How much agency do victims have? I'm asking this because the way people talk about victimhood is really weird.On the one hand, I see sometimes people act like victims are never in the wrong and they should never be blamed for what bad happens to them. Then I see people also say, for example, that while X is a victim, that doesn't give him the right to go and do wrong to other people. Then I also see something where something bad happens to someone like Schadenfreude, and then people say the person deserved what bad thing happened to them, even if they technically are victims.Is there a coherent moral system or ethical framework that can properly explain just how much blame/agency should go to a victim, or are people just inherently inconsistent about these types of things? Pic unrelated
>>18545948All dichotomies are just poles. Reality lies between them. Sometimes there's willingness to acknowledge that, sometimes not.The framing of a perpetrator and a victim is a simplification, an extreme reduction to cause-and-effect. One has agency (cause) and one doesn't (effect). You can choose to take a more nuanced approach and show that these dichotomies aren't absolute, and what it's more, you can actually step outside the reduction almost completely. When a couple dances bachata, is it the man causing the woman to dance? Or the woman causing the man? Neither and both. They dance together and in every moment the causation flows both ways. If someone is interested in at least partially stepping outside the perpetrator-victim dichotomy, they may. And they arguably should. But reductionism is too sexy to give up.>Is there a coherent moral system or ethical framework that can properly explain just how much blame/agency should go to a victimThere is a shortage of coherent moral systems altogether. You get a few rules here and there that happen to coincide, but since ethics are heavily dependent on relevance realization (and systematizing relevance realization is impossible), they will likely never be systematized in a way that natural sciences are systematized. It's in physics where you can explain how much causation or energy or spin comes from where to where. In ethics you get a medal if you avoid the repugnant conclusion and that's as far as you will realistically go.
