This is a thoroughly dumb argument. You might as well say that cancer is perfectly nice given that most people survive, and that the ones who don't have something wrong with them.

The mistake you're making is that responsibility isn't zero-sum. Is Swartz responsible for killing himself? Sure. But if prosecutors are unjustly harsh with a lot of people in a way that causes the suicide rate in that group to jump, are they responsible too? Yes indeed.

If multiple factors cause something, multiple people can be responsible, and the responsibility of one does not diminish the responsibility of the other.

But now the mistake you're making is that if everyone is responsible then no one is responsible, which is an even worse state of affairs.

He didn't say everyone was responsible. But even if we were it would not follow that no one is since responsibility is not something that depends on others not having any.

> He didn't say everyone was responsible.

Didn't say it directly, but follow the logic.

If the prosecutors are now responsible for only proferring charges on suspects who won't kill themselves then it obviously follows that we need to ensure that no one appoints prosecutors who would do this (it's life and death after all!).

So now the person appointing the prosecutor potentially has blood on their hands. Likewise for the person appointing the person appointing the prosecutor. And God only forbid the population as a whole votes for someone in this chain, could you live with yourself if you had voted for the person who appointed Ortiz or Heymann?

That is insanity and I refuse to go down that path.

Instead point your finger at the person (or even persons) responsible, but don't act like simply being a big mean jerk is by itself tantamount to putting a noose around a man's neck. If that were really the case the vast majority of humanity would at some point be liable for manslaughter or attempted manslaughter.

Responsibility is not a binary property where any given individual is either responsible or not. There are varying degrees of responsibility. Obviously each step in your absurd slippery slope argument corresponds to a drastic decrease in the degree of responsibility. You aren't following the logic, you're evading logic entirely.

And yet people here are holding MIT and the prosecution team more responsible than Aaron himself for Aaron's own actions. I'll definitely agree with you that responsibility is not binary but I won't agree that the slippery slope argument isn't exactly what many of the HN'ers are on right now.