Reference reading
Recklessness
Calling an act an experiment does not decide who may reasonably bear its risks.
Disregard for foreseeable, significant consequences, including risks imposed on other people.
Imagine this: An installation artist balances a full water vessel on a narrow shelf above a colleague’s paper model. A beautifully drawn plan is propped beside the precarious arrangement.
How the pattern works
Recklessness disregards foreseeable, significant consequences, including risks imposed on others. Intellectual and artistic freedom can become an excuse to treat provocation, publication or experiment as exempt from ordinary consideration of who might be affected. The maker’s interest in trying the act is allowed to stand in for an account of its consequences.
Experiment involves uncertainty, and some worthwhile work accepts defensible risk. The distinction is not between guaranteed safety and every departure from it. It is whether foreseeable significant consequences receive fitting weight, with attention to competence, alternatives, consent and the people who bear the possible cost.
What it costs the work
Others can inherit losses they did not choose while the maker retains the attractive identity of the risk-taker. A publication may expose a contributor’s private information, a stunt may impose costs on bystanders, or a collaboration may put shared resources at stake without an intelligible agreement.
A distinction worth keeping
Impatience rejects necessary duration; Recklessness can be carefully scheduled. Negligence disregards care; a meticulously prepared act can still give too little weight to its serious consequences. Fanaticism treats a cause as licensing moral transgression and may foresee the cost accurately. Controversy, failure and a considered risk do not by themselves establish Recklessness.
What a useful response can change
Identify the significant foreseeable consequences and who bears them. The maker’s willingness to accept a cost does not settle whether someone else has agreed to it.
Consider whether the purpose can be served through a less exposing form: different identifying details, a bounded trial, a safer arrangement or a genuine opportunity for affected contributors to decide.
A useful response can include postponing, changing or declining an act. Creative seriousness is expressed through judgment about the experiment, rather than through the amount of unchosen risk it leaves behind.
Questions for reflection
- Whose possible loss is absent from the story of my daring?
- What alteration would preserve the inquiry while reducing an unjustified exposure?
Other perspectives
That careful and laborious and circumspect state of mind, ever watchful and ever attentive to the most distant consequences of every action, could not be a thing pleasant or agreeable for its own sake, but upon account of its tendency to procure the greatest goods and to keep off the greatest evils.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source
Smith describes foresight through the goods it secures and the evils it avoids. Consequence-sensitive judgment is not merely an unattractive temperament opposed to artistic daring.
Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and punishing the bad.
William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source
Hazlitt relates moral understanding and poetry through pictures of consequences. His claim that art rewards and punishes is a perspective, not a rule for fiction; the relevant question is what a faithful portrayal lets us see.