The UK Parliament has already pre-emptively legislated for a compensation solution for autonomous vehicle accidents through the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018. The Act is a response to the fact that the ordinary approach to motor vehicle accidents cannot apply in an AV context since there is no human driver. Tort law has previously been subjected to major shifts in response to motor vehicles, and we are again on the cusp of another motor-vehicle-inspired revolution in tort law. However, in legislating for AV accidents in the UK, there was inadequate consideration of alternative approaches.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to the reconstruction of the case of the Costa Concordia accident, which occurred on January 13, 2012, off the west coast of Italy, near the island of Giglio, and presents an analysis of the scapegoating process that involved the ship’s captain. Sailing very close to the coast, the Costa Concordia foundered on a rock. The impact tore open a gash in the ship, allowing in water which put the engines out of action. After traveling a short distance, the ship ran aground near the island, listing over onto its side. Out of over four thousand people on board, thirty-two died. The dominant view of this case from the judiciary, the media and public opinion, was that the ship’s captain was the main and, in fact, almost the only, figure responsible for the accident and for the inadequate management of the emergency. This book challenges the conventional interpretation of the accident, providing a revised history of the event and at the same time putting forward a different explanation.

Public engagement with the twin scandals associated with the railways was much more direct, as most of the victims were ordinary citizens. These individuals shared their experiences by writing eyewitness accounts of crashes, or of approaches made by speculative stags, in letters to the press. Some of the newspapers that published these letters of protest were themselves caught up in the politics of the ‘railway interest’, occasionally engaging in internecine warfare through statements written by their editors. And Sir Robert Peel, whose government was responsible for the control of the railways, was prepared to address the nation directly, if anonymously, by drafting text for a Times leading article in a letter to his chancellor of the exchequer.

This chapter examines Aquinas’s views on the ontological status of the actualization of an agent’s active power, namely its action, and the patient’s passive power, namely its passion. Aquinas claims that one and the same motion constitutes both an agent’s action and its patient’s passion. This chapter considers Aquinas’s motivations for defending the “action-passion sameness” thesis and his responses to common objections. The chapter also includes a solution to a longstanding interpretive difficulty regarding Aquinas’s views on the ontological status of action. Aquinas claims in some texts that actions are accidents in the agent as subject. This seems to conflict with his standard view that an agent’s action is the motion which it causes in its patient. While advancing a solution to this textual difficulty, the chapter proposes a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between forms and accidents and the metaphysics of inherence.

Chapter 5 analyses the questions of accountability, namely whether or not AWS will give place to an ‘accountability gap’. Its first part aims to explain that, from a legal point of view, what is relevant is who (human operators) or what (AWS) guarantees a better compliance with IHL. The second part looks at eventual violations of IHL caused by AWS. Three types of situations are distinguished: hardware malfunctions, accidents (violations caused by human fault) and errors (violations caused by the systems‘ software). In this regard, special attention is given to the category of ‘dolus eventualis’ for ‘accidents‘ as a level of guilt that should be included in the ICC Statute for some specific situations of individual accountability. In the case of ‘errors’- IHL violations caused by the software system alone - they cannot be attributed to any human operator but the deploying state alone. Lastly, in the third part, it is explained why machine learning algorithms introduce specific challenges in terms of evidence due to their black-box nature. In this regard, it is argued that those algorithms should be able to provide ‘factual algorithms’, that is, be able to provide information about the fundamental facts that the algorithm considered in its selection-making process.

Foreseeable threats to life such as from accidents, disease, and natural disasters, demand both preventive and reparative action from the authorities, and such action must be of a minimum level of competence. The General Comment on the right to life issued by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2015 stipulates that the African Charter demands that States act to protect life against threats from natural disasters, famines, and outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Though railways have been frequently depicted as icons of the progressive and the dynamic within British Victorian fiction, their secular and timetabled culture is, in fact, more often than not freighted with a disruptive Gothic presence. This chapter begins by noting how the construction of the railways in the nineteenth century literally impacted upon the built and cultural environments, laying waste to familiar landmarks and marking the bodies of those who travel as well as those who serve the engines of progress. The chapter considers the theme of physical violence and sexual interference within the closed space of the railway carriage, making reference to popular newspaper reportage and erotic fiction before engaging with the issue of psychological trauma and isolation, particularly among those whose task is as much to protect, as to transport, the travelling public.

Chapter 3 is devoted to explaining the most fundamental category of domination in capitalism: “totality.” According to Adorno, the ubiquity of the exchange of commodities makes society in capitalism a totality. Individuals, on pain of perishing, must necessarily follow the logic of exchange. The totality, therefore, effectively functions as a “spell” from which nobody can flee. Turning to the logic of essence, I then reconstruct the dialectical development of the category of totality. Hegel first conceives of totality as an “actuality” that, like an organism, has the ability to maintain and reproduce itself across different circumstances. The most determinate form of actuality for Hegel is “substance.” Although individuals as “accidents” constitute substance, they remain subject to the “absolute power” of substance. It seems to individuals that they have power over each other, yet the power of individuals is an objective illusion. In fact, it is the totality of substance that makes one individual powerful and the other powerless.

AI has the potential to be substantially safer than people. Self-driving cars will cause accidents, but they will cause fewer accidents than people. Because automation will result in substantial safety benefits, tort law should encourage its adoption as a means of accident prevention. Under current laws, suppliers of AI tortfeasors are strictly responsible for their harms. A better system would hold them liable for harms caused by AI tortfeasors in negligence. Not only would this encourage the use of AI after it exceeds human performance, but also the liability test would focus on activity rather than design, which would be simpler to administer. More importantly, just as AI activity should be discouraged when it is less safe than a person, human activity should be discouraged when it is less safe than an AI. Once AI is safer than a person and automation is practicable, human tortfeasors should be held to the standard of AI behavior.