[philwelch]

His prosecutors are surely responsible for their actions--namely, over zealously prosecuting a man beyond the legitimate interests of justice--but that does not relieve Aaron of responsibility for his actions.

People can be provoked into suicide by a number of things. If a woman divorces her husband and he commits suicide, the woman may be blamed for the manner of the divorce, whatever that may be, but it was not her choice for the man to die. Conversely, if Aaron didn't commit suicide, the prosecutors would be no less responsible for their cruelty and injustice towards him.

Your moral responsibility for what you do to me has nothing to do with how I choose to react to it. I am not exonerating Aaron's prosecutors, though the logical conclusion of your argument is that you would exonerate them, had Aaron reacted differently.

[mistercow]

I think if a woman sets out to destroy a man's life via a nasty and aggressive divorce, especially if she knows he has a history of depression, then yes, she does bear some responsibility for his death if he kills himself.

People have a responsibility to diligently consider the consequences of their actions, and to act based on their expectations of those consequences. "Consequence" isn't hard to define here; it's "what things are likely to happen after X, versus what things are likely to happen after ~X". There's no "will it be my fault?" There is only "will it be more or less likely depending on what I do?"

After the fact, the matter of responsibility is a function of whether the person took reasonable measures to obtain information, and whether the person acted in a way that would maximize the utility of the expected outcome based on that information.

Note that responsibility need not be a conserved quantity. Had the prosecutor not been informed that Swartz was a suicide risk, he would bear exactly the same amount of responsibility for his own death. The prosecutor would have just born less.

[philwelch]

She bears responsibility for setting out to destroy a man's life via a nasty and aggressive divorce, but his reaction to that is his own.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're ignoring the evidentiary value of his decision. If someone is pushed over the edge, that is good evidence that some antagonist has been doing more than the acceptable amount of pushing.

[mistercow]

I feel like you didn't read past the first sentence of my comment.

[philwelch]

I don't accept that one is responsible for how others react to their actions, no, at least not in the way that you suggest. That's the difference between moral agents and the amoral (natural) world. Aaron Swartz, to put it crudely, bears moral responsibility for what gravity and the rope did to him because gravity and rope are not moral agents. Carmen Ortiz doesn't bear moral responsibility for what Aaron did, because Aaron is a moral agent. Her responsibility begins and ends with her own actions, which were equally reprehensible whether or not Aaron chose to hang himself over them.