See Christopher H. Schroeder, Corrective Justice, Liability for Risks, and Tort Law, 38
UCLA L. REV ., 143 1990 (arguing that corrective justice is perfected by dispensing with what
might be called “act causation”).
60
W
EINRIB , supra note 24, at 75. The idea that the doing and the suffering must be of the
same harm warrants repetition.
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defendant have caused the plaintiff’s injury” is one of a handful of elements of tort
liability whose absence marks “the disappearance of private law a recognizable mode of
ordering.”61 When harms are attributed to activities and losses distributed among all
those who create the same characteristic risks, the unity of doing and suffering,
corrective justice—and tort law itself—all disappear.62
Arthur Ripstein, writing in the same vein, criticizes Christopher Schroeder’s and
Jeremy Waldron’s defenses of enterprise liability in these terms:
Like Schroeder, though, Waldron offers no explanation of why only those
misfortunes brought about by carelessness are to be compensated in this way. In
the attempt to avoid the supposed arbitrariness of chance, Waldron, like
Schroeder, finds himself embracing the genuine arbitrariness of selecting
candidates for compensation based on how they came about while
simultaneously denying the relevance of how they came about.63
There is, it seems, no conceptual space between traditional tort liability and universal
social insurance. Enterprise liability cannot coherently exist.
Ripstein’s objection misses its mark. We have perfectly good reason to
distinguish between harmful human agency—the subject to activity liability addresses
itself—and fate (against whose perils social insurance protects us). “The nature of
61
Id. at 9. At pp. 1-2 Weinrib writes:
The most striking feature of private law is that it directly connects two particular
parties through the phenomenon of liability. Both procedure and doctrine
express this connection. Procedurally, litigation in private law takes the form of
a claim that a particular plaintiff presses against a particular defendant.
Doctrinally, requirements such as the causation of harm attest to the dependence
of the plaintiff’s claim on a wrong suffered at the defendant’s hand.
62
The great strength of this idea is that it provides an answer to the question: Why
reparation? That answer is: because the person who has inflicted the harm stands in a special,
morally salient relation to the victim of that harm. A weakness of this act-centered idea,
however, is that it cannot account for the fact to which enterprise liability bears witness—the
fact that the collective activity not can been seen as standing in a more morally salient relation
to the victim than the individual actor who inflicted the injury.
63
R
IPSTEIN ,
supra note 24, citing to Waldron, supra note 5.
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things,” Rousseau famously remarked, “does not madden us, only ill will does.”64
Natural misfortune is neither just nor unjust. It may be feared, but it is beyond the reach
of resentment. Malfeasance another matter. People do have reason to resent
mistreatment at the hands of others. The institutions which determine the terms on
which people may impose risks of serious physical injury on one another are concerned
with harmful human agency, and harmful human agency is not something which can
ever be a matter of moral indifference.65 The institutions of accident law are either just or
unjust and people have reason to resent injustice.
From here it is but a shot step to the defense of strict liability. Strict liability
identifies a distinct form of mistreatment: There are some harms which may only be
justly inflicted if compensation is paid for damage done. Vincent v. Lake Erie66 is a case in
point. Neither Vincent nor Lake Erie have reason to resent the natural misfortune of the
storm: Whom might they call to account? But Vincent does have reason to resent Lake
Erie’s failure to repair the harm done his dock by Lake Erie’s ship. Even though Lake
Erie was fully justified in lashing its ship to Vincent’s dock and even though it was that
justified action which damaged Vincent’s dock, Lake Erie’s infliction of damage to the
dock was justifiable only on condition that Lake Erie repair the damage done.67 Strict
liability identifies a special kind of wrongdoing—a kind where the wrongfulness lies not
in the infliction of the injury but in the failure to make reparation for an injury justifiably
inflicted. This is a kind of malfeasance and—as Professor Ripstein himself has
argued—there is a fundamental distinction between misfortune and mistreatment.68
J64 EAN -JACQUES ROUSSEAU , EM ILE , Book 2: vol. 4, p 320 OEUVRES COM PLETE (Bernard
Gagnebin et al., eds. 1959-95). Isaiah Berlin quotes this passage in his Two Concepts of Liberty,
reprinted in I. BERLIN , FOU R ESSAYS ON LIBERTY (1969).
65
H ONORE , RESPONSIBILITY AND FAULT , supra note 53, at 84 . (“It seems reasonable to put
conduct that exposes others to a risk that materializes—for example selling milk that may
possibly be and in fact is adulterated—at a fairly low point on the scale of misconduct on which
showing indifference to and defiance of the interests of others occupy the higher reaches. The
behaviour located low on the scale is not morally bad, and does not amount to fault, but neither
is it morally indifferent; conduct that may affect others cannot be that. It is taking a chance of
harming others.” [fn. omtted])
66
124 N.W. 221 (Minn. 1910).
67
See Gregory C. Keating, Property Right and Tortious Wrong in Vincent v. Lake Erie, ISSUES
LEGA L SCH OLARSH IP , Symposium on “Vincent v. Lake Erie Transportation Co. and the
Doctrine of Necessity,” Article 6 (2005)
IN
68
See Arthur Ripstein & Jules Coleman, Mischief and Misfortune, 41 McGill L. J. 91 (1995).
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Enterprise liability tends toward strict liability69 and, as a form of strict liability, it
is distinctive in its focus on organized activities not individual acts. But there is nothing
incoherent or mysterious about this. It arises out of the perception that the accidents
characteristic of our social world are “mainly the incidents”70 of ongoing systematic
activities. From here it is but a short step to the basic precepts of enterprise liability: (1)
that, in characteristically modern circumstances, protection against enterprises takes
priority over protection against individual actors71; (2) that this protection can and
should be secured by requiring enterprises to bear the costs of their characteristic risks;
and (2) that it is fairer to distribute the costs of an enterprise’s characteristic risks across
the enterprise, than to leave them concentrated on the particular parties to enterprise
related accidents. One can contest these claims, but one cannot seriously dispute their
coherence.
The complaint that we have lodged on Ernest Weinrib’s behalf72—that enterprise
liability denies the unity of doing and suffering as Weinrib understands it—is true but
toothless. In the “world of activities,”73 doing and suffering simply are not unified in the
way that Weinrib insists that they are. To be sure, actions can be described in all kinds of
ways and it is not unintelligible to say that, between two equally careless drivers, the one
69
See supra note 41, and accompanying text.
70
See the quote from Holmes, supra note 43.
71
This is why (absent something akin to intentional individual malfeasance)we care
about the harm that the enterprise causes more than we care about the harm caused by any
particular actor. Compare Waldron, supra note 5, at400-01 (criticizing Ernest Weinrib by noting
that “it is possible to explain the importance of causation without explaining its importance as a
basis of differential liability.” Cause matters to traditional fault liability because the failure to
act carefully is “apt to cause injury.”).
72
In a commentary on this paper at the conference, Martin Stone urged this kind of
criticism. Stone is the author of two important papers on Weinrib’s conception of corrective
justice as embodied by tort law. See Martin Stone, The Idea of Private Law, supra note 24, and
Martin Stone, The Unity of Doing and Suffering, in PH ILOSOPH Y AND THE LAW OF TORTS (Gerald J.
Postema ed., 2001).
73
And perhaps in the world of risk imposition more generally. Weinrib adopts the
expression and the idea from Aristotle. Tellingly, however, the only examples of Aristotle’s
that Weinrib cites to illustrate this unity are examples of intentional wrongs. “The injustice of
battery and murder, for instance, (in Aristotle’s words, ‘when one has hit and the other has
been hit, and when one has killed and the other has been killed’), lies in the fact that the doing
and the suffering have been unequally divided.” Weinrib, supra note , at 64, fn. omitted.
Plainly, intentional hitting unifies doing and suffering in a way that imposing a risk of a blow
to the head does not.
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who inflicts a devastating injury has done something entirely different from the one
whose negligent risk has dissipated harmlessly, even if chance and chance alone
accounts for these wildly divergent outcomes. But though it is intelligible to say this, it
is also utterly unpersuasive to speak this way. To impose a risk is to play a lottery.
When you buy a lottery ticket, you place a bet and take your chances (and you almost
always lose!). A lottery spokesman who talked about the “unity of purchasing and
winning” would be courting liability for fraud. Purchasing is a necessary precondition
of winning but no more. The two are disjoined far more often than they are unified.
When you impose a risk of serious physical injury on others, you take your
chances in a different kind of lottery: You may inflict devastating injury our your risk
may dissipate harmlessly. Usually—and fortunately—risks of devastating injury
dissipate harmlessly. But whether a such risk devastates or dissipates is a matter of
chance. Speaking of the “immediate relation” of doing and suffering in connection with
the imposition of a risk is no more convincing than speaking of the “immediate relation”
of purchasing and winning in connection with a lottery.74 The claim of “immediate
relation” badly distorts our understanding of the two risk impositions it so radically
distinguishes: The difference between the two is determined by the luck of the draw and
the luck of the draw alone. To impose a risk is to roll the dice. Rolling the dice is not an
action where the rolling and the result are one and the same action. It is thus a virtue,
not a fault, of activity liability that it denies the unity of doing and suffering as Weinrib
understands it. In the world of activities, accidents are characteristically connected to
activities and only coincidentally correlated with individual acts.
III. Mitigating Moral Luck
In introducing the law of torts, it is common to say that it protects us against
conduct that is both harmful and wrong.75 The framework sketched in this paper
74
See Weinrib, supra note , at 81 for use of the term “immediate relation.”
75
For example, in the Introduction to his treatise on torts, Richard Epstein writes: “Every
legal society from the most primitive to the most modern must develop some set of rules that
prevents one individual from harming another. . .” RICHA RD A. EPSTEIN , TORTS , xxvii (1999). In
the first section of his treatise Dan Dobbs writes: “A tort is conduct that amounts to a legal
wrong and that causes harm for which courts will impose civil liability.” DAN B. DOBBS , TH E
LAW OF TORTS , 1 (2000). In point of fact, harm is not an element of every tort. Trespass to land
and conversion are cases in point. Generally speaking, when harm is not an element of a tort,
the tort is based on right (e.g., on the right to exclude others from entry onto one’s real
property). Most torts, however, are predicated on the wrongful conduct of the defendant and
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supposes that tort should fix its protections on terms that fairly reconcile the competing
claims of liberty and security asserted by a plurality of equal and independent persons,
who hold distinct and diverse ends. Wrongful conduct on this view is conduct that
strikes an unjust balance between the competing claims of liberty and security. Within
the law of torts then, the problem of moral luck is a second-order one—neutralizing the
effect of luck on responsibility for harm done is not and should not be a fundamental
objective of the law of torts. But the problem of moral luck cannot be wholly ignored
either. Within ordinary moral thinking the problem of moral luck arises naturally, as
Thomas Nagel says.
The erosion of moral judgment [by the phenomenon of moral luck] emerges not
as the absurd consequence of an over-simple theory, but as a natural consequence
of the ordinary idea of moral assessment, when it is applied in view of a more
complete and precise account of the facts. . . . The view that moral luck is
paradoxical is not a mistake, ethical or logical, but a perception of one of the ways
in which the intuitively acceptable conditions of moral judgment threaten to
undermine it all.76
In tort, the problem is not the erosion of confidence in moral judgments of culpability,
but the erosion of confidence in the justice of negligence liability. But this erosion, too,
comes about from the application of intuitively acceptable ideas.
Chief among these intuitively acceptable ideas are the propositions that liability
should turn on what people have done (culpably or faultlessly) and that “like cases
should be treated alike.” The first idea is firmly fixed in our intuitions about the bases of
responsibility for harm done. Responsibility for harm done is the subject matter of torts
and it seems almost tautological to say that to be responsible for harm done one has to
do it. When two similarly situated negligent actors are divided only by luck—when the
negligence of one has unfortunately resulted in injury whereas the identical negligence
of the other has fortuitously resulted in no harm at all—our confidence that we are
imposing liability for harm done by the first actor is shaken. The harm seems to be done
by luck. The second idea—that “like cases should be treated alike”—in its turn is a
fundamental precept of justice according to law.77 When fate singles out one careless
actor for crushing liability and fortune spares her equally careless companion, the
that wrongful conduct usually involves the infliction of injury.
76
N
AGEL ,
supra note 2, at 27.
77
H.L.A. HART , TH E CONCEPT OF LAW , 157-67 (2d. ed. 1994). Compare Waldron, supra
note 5, at 390-91 (noting how the distinctions drawn by negligence liability and defended by
corrective justice theorists violate our ordinary criteria of fairness and desert).
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precept that like cases should be treated alike casts doubt on the justice of negligence
liability. A form of liability which was is subject to these anomalies is less disquieting
and more defensible. Strict enterprise liability is such a form. By pooling accident costs
among those who create the risks responsible for them, strict enterprise liability treats
the competing claims of the lucky and the unlucky more fairly, and diminishes the role
of moral luck. Other things equal, this feature of strict enterprise liability makes it less
disquieting and more defensible than negligence.
There is broader lesson lurking as well: When we speak of the effects of moral
luck on responsibility in law, we are speaking of something which is shaped by human
artifice—by the design of legal institutions. The moral luck that figures so vividly in
negligence liability is not merely the consequence of applying our ordinary notions of
moral assessment to accidental harm. It is also a consequence of the way in which
negligence liability attributes responsibility for harm done. Negligence liability is prone
to hunt for individual fault in institutional settings.78 It tends to attribute accidents
which are characteristic of institutions to particular individuals. The erosion of
confidence in the justice of negligence liability associated with the play it gives to moral
luck is, in important part, a consequence of the mismatch of liability regime and social
reality.
In the modern “world of activities,” accidents are not the random byproducts of
discrete individual acts, but the regular and predictable consequences of large activities,
enduring over time. It is a matter of luck just which agent within such activities will
inflict injury—negligently or faultlessly—but it is not a matter of luck that injuries will
be inflicted. That injuries will be inflicted is a matter of the actuarially certain
consequences of human agency, expressed collectively. The closer our social world
draws to the pure type of the “world of activities,” the more fully we know not just that
accidents are certain to happen, but how frequently they are certain to happen. The
closer our social world draws to the pure type of the “world of activities,” the more it is
the case that collective agency not luck is dealing out death and devastation. In this
78
The is vividly illustrated by the application of the doctrine of conditional res ipsa in
Ybarra v. Spagnard, 25 Cal.2d 486, 154 P.2d 687 (1944). Plaintiff experienced a serious injury to
his shoulder and neck immediately following surgery for an appendectomy. Convinced that
someone’s malfeasance in the operating room was responsible for this condition, the court
permitted a conditional res ipsa instruction to be introduced against all the defendants. When
no defendant was able to meet the burden of proof of exculpating him or herself judgment was
entered against all of them. It later came to appear that the injury was unrelated to the surgery.
It would be both administratively easier and morally more apt to ask an enterprise liability
question instead of an individual fault one: Was the injury attributable to the operation?
Administratively easier because it simplifies the inquiry. Morally more apt because the surgery
was a collective enterprise.
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world, negligence liability exacerbates the problem of moral luck that strict enterprise
liability mitigates.
Tort law may thus have something to tell us about the sources of moral luck.
Toward the end of his paper, Thomas Nagel muses that the problem of moral luck may
arise out of our ability to adopt both objective and subjective perspectives towards
ourselves—to see ourselves both as objects within the natural world , governed by causal
laws and as actors who cannot help but conceive of ourselves as free. In tort law, the
phenomenon appears to arise more proximately from another source: The clash of
individual conceptions of fault with the reality of systemic social risk. What is luck to
the parties involved, is statistically inevitable harm to the activity within which the
accident arises. “Moral luck” is not “luck” at all but the upshot of a mismatch of social
reality and institutional form.
And this suggests one last lesson: The standard criticism of strict liability has it
exactly backward. This criticism asserts that strict liability is suspect because of the great
burden that it places on our freedom: We may find ourselves liable for devastating
injury no matter how carefully we proceed, no matter how irreproachably we conduct
ourselves.79 Strict liability is a sword of Damocles dangling over all of our actions.
When the subject under consideration is strict enterprise liability in the law of torts—and
when that subject is under consideration in “a world of activities”—this criticism is
wholly misplaced. In the “world of activities,” strict enterprise liability protects our
freedom of action, whereas fault liability heightens our exposure to unavoidable
financial ruin. By substituting certain but manageable insurance premiums for
unpredictable but potentially catastrophic losses strict liability enhances both liberty and
security.
79
See supra note 4, and accompanying text.
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