elwoodblues

"the more comfortable way of looking at life that says if you didn't cause the problem that it isn't your fault."

Isn't causation implicit in the idea of 'fault'?

(btw: I've been sick as a dog the last few days, and haven't been able to participate. I'll be back soon; I'm feeling a bit better now.)

ohwilleke

The idea is that you can be responsible for things you didn't do. If you own the building, your responsible when someone slips and falls, even if your maintenance guy screwed up without you having any reason to expect that he would. If your kid who lives at home gets in a car and hits somoene, you as a parent are responsible, even though you weren't driving the car. If you have guanteed a loan, you have to pay up when it goes bad, even though it wasn't your fault that it wasn't paid.

The notion that many people have these days is that the industrialized world, and those in it, are personally responsible for the fate of the world, even if they didn't screw it up. They feel this in part, because they benefit from what goes on in the rest of the world (sweat shops, etc.) and would have a difficult time extricating themselves from the rest of the world, even though they didn't create those problems.

hezekiah jones

Yes, yes, that's all well and good. Meanwhile, it's time to move ahead from Boethius to Peter Abelard.

<a href="http://www.saint-andre.com/thoughts/abelard.html" target="_blank">Conceptualism in Abelard and Rand</a>

How's that for a segue?