The lorry driver

Bernard Williams begins with a lorry driver. Through no fault of his own, a child runs into the road and he kills it. He could not have stopped. Everyone agrees he is not to blame, and Williams's observation is that he will still feel something the passenger beside him will not, and that we would think less of him if he did not. Williams calls it agent-regret. It attaches to what you did, not to what you did wrong, and being told it was not your fault does not remove it ("Moral Luck," 1976, collected in Moral Luck, 1981).

His larger claim is that morality cannot be walled off from luck the way philosophers since Kant have wanted. Two drivers can be equally careful; one kills a child and one gets home. It seems both wrong to blame the unlucky one more and false to say nothing about them differs.

Now the driver is a team of engineers and the lorry is a model that was tested, audited and deployed with care, and harmed someone anyway. The motion says they are to blame in proportion to the harm. Williams gives you the materials for three different answers: that blame tracks fault and the harm is irrelevant; that the harm changes what they are answerable for even without fault; or that "blame" was the wrong word, and the real question is what an engineer who did everything right should feel. Pick one, and be ready to explain the driver.