Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
If we assume she was not being aware of her surroundings and this wasn’t just a momentary lapse or poor judgement call, but we also assume he driver bare 100% of the responsibility for creating an unsafe situation, doesn’t that imply that not being aware of your surroundings actually contributes 0% to an unsafe situation and is therefore completely fine?
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It is possible to fully acknowledge the driver's sole culpability while recognizing the pedestrian's lack of awareness is a separate, pragmatic issue about self-preservation. Fault only determines who causes an incident, but being faultless doesn't prevent injury whereas exercising good awareness
does.
100% is being used in the legal and ethical sense, which doesn't prevent us making observations about behaviour. A driver can bear 100% of the fault and the pedestrian can still have made choices that worsened her odds of staying unharmed. Liability versus survival.
Age matters only insofar as it shapes our expectations of people. At 17, you're old enough to know what an inattentive driver looks like, how to safely cross a street; a 9-year-old, less so. That doesn't mean she's to blame, it just raises the question of why they weren't even remotely aware of what was happening around them.