The Ethics of Stupidity

Anyone who follows this web log already knows that I do a lot of posts about stupid people, stupid business concepts, stupid decisions, and other things that can be tagged as “stupid.” In fact, it’s the single most common tag found on my posts, and it probably would be even if I didn’t specifically study the ways in which things fail; most of these episodes just make for entertaining storytelling. However, from time to time I’ll write about something and readers will ask me why that particular bone-head play was “allowed” to happen. Why didn’t they – the anonymous “they” who seem to be in charge of everything – stop these poor idiots from injuring themselves, destroying their businesses, putting innocent lives at risk, or whatever it is? The straight answer is that there is no “they” – no level of government of which I’m aware includes an Office of Stupidity, and if making foolish business or consumer decisions was outlawed our economy would collapse. But this begs the question of just what obligation do we, as business people, have to the truly stupid…

Consider, for example, this case from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about two people who managed to wound themselves while trying out a gun they had just purchased. As the story notes, the weapon was legally obtained and no one was charged with an illegal discharge, so they were not breaking any laws by firing it, either. The couple in the story did, however, manage to shoot themselves (or each other; the account isn’t that clear) with their own gun, proving that they are either too stupid to correctly operate a firearm or too stupid to understand that guns can be dangerous if you fiddle with them and take the appropriate gun safety class. I once saw a similar episode happen at a gun range: a young man, attempting to impress his girlfriend, insisted on renting a .50 caliber Desert Eagle (a very large handgun) and then attempting to fire it one-handed…

Folks, the Desert Eagle in .50 cal is too big for me to use comfortably, and this kid was a foot shorter and probably 100 pounds lighter than I am. Sure enough, the massive recoil was too much for the kid to handle, and the gun flew back and smacked him in the forehead, cutting a huge gash and sending blood gushing down his face. Note that he didn’t do anything wrong, let alone illegal, in wanting to rent and fire this weapon. But he still managed to injure himself and scare the living daylights out of the young lady who was with him and a number of other people on the range that day. The desk clerk at the range tried to talk the young man out of trying to fire this weapon, but ultimately had the choice of either allowing his customer to proceed or refusing to do business with that customer, and made the same choice most businesspeople would have made…

So my question is, if one of your customers is planning to do something that you know has a very high probability of injuring them or someone near to them, but which is completely legal in your community, do you have any ethical responsibility to stop them? Assume for the moment that you have no LEGAL requirements to do so, and that no other consequences will befall you if you do intervene. Do you have any purely ethical responsibility to keep someone who is too stupid, ignorant and/or stubborn to know any better from hurting him or herself? How about if there are innocent people who might suffer from collateral damage; do you have any responsibility to them? On the other hand, if the activity in question is considered a civil right, guaranteed to every citizen of our country under the U.S. Constitution (like the right to keep and bear arms, for example), do you have the right to prevent them from exercising their rights under the law of the land?

It’s worth thinking about…