[brutusborn]

There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking.

If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.

[phs318u]

A “risk assessment” by customers is typically based on attestations to safety made by the company. If the company is hiding or misrepresenting pertinent information then the customers have been denied the opportunity to make a reasonable assessment. At best it’s a case of gaining money by deception. At worst the company principals will be liable for deaths the deaths of those customers.

[aksss]

Let’s not rob the clients of their agency.

Remember the proposition: you’re going to dive 2.4 miles underwater, in the middle of the Atlantic.

On a nuclear sub with the best collision avoidance and mapping data available, with highly regimented procedure, this is still a riskier proposition than most people appreciate.

But you’re going to do it in a carbon fiber hull. This is at the very minimum an adventure, with a very high risk of turning into a disaster. You sign the liability waiver and have the balls to get on board the boat, and have the further commitment to board the submersible day-of.

I’m not saying this to blame them or extol their courage. It just is what it is, and sometimes - oftentimes - with adventure sports and tourism, we don’t need to search for bad guys and villains. It’s risky living and this is what it looks like sometimes.

[brutusborn]

I completely agree that if the company lied they should be liable. Truth is essential.

[rdtsc]

It's one thing for them to take the risk for themselves, but it's a whole other level selling to others. For example, if someone wants to drink a refreshing glass of strychnine soda, it's hard to stop them. But opening a stand and selling at the street corner is a bit different.

[brutusborn]

The distinction is artificial, both parties paid for either the materials or the final product. Financial gain doesn’t fundamentally change who is responsible, that it just you applying your personal values to the situation.

[afiori]

As an hypothetical would you say that someone should be allowed to sell "mystery drinks" where the customer is told that the ingredients are a secret but the seller knows that it is heavily poisonous?

[ikekkdcjkfke]

A kid walks up and wants one

[bluepod4]

You must be a huge Ayn Rand fan.

LMAO.

[stOneskull]

the CEO is drinking one with them

[rdtsc]

Indeed. He put his life on the line. I don't know the circumstance that lead to this and I hope everyone gets rescued, though it's looking quite desperate. But, yeah, that's pretty convincing from a marketing point of view.

[rgmerk]

That’s not how regulation of transportation works.

You can build your own plane and fly it with relatively few restrictions, but as soon as you a) manufacture a plane for sale to someone else, or b) get paid for transporting someone in it, the regulators become much much stricter.

[xpe]

>> There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine.

> There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking.

I'm unconvinced. The phrase "philosophically speaking" is very vague. Which philosoph(y/ies)?

> If people want to take huge risks, then so be it.

You didn't say who is affected by said risks. Only the person taking the huge risk? What about externalities? "Huge" risks would include an existential threat to an individual and thus anyone who knows or depends on them.

> Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.

Sounds like we're in the domains of legal and/or moral philosophy. The phrase "up to them" suggests a responsibility, a kind of normative claim. Perhaps a responsibility to make wise decisions? Perhaps a responsibility that cannot be transferred or delegated?

Using the phrase "philosophically speaking" invites these kinds of questions, particularly when the underlying philosophy is unsaid and its reasoning unclear.

[brutusborn]

I admit I didn’t put much effort into that comment. I meant ‘philosophically’ as opposed to legally.

Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (I don’t trust some regulators in my country because they have a bad record for competence, so I avoid/minimise using things that they regulate). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.

Legally it’s anyone’s guess who is responsible, that depends on the polity involved and the political philosophy it uses (libertarianism or authoritarianism being the 2 extremes).

I think we should protect those who truly cannot judge (children and mentally handicapped) but in this case it was grown men taking a risk for the chance of a reward. I hope they are found alive and well but I think they had every right to go aboard.

[xpe]

> Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (...). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.

It seems you are trying to say something along the lines of:

A. In cases where an individual has the freedom to make decisions (i.e. not coerced or manipulated)

B. The individual bears moral responsibility for the consequences of those decisions

To what degree did I convey what you were hoping to convey?

This is an flawed argument for at least two reasons:

1. The consequences flow from many people's actions. Figuring out credit and blame is a hard project in philosophy, even theoretically. In practice, it can often be impossible.

2. Humans have imperfect abilities to predict consequences

Point A does not always hold -- not even most of the time. Individual conscious awareness and volitional control is limited. We are largely driven by subconscious and non-volitional parts of our brains. Not to mention by environmental constraints.

[brutusborn]

I think A and B convey it pretty well.

I'm not sure I understand your criticism. In this case, for (1) who else but the individuals decided to go on the expedition? Where is the lack of freedom? And what is the relevance of 2? Are you saying people are not responsible for their actions because they don't have perfect prediction power? Doesn't it follow that no-one is responsible for anything?

[xpe]

Regarding your last two questions: I don’t care for the binary framing. By framing these prescriptive questions as a matter of degree, we can get a lot further. I’d ask it this way:

To what degree is it reasonable to hold people to prescriptive standards given the presence of imperfect conscious awareness, limited volition, and constrained rationality?

When one keep these realities things in mind, it can challenge us to better talk about what we mean wrt accountability.

Some might suggest that “the buck stops” where free will begins. Such a statement requires a lot of unpacking.

I don’t have room to unpack even a small fraction of the ideas in play here. So I think I’ll end with a few things.

1. In the United States popular culture (for example) there is an assumed but unexamined belief in conscious free will. This does not hold up to philosophical nor scientific scrutiny.

2. Unfortunately, simplistic moral claims have a tendency to shift our thinking away from good analysis towards judgmentalism. Many people here on HN know how to reason under uncertainty wrt debugging or attack trees. That same level of rigor needs to be used when analyzing human behavior and ethics.

3. When I say accountability, I think analyzing it in a consequentialist way might be the most useful.

For example, if someone drives particularly dangerously and puts others at risk, some interventions are justified. The calculus can be very complicated, and some of the key data may not be known with sufficient confidence. But I do think there are core principles that apply. I would say the dangerous driver might “deserve” a license suspension, for example, not because they had the free will to do otherwise, but because of the consequences.

There are lots of interesting ways to understand dangerous driver scenarios.

A. Take the exact same person and compare their behavior while seated in 150 hp vehicle as compared to a 400 hp vehicle. The latter environment provides more temptation and more opportunity for dangerous driving. Is an individual who opts for the quicker car thus morally culpable to some degree? Or does does it depend upon their levelheadedness and driving skills?

B. In some sense, our entire infrastructure in history that led up to incentivizing automobiles is a huge factor in predicting behavior patterns, vehicle and pedestrian accidents and deaths, inefficient land use, and more. How much blame should we “dole out” particular individuals over the course of history that led us here?

C. In some situations, it could be argued that driving is immoral, particularly when you have other options for transportation. This is kind of a raw deal for the individual who had nothing to do with how we got stuck in such a situation. But it also demonstrates that some people may hold individuals morally responsible even though one person are only a tiny part of the situation. This highlights how individualism run amok and unscientific views of free will can sometimes sabotage comprehensive rational thinking about ethics. To speak very loosely when I see an accident on the road, it is easy to point to the proximate causes such as a distracted driver or worn out tires. But we must not overlook the deeper systemic causal factors. If we want to progress as a society, we need to solve problems, not scapegoat.

## My Take

An unexpected benefit of dispensing with free will is that judgmentalism doesn’t get in the way of solving problems.

In this view, we justly lock up criminals not because they could’ve done otherwise. We lock them up for the exact opposite reason: their brains and bodies make the unacceptable behavior a predictable pattern at some level.

[brutusborn]

I respect the detail you give your answers, but I feel like they are avoiding the essence of the questions I posed.

I didn’t mean to frame them as a binary, I interpreted your premises as binary and just wanted to better understand them.

You say it’s a matter of degree, but I fail to see to what degree you think the individual is ‘responsible.’ You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’ In the same way I think we should allow people’s ‘brain and body’ to put themselves in harms way if it doesn’t predictably harm anyone else, thus we essentially hold them ‘responsible.’ I don’t think this is ‘judgementalism’ but rather just the best way to approach a complex situation (as you have shown). I cannot see any good alternatives.

At some point all this complexity needs to be discarded and we need to make a decision either way. We could write tomes about how complex this all is, but it doesn’t change the simplicity of how those intangible arguments become a tangible policy.

Fundamentally everything is a binary when it comes to behaviour, you either take a risk or you don’t. The complexity is fun to unpack but doesn’t fundamentally matter to what our behaviour is. In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions. It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.

[branko_d]

Were the customers aware of the risks?

There is a difference between somebody selling me poison and somebody selling me “lemonade” that’s actually poison.

[fasthands9]

This is not really how the government operates. If this was operating at scale the government would absolutely be involved. You can't just run cruise ship operations and advertising without government involvement.

I dont see how this is any different. Perhaps you personally have a "so be it" libertarian view but thats not the view the government takes.

[Osiris]

It’s international waters. What “government” are you referring to?

[greiskul]

Any ship needs to fly the flag of a country. They do so by registering with a country, following the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. By doing so, the ship has to follow the laws of the registered country.

If a ship or submarine does not register to any country, I think most coast guards will assume it to be pirates or drug smugglers. And they will probably surrender and arrest anyone on board or sink you if it comes to that.

[mwint]

Yeah, and there will always be a country willing to let you do anything short of actual piracy under their flag, maybe for a fee. There’s no world government, thank goodness.

[pohl]

Does the first sentence here help narrow it down?

https://oceangate.com/about.html

[fasthands9]

A cruise ship is on international water but there are still strict laws about what cruise ships can operate at US ports or can advertise to US consumers.

[yxhuvud]

Assumedly the sale of the service didn't also happen on international waters.

[strawhatguy]

Oh government likes to step in alright. Doesn't mean they should, or that it helps as much for 'safety' as people would like to believe. Just as often rules can cause safety issues as not. But always more expense.

[pryce]

Libertarian students have a notoriously difficult time in philosophy departments because of these kinds of eager statements.

The question of whether or not organisations, businesses, states, armed forces, educational institutions, self-declared medical providers, and other entities incur some obligation to preserve peoples lives - and if so in which ways and to what extents - are far from settled questions. It helps no one to adopt a hard-libertarian position, omit the framework being employed, and imply the matter is settled.

A fair number of regulatory efforts trace their roots to a groundswell of public distress in the aftermath of preventable deaths; and questions such as "should I, a computer programmer, be undertaking my own untrained risk assessment of the particular type of cladding used in Grenfell tower" are perfectly fair objections to a libertarian free-for-all position.

[brutusborn]

As you say, these kinds of questions are not ‘settled’ so it’s somewhat up to personal opinion. I think the best policy is to enforce rules only when there are obvious benefits. In the same way that theories should be simple, regulations should be too: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”

I’m not a hard line libertarian, I think regulations are good in many cases. But not in the case of high risk adventuring. If you want to climb Everest, visit the titanic or the stratosphere, then that’s up to you: the state need not hold your hand, the risks are obvious to anyone with eyes.

The fact that libertarians have a difficult time just goes to show how close minded and dogmatic universities are. If all flavours of opinions were respected enough for discussion then I think you would end up with less extremists online and in general.

I think the demarcation problem applies just as well to politics as to science. What is good policy? Impossible to know absolutely, so we must rely on heuristics, judgement and intuition. Claims to truly objective knowledge just don’t hold up. Regulators often fail, and in many cases no regulation is preferable. I can’t prove that, but critics can’t prove otherwise, so we discuss and learn and change our opinions as we go.

The Grenfell tower is good example of failure of regulation. And I think the fundamental problem _is_ over regulation. When regulations become bloated beyond the capacity to enforce them, most of them are ignored and the most obvious ones are the only ones enforced. If the regulation was simpler it would be easier to enforce because you would only focus on _critical_ aspects. Instead of simplifying, people campaign for more regulation, forgetting second order effects that make things less safe.

[peterashford]

I totally think it matters, philosophically. Clearly there's a moral difference between risking your own life and profiting off risking other people's lives.