You’re driving down the road and, in a moment of inattention, you run a red light. In one universe a cop pulls you over and gives you a ticket. In another universe you hit a little old lady and kill her.

In the first universe you’re just an ordinary motorist. In the second you’re a shameful monster. But you had no control over the presence of the little old lady; the same (small) list of controllable actions were available to you in both universes.

If our moral responsibility extends only to our voluntary actions, then in both universes your only transgression lies in running the red light. Why then do we assign additional blame for hitting the lady, an outcome over which you had no control?

There is a story to the effect that a statistician once found a very high correlation between the number of old maids and the size of the clover crop in different English counties. After puzzling over this relation for some time, he was able to trace what appeared to him to be the causal chain. Old maids, it appeared, kept cats; and cats ate mice. Field mice, however, were natural enemies of bumblebees, and these latter were, in turn, the chief agents in fertilizing the flowers of the clover plants. The implication, of course, is that the British Parliament should never legislate on the subject of marriage bonuses without first evaluating the effect upon the clover crop of reducing the spinster population.

— Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1997

After about a month of studying cases, I put to my first term torts students a couple of hypothetical questions. The first concerns an ‘evil deity.’ ‘Suppose,’ I ask my students, ‘such a deity were to appear to you, as president of this country or as controller of our legal system, and offer a gift, a boon, which would make life more pleasant, more enjoyable than it is today. The gift can be anything you want — be as idealistic, or as obscene, or as greedy as you wish — except that it cannot save lives.’ Later I will drop even that requirement. ‘The evil deity suggests that he can deliver this gift in exchange for one thing … the lives of one thousand young men and women picked by him at random who will each year die horrible deaths.’

When I ask, ‘Would you accept?’ my students almost uniformly answer, ‘No.’ Indeed, they are shocked that one could even ask the question. I then ask, quietly, what the difference is between this gift and the automobile, which takes some fifty-five thousand lives each year.

— Guido Calabresi, Ideals, Beliefs, Attitudes, and the Law, 1985

The situation is reminiscent of the two monks, Theophilus and Gottlieb, who are quarreling over whether one may engage in smoking and praying at the same time. Theophilus, an unbending ascetic, says no. Gottlieb, an easy-going smoker, says why not. They meet again some weeks later. Theophilus triumphantly reports, ‘I took the issue to the pope. I asked him point-blank “Is it permissible to smoke during prayer?” and he said “Absolutely not.”‘ Gottlieb protests: ‘That’s not what he said when I asked him.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘Of course I did phrase the question a little differently. I asked him “Is it permissible to pray while I smoke?” and he said “Of course.”‘

— Leo Katz, Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, 1987

A French diplomat, seeking to ingratiate himself with the patriotic Lord Palmerston, said, “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman.”

“If I were not an Englishman,” replied Palmerston, “I should wish to be an Englishman.”

At a London banquet, Winston Churchill was asked who he would most like to be.

He took his wife’s hand and said, “If I could not be who I am, I would most like to be Mrs. Churchill’s second husband.”

In 1968, Australian psychologist Paul R. Wilson took a visiting Englishman around to five different groups of Sydney students. He introduced the man differently to each group, and when the visitor had left, Wilson asked the students to estimate his height. Results:

• “Mr. England, a student from Cambridge”: 5 feet 9.8 inches
• “Mr. England, demonstrator in psychology from Cambridge”: 5 feet 10.39 inches
• “Mr. England, lecturer in psychology from Cambridge”: 5 feet 10.86 inches
• “Dr. England, senior lecturer from Cambridge”: 5 feet 11.57 inches
• “Professor England from Cambridge”: 6 feet 0.32 inches

That’s an increase of 2.5 inches. “Wilson’s experiment suggests that extra inches are available to anyone who achieves increasing degrees of success, on campus or off,” reported Time. “But apparently the success must be of considerable dimension. For even when he was Professor England, the visitor’s estimated height still fell more than half an inch short of his actual height (6 ft. 1 in.).”

The following story, told of Franklin’s mode of treating the animal, called in those days ‘lounger,’ is worth putting into practice occasionally, even in this age and generation:

One fine morning, when Franklin was busy preparing his newspaper for the press, a lounger stepped into the store, and spent an hour or more looking over the books, &c., and finally, taking one in his hand, asked the shop-boy the price.

‘One dollar,’ was the answer.

‘One dollar,’ said the lounger, ‘can’t you take less than that?’

‘No, indeed, one dollar is the price.’

Another hour had nearly passed, when the lounger asked, ‘Is Mr. Franklin at home?’

‘Yes, he is in the printing office.’

‘I want to see him,’ said the lounger.

The shop-boy immediately informed Mr. Franklin that a gentleman was in the store wanting to see him. Franklin was soon behind the counter, when the lounger, with book in hand, addressed him thus: ‘Mr. Franklin, what is the lowest you can take for this book?’

‘One dollar and a quarter,’ was the ready answer.

‘One dollar and a quarter? Why, your young man asked only a dollar.’

‘True,’ said Franklin, ‘and I could have better afforded to have taken a dollar then, than to have been taken out of the office.’

The lounger seemed surprised, and wishing to end the parley of his own making, said, ‘Come, Mr. Franklin, tell me what is the lowest you can take for it.’

‘One dollar and a half.’

‘One dollar and a half? Why, you offered it yourself for a dollar and a quarter.’

‘Yes,’ said Franklin, ‘and I had better have taken that price then, than a dollar and a half now.’

The lounger paid down the price, and went about his business–if he had any–and Franklin returned into the printing office.

— Arthur’s Home Magazine, January 1854

The same Dr. Webb was on one occasion counsel for Peter Mulligan, who made an application before the Recorder of Dublin for a license for a public-house. The applicant was only twenty-five years of age, and the police objected on account of his youth.

‘He is very young for so responsible a position,’ quoth the Recorder.

Dr. Webb instantly rose to the occasion:

‘My lord,’ he said, ‘Alexander the Great at twenty-two years of age had–had crushed the Illyrians and razed the city of Thebes to the ground, had crossed the Hellespont at the head of his army, had conquered Darius with a force of a million in the defiles of Issus and brought the great Persian Empire under his sway. At twenty-three René Descartes evolved a new system of philosophy. At twenty-four Pitt was Prime Minister of the British Empire, on whose dominions the sun never sets. At twenty-four Napoleon overthrew the enemies of the Republic with a whiff of grape-shot in the streets of Paris, and is it now to be judicially decided that at twenty-five my client, Peter Mulligan, is too young to manage a public-house in Capel Street?’

The license was hurriedly granted.

— Matthias M’Donnell Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge, 1915