When a child complains excessively about some injustice, a good parent’s response will generally include the maxim that “life isn’t fair”. Because it isn’t: through the sheer workings of bad luck, bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them.
And even if the relevant bad thing could have been averted if someone else had acted differently, this doesn’t move the relevant act from being a horrible accident to the second person being morally responsible for the bad thing.
Unfortunately, although anyone with an age and/or IQ over ten is aware of these maxims, The Authorities increasingly aren’t. One obvious recent example is the utterly appalling decision to impose prison sentences for causing death by careless driving. This does not mean getting blind drunk and then driving at 150mph, or even driving while eating a sandwich. It means driving like most drivers do most of the time, but being unlucky enough to have been caught up in a fatal accident that would not have happened if you’d driven better than most drivers do most of the time.
Another is the sad-but-really-really-fucking-obviously-accidental death of Vietnamese student Vu Quang Hoang Tu. Some teenage boys were messing around on a Tube platform, chasing each other around; one fell over as a train entered the station; the boy fell into Mr Tu (or possibly Mr Vu – sorry, I can’t remember which way round Vietnamese names go); both went under the train. Mr Tu died; the boy survived with serious injuries.
In saner times, this would have been viewed as a tragic accident (and possibly as the basis for a gory Public Information Film). Since we live in a society with no concept of bad luck, the boys are currently out on police bail on suspicion of murder. For fuck’s sake…
