I mean good luck getting mainstream politics for instance to ever be anything other than post hoc rationalization. In the meantime people need to be held accountable and as any judge will tell you if the consequences are severe enough, it really doesnβt matter if you intended the consequences or not. Youβre giving people a get out jail free pass by telling them most things are unintended.
Discussion
That is certainly the functionalist viewpoint. But I think it's generally wrong, and has nothing to do with whether we hold people accountable or not. But I would suggest that people's concept of accountability is often epistemically flawed. Like I don't think, in the vast majority of cases, a president of the US can be given credit for creating new jobs, or be blamed for jobs being lost. This is an example of where people tend to attribute accountability in a completely unjustified way, for example.
Whereas, functionalist thinking tends to not care much about that nuance.
