What to do while waiting for an ambulance
You can write a letter to The New York Times:
Who should bear responsibility when consumers use products, such as cellphones, in unreasonably dangerous ways? Generally, the narrative of personal responsibility has precluded courts from allocating a share of responsibility to product suppliers.
But when we focus on the aggregate things look different.
Cellphone suppliers know that in the aggregate a predictable and high percentage of consumers will fail to exercise reasonable personal responsibility and drive while texting or talking. These companies know that no warning will alter this predictable behavior.
Given the completely predictable way consumers will use the product, selling cellphones is not so different from releasing a deadly toxic agent. In both cases a certain predictable number of innocent people will die.
The misuse of cellphones by drivers is too predictable and too unavoidable to shield cellphone suppliers from partial responsibility.
Shorter version: “Joe Sixpack’s pockets are insufficiently deep. Let’s go after Motorola.”
There are people who will argue that our mutation from a nation of laws to a nation of lawyers is somehow a Good Thing. You will not find me among them.
(Spotted by Greg Hlatky.)
Jeffro »
12 December 2009 · 5:35 pm
selling cellphones is not so different from releasing a deadly toxic agent
Not projecting much, are we? I’ll just bet that Professor Gonzales, as a moral purist, no longer drives or uses a cell phone, since using those items is such a dangerous undertaking. /snark off