I have a norm that helps me evaluate a decision to forgive a wrong or not. Perhaps this is partly because I believe in limited free will in the context that not every of one’s actions is architected by him. I find it quite logically persuasive.

I invite you to a thought experiment. Imagine we have a machine that makes bananas and its performance is dependant on two generalizations: the system and the operator. Our task is to evaluate which errors we can blame on the operator and which ones on the machine. How best can we do this?

Firstly, if the machine frequently produces apples instead of bananas then we have reason to believe that there is something wrong with the machine itself. The reason is that, unlike a machine, an operator’s errors do not appear in patterns or that frequently. This is the equivalence of Systematic Error in…