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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Legally-speaking, "ultrahazardous activities" to which strict liability attaches are those activities where harm frequently results even if due caution is taken. The prototypical example is blasting or other explosives work - even if you do everything right, you don't know where all the debris is going, or what effects other properties of the explosion could cause (e.g., there's a famous case where the shockwave from dynamiting-open an irrigation canal caused a bunch of minks on a nearby fur farm to freak out and eat their own young; the blaster was held responsible for the lost profits from the devoured baby minks, even though the blast wave wasn't itself harmful to anything, and the mink freakout was unforeseeable, because blasting is just that dangerous.).

We don't impose strict liability to incentivize due caution; we impose it because someone has to swallow the inevitable losses caused by ultrahazardous activities, and society has decided that the person/entity engaging in the activity is the best option.