An abuser drives over a bridge to reach his victim's house, where he commits an act of domestic violence.

You've committed to the position that the engineer who built the bridge is morally culpable for that domestic violence.

Perhaps, but is Anubis' scales, the good is weighed against the evil that a man has done. Cannot the engineer be culpable for facilitating a crime, and yet be also culpable for improving the lives of many thousands of others, and in balance the good outweighs the bad? Culpability is not an absolute. The engineer may be culpable, but how culpable? Relative to the culpability of the one who held the knife? Relative to the man's parents who suspected his intent but failed to stop him? Relative to a society which has decided that it needn't guarantee access to mental health care that the man required? Culpability is distributed, and it isn't all or nothing.

You stated that we have moral culpability for second-order effects, whatever those are. If a person engineers a bridge that works as designed, what would the second-order effects be?

"whatever those are" was a poor attempt to indicate that I wasn't sure what people mean by second order effect. was it that something that was not intended, or is it that it happens further in the causal chain, or is it something about particular affordances and general ones (a bridge affords crossing. a bridge that affords crossing both affords crossing a bridge to buy your groceries and crossing a birdge to commit a crime.) Or is it just things that are hard to predict might occur? Or things that have an intervening autonomous moral agent between the engineer and the victim? its not clear to me.

A man-made dam might increase a city's availabe water supply and allow power generation, but it also can increase CO2 emissions and do harm to salmon reproduction. Increased CO2 emissions and detriments to salmon reproductions might contribute to global warming in the first case and an increased price on fresh fish and a declining seal population in the second. Increased price of fresh fish mean less availability to poor consumers and the loss of what might be an otherwise valuable part of diet. Global warming means climage change, sea level rise, an expected increase in unrest, and large scale ecological instability. All those things mean that my daughters may not enjoy the relatively secure life that my generation has led...

On what basis?

on what basis are we culpable for anything? if you can answer that I question I'll try to answer yours. not trying to be flippant (we've had a good discussion so far), but I don't really have an answer, except to say that I don't know on what basis we might distinguish the two cases. if you can answer me what makes someone morally culpable of anything, maybe I'd have a clue.

The basis for my arguments are from English law. Who is guilty of what has been fine tuned over centuries. It's not enough that something bad happened. There must be either intent to harm or gross negligence.

The modern trend both in law and society of statutory offenses and ex post facto "something bad happened so let's see what we can charge him with" is something I find deeply disturbing. I find the original articles proposals as yet another step upon that road.

Our forefathers accepted the universe was unpredictable. We seem to feel we have enough grasp now that if bad things happen someone must be to blame.

you are just making a point, but I'll take it seriously for a moment.

I think that handles can be provocative, and some are certainly chosen to do psychological harm (e.g. to racial minorities). If I had known you, and known that you would be triggered by this name, and that the harm was substantial, I would have some culpability, especially if I chose it with the intent of triggering you. But I didn't know you, and I didn't know that you would be triggered, and I did not intend to trigger you, and I had no way of knowing it would trigger anyone, nor a reasonable expectation that it would. And so there is really no culpability.

This gets to the core of our disagreement. I don't believe second order effects (i.e. things that involve another human decision maker using your creation) to be knowable in the general case. The exception being if you specifically advertise it for that purpose or similarity to existing tools makes it obvious.

In the case of a scientist - the ultimate effects of their discovery will always be second order as they are not the engineers applying the science.

but the second order effects of triggering you, such as you being a jerk to someone, is something that I would have at least some culpability for. its ... complicated. but we still have to try to think about what we are doing