[StincPriene]

Originally posted by Arrian

Of course not. It's an accident. The thing is, people are held liable for accidents all the time. And there are varying degrees of fortuity (some things are purely accidental, some are party accidental/party intentional). People shouldn't be blamed for things that are wholly accidental. It's completely irrational to do so.

We blame people for intentional wrongdoing or negligence because these things have negative consequences and we apply sanctions so that people won't do them and thus we decrease the likelihood of the negative consequences occurring.

Blaming people for wholly accidental consequences serves no such function, because these things are completely beyond their control. It's like random punishment. Imagine if there was a compulsory lottery every week and the "winners" (i.e. the losers) had to burn $1000 of their property for no reason at all. Such an institution would be viewed as perverse, yet our attitude towards blame for accidents is similarly absurd.

You bring up the state. Your solution, I take it, would be to have the state pay for the damage. Not necessarily. The person who should pay in the original case is Steve, or more precisely Steve's insurance company. Steve has effectively been the victim of a random accident, and we have insurance in large part to pool such risks. Of course you could look at it the other way and say that Bob and everyone else should have liability insurance to cover accidents they might be involved in which cause damage to others. The problem is that it is easier for people to judge the value of the insurance they pay on their own property than it is for people to know how much insurance to buy when they might be involved in an accident that causes $10 damage or $10,000,000 damage. It's a lot easier to manage "Steve" insurance than "Bob" insurance.

Either way, when it comes to accidents, there is no blame, and thus no point in having any one member of the community pay more than any other. The moral of this story is that insurance should be compulsory such that we all pool our risks in the case of accidents. So the proper way to think of it is, I think, this: Steve has been the victim of an accident, so everyone should pay to have his house rebuilt. That's because Steve has paid in to the insurance fund that we all pay in to in order to pool our risk. We keep our promise to him by rebuilding his house, and we all benefit by knowing that the promise will be kept if we were to be the victims.