I can't believe I'm seriously bored enough to respond
again. Luckily for you if you wanted a response, the material I was supposed to be working on hadn't come in yet. 感謝しなさい！/Be grateful! /Last part is jest and tsundere parody.
Not even going to bother quoting specific passages at this point. Quick, dirty. If you get what I'm saying, you get it. If you don't: -shrug-
-- teenagers --
Get a license/licence because they're still developing, and said developments include all the hormonal stuff and the still ongoing development of the brain. As such, they
don't think like "adults" do. Also, I'm not excluding Kyousuke from this category. It's simply not the case that I really feel like any of his actions or lack of action are "faulted" by anyone, thus it doesn't seem like there's any real expectation of explaining his behavior to excuse fault. But, if I felt I needed another one, that would be another reason to also not fault Kyousuke.
I feel like there should be plenty of neuroscientific evidence to support this, but at the moment I don't believe I still have access to my Uni's subscription to research, and I'm just too damned lazy to look it up on Wikipedia or what have you. Just another one of the many arguments against trying teenagers as adults in the majority of cases.
-- "improving relationships" --
I thought I clarified this previously, but that was a general observation, regarding the actions of participants or otherwise involved parties. Even supposing this were a real scenario, you would not fall under the category of "participants or otherwise involved parties". If I still need to clarify that further: The opinions of individuals who are in no position to influence the outcome of events, as relevant to the relationship, are themselves not considered relevant to this observation. If there is no point in blame casting within the relationship, what value does blame casting from outside the relationship add?
Supposing Jaeger and Wong were having a disagreement regarding whether they should take jam sandwiches or ham sandwiches to their picnic. Smith isn't invited to the picnic. Jaeger and Wong decide they'll take jam ham sandwiches. Smith comments that this is disgusting. Jaeger and Wong are the one's eating the sandwich, and they've agreed on the choice of jam ham sandwiches. Takeshi just doesn't give a fuck. Now: What's really the point of Smith's observation that the combination doesn't suit their palate? Neither Smith's disgust nor Takeshi's indifference make any difference to the involved parties—they've already reached a resolution, and I doubt it had any significant impact on Smith or Takeshi's lives, either.
You're still entitled to cast blame, and I'm not attempting to indicate otherwise. I don't think participants in similar situations would have benefited from it, and I
personally don't feel any need to assign blame in this scenario.
Meanwhile, Reimu's donation box is still empty.
-- Kyousuke + blame --
Not really. Suppose you were playing a game of whatever and left it running in the background. It's an easy game, so you tell your kid brother/sister/Hideyoshi to watch it for you while you go do something else. Suddenly there's a fire in an empty room on your ship, but your kid sibling doesn't vent the oxygen out to space. You come back. You can (a) blame them for something they wouldn't even know how to do and thus couldn't really "choose" to do or (b) not, realizing that it's not really their fault.
Before you bring up the point that you might blame the person leaving them in charge despite knowing that they knew nothing about the game, let me point out that there is no such "precursor" individual for Kirino and Kyousuke. Unless you want to go back and blame their parents for how they brought them up, and then their parents, et cetera, et cetera, and while we're at it, don't forget society and genetics, either. You are still free to bring it up, but that observation does not seem relevant to the issue I was trying to illustrate.
Personally, I don't think Kyousuke even had the capacity to
consciously choose to do what he would have needed to do to avoid the situation. Since "conscious choice" is your requirement for fault, even by your standards I wouldn't say I was faulting Kyousuke.
-- strangers --
It doesn't matter whose actions initiated the transformation. What is relevant is that they essentially existed as strangers for that time. Does it really matter if A cuts off ties with B or B cuts off ties with A? The relationship is still severed either way.
--distance--
Yes and no. Kyousuke stopped dragging her around with him with the whole "I'm grown up now and can't hang out with you all the time" bit. Later Kirino stopped trying to hang around him for her whole "I'll become awesome and show him!" bit.
My observation regarding the distancing bit was to provide a reference point. It didn't matter to me which specific event I chose so long as the reference resolves to a point in time where they got along much better. If you prefer, I can rephrase it as "prior to the point at which Kyousuke and Kirino became distanced" in the passive voice and side-step the blame issue. The relevant issue was that they got along in the past, and based on that I think Kyousuke would have taken active and conscious steps to repair the relationship if he had realized what was going on.
If that view needs explaining, it's simply because it seems to me that even when relationships fall apart it's rare that there is no residual feeling.
--actions--
I realize I started it, but are we really going to keep getting all philosophical with definitions? Just to point it out, even if "not taking an action" is an action of sorts, "not believing in {x}" is not the same as "believing in not{x}". One is a failure to assert a belief in {x}. The other is an assertion that not{x}. It is possible to fail to assert {x} but to still accept the possibility that {x}, the latter of which is precluded by an explicit assertion of not{x}.
Also, I can still claim I don't believe, or fail to believe, in the invisible yet paradoxically opaque and possibly purple griffin (no caps — they're a humble deity), regardless of whether or not someone has asserted a belief in such an entity. Granted, that's not what you said. Unless we take the equivalence relation you provided for the "inaction is a type of action" branch, where {not asserting x} = {asserting not x}, in which case it is what you said, by my previous failure to assert belief in a deity for which no one has yet asserted existence—regardless of whether it was an action previously, the equivalence would make it an action. Further, if someone fails to assert that they don't not believe in their humble and possibly purple invisible opaqueness, do they therefore implicitly assert that not{not{x}}, ergo, by your equivalence, belief in said deity?
バカバカしい/Ridiculous. I've never explicitly rejected Russell's teapot, but that doesn't mean I implicitly assume there's a teapot floating somewhere out there. Similarly, I've never explicitly accepted Russell's teapot, but that doesn't mean I implicitly reject the possibility that there is a teapot. Whether I actually reject the teapot or not is irrelevant to my example.
I'm not even going to bother checking that for consistency. I'm not claiming all failures to act are actions, and you are asserting that you do not view inaction as an action. Our exact reasons and conclusions on the matter are different, but not substantially so that it's worth going further into why your proposed equivalence doesn't work very well, and is quite probably a straw man. If we accept your proposed equivalence for the alternative to your own stance, all statements not explicitly asserted would be both simultaneously true and false. This isn't necessarily impossible or even implausible, if you don't restrict yourself to more traditional models, but for these purposes any model which would accept such an equivalence as an axiom is irrelevant.
If you really want to further consider the action/inaction branch, I'll point out this: I don't consider all failures to act as actions. I do consider
choosing not to take a course of action to be an action. Since I do not believe Kyousuke had the ability to choose the course of action required, I cannot fault him for that even if I wanted to do so.
And, -sigh-, I didn't expect to have to, but it looks like I really do need to provide my entire "fault" spiel that I wrote the other day. The most relevant bits are in bold.
Mind, I haven't provided formal definitions for anything, so it's entirely possible, even probable, that I've left an important gap somewhere.
(You can probably safely ignore the following 'amateur logic spiel' unless you care about how I'm assuming "fault" is defined in this case.)
Perhaps most importantly, I made the implicit assumption that "fault" implies "sole attribution" or a "predictive and required relationship" (in which "A is at fault for B" requires both "A=>B", if A then surely B (predictive), and "~A => ~B", if not A then surely not B (required) ... otherwise known as "A<=>B" -facepalms-). Rephrased in English, "fault", as implicitly defined, means that "if A happens, B must occur; and if B occurs, A must have happened". If you choose to go with "B could not have happened without A" (i.e., just "B=>A"), then you could make rather absurd accusations such as "Smith would not have been shot by Wesson if Smith had not been born, therefore Smith's birth is at fault for Smith being shot by Wesson." One might be able to make an argument for changing it to "A is partially at fault for B" if "B=>A", but... well. I don't know. It just seems awfully convoluted at that point.
It seems to me you'd have to resort to probabilities and assumptions about the relative frequency of unknown cause-and-effect relationships in order to assign a "fault index". E.g., "How 'at fault' is the universe's existence for the death of J. Doe? Well, 'the universe's existence' is a property that is required for all events occurring in the universe, and therefore minimally at fault, as it serves no meaningful predictive value of any particular event, beyond the existence of events in general."
If you accept "all things being determined" or "nothing being determined", you either have it that all events are equally at fault for all other events, as they are just constants, not variables, or that all events are random, and thus no such cause-and-effect relationships can be established, due to the results being independent of the variables. At least, I think that's how it would work.
I also didn't bother to major in philosophy, so I'm basing that just on assumptions made from basic definitions of sets and set membership.
Why is that relevant? Simple: While I didn't want to expect it, it was within the realm of possibility and expectation that you might go down the line of reasoning that "(if not{x} then not{y}) is equivalent to the assertion that (if {x} then {y})"—in this case, your assertion that my assertion may as well be equivalent to faulting someone for something that didn't take place, which could have prevented the situation. The assertion of equivalence is, by the way, again not valid. If you take a look at the tables for "~x => ~y" and "x => y", this should be immediately apparent. Simply because not taking a certain action would prevent an event, does not mean that taking that action will cause an event. Whether you reverse the roles of action and inaction makes absolutely no difference—if you want to be picky, my actual statement would be stressing that he didn't take an action that could have prevented the outcome, not that his failure to act caused the outcome.
And,
again, this particular inaction is, from my perspective, a necessary/unavoidable inaction. In eroge terms, the action required at the time wasn't in the list of options. In "people" terms, the necessary course of action was not apparent to him—you can attribute that to personality, reality tunnel, or whatever you please.
There are any number of actions or "un-actions" that could have prevented the situation. That doesn't mean that their inverse can also be said to have caused the situation. Supposing a super volcano had erupted in the early 1900s, preventing both WW I and WW II, is it the super volcano's fault for not erupting and preventing the deaths of so many soldiers and civilians? If I have to provide the answer to that rhetorical question, I'm afraid I'd have to re-post your Seinfeld gif.
There certainly are positions that could be taken in support of that view, but I think most would dismiss them as straw man arguments or invoke Poe's Law.
--anime--
Not really sure what to say to this. I'm not saying your observation doesn't have merit, just that I didn't really consider such scenes at the time. If I considered them realistically, perhaps I would change my view somewhat, but most likely only with respect to the fact that I don't consider interpersonal violence acceptable in the majority of situations. It wouldn't change my view that I don't think anyone is at fault for the
general situation.
-- questions --
It's a bit of a social expectation in certain cases that clarification will follow. Sometimes the expectation is on the part of the person asking ("what, and why?"), other times it's on the part of the respondent ("{immediate answer}, but you probably won't get it, so also {reason}"). The more literal minded might expect a presentation of "Do you {x}? And why?", assuming they don't just answer "Yes/No. Because {some hyper-literal explanation involving biology/philosophy/quantum mechanics/what-have-you}."
I
can be hyper-literal, so far as my knowledge allows, but usually if I am it's because I'm too lazy to kick in my "human-speak" faculties or because I feel like making someone's life difficult or otherwise dodging, or occasionally I just feel like toying with them/having fun.
Social expectations like these generally seem to exist to "smooth over" interactions and, in some cases, improve efficiency. (At least, IMO.) Similarly to how you admit the expectation that people treat each other with some modicum of respect, even if they don't genuinely want to do so, many just assume and accept such expectations and behaviors as implicit in the transaction.
--rapey--
Right. Misogyny. It really is pointless debating this, then. /Oh, wait, that's an ad hominem argument. Myself, I'm an equal opportunity individual: I am what would generally be considered a "misanthropist". According to the two-party gender system, that makes me equal parts misandrist and misogynist.
Even putting that aside, I can see that you really don't seem capable of understanding the point to the original quoted statement. That isn't meant as an insult. It's not really your fault if your perspective and filters prevent you from recognizing the more general applicability of such an approach to confrontations with hostile entities. It is entirely possible that you've had the incredibly good fortune to never find yourself in a situation where you had to earn someone's trust or acceptance the hard way. Or, if you have, it is quite possible that you've never had to earn their trust using that particular method.
And, why—and this is especially ironic coming from me, one of the more hopeless of the perverts on the board—is it that everything always seems to devolve into being about sex?
