Proximate Cause VS Free Will...

If someone holds a gun to a little girl's head and tells me he'll shoot if I take another step, and I take another step, and he shoots her, whose fault is it that the girl is dead?

It absolutely APPALLS me how many people would say that it's mine.

Folks, even if I held a gun of my own to the guy's head and DEMANDED that he pull the trigger, it would be HIS FAULT that the girl is dead because HE CHOSE TO DO IT.

You can make a case that shooting her under those circumstances was the right thing to do, but you can't make a case that it wasn't his choice to kill her. He could have chosen death. Instead he chose to kill. Me? I never shot anybody. But I'll bet his first words after he pulled the trigger would be something to the effect of, "I had no choice."

People are fond of saying that actions have consequences. Fine. I'll buy that. For every action there's a reaction. Pretty fundamental, really. A child throws a brick through a window, it'd be downright ridiculous not to expect the window to break. Action, consequence.

What I refuse to buy is the idea that anybody's actions ARE consequences. An action is someone's choice. You can't claim that someone's actions are consequences of someone else's actions and still claim to believe in choice. It's Free Will OR Proximate Cause, people. Not both.

This confused me most when I was a kid, getting trouble, and I'd get grounded, and there'd be something in the accompanying lecture about this being my own fault, and how we all have to accept the consequences of our actions.

Wait, what? Parents, this makes no sense at all. The grounding wasn't the result of the child's actions. The broken window is the result of the child's actions. Grounding the child is YOUR action. YOUR choice. You could just as easily NOT ground him. The child isn't grounding himself. You can't rattle off an entire spiel about taking responsibility for one's own actions, and then in the next sentence claim that you're not responsible for your own.