In the midst of even the most tragic circumstances attending the
aftermath of disaster, and co-existing with a host of complex emotions,
arises a practical consideration: how might similar tragedies be prevented
in the future? The complexity of such situations must not be
neglected. More than mere prevention must usually be taken into
consideration. But the practical question is of considerable importance. In what follows, I will offer some reasons for being concerned that
efforts to fix the problem -- efforts, that is, directed toward insuring that similar tragedies do not occur in the future -- can easily be obstructed by attempts to fix blame -- that is, efforts directed toward determining which agent among those involved is guilty of wrong-doing. This is the case, I shall contend, even where some agent or another really is guilty of wrong-doing. The problem is further complicated by a pervasive
human tendency to imagine that some agent or another must be responsible
in some way for any tragedy that occurs -- even when this is not really true -- but its influence is not at all limited to such cases. As I shall suggest, philosophical attitudes toward issues of determinism and free will may be implicated in the different approaches people take to the problem of assessing what has gone wrong in a particular case and how to fix it, but such deep philosophical problems need not be resolved here. The point is not that humans are never guilty of wrong-doing (since their actions, the argument might go, are all products of outside forces), but rather that whatever the case may be about guilt, tracking down guilty persons is a different business from fixing institutionally-embedded problems so as to lessen the likelihood of their recurrence