Bankman-Fried’s mom argued that ‘the philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy’
The mother of Sam Bankman-Fried, the beleaguered founder and former CEO of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is a Stanford Law professor who penned a 2013 essay arguing that it is time for Americans to ditch the “philosophy of personal responsibility.”
Barbara Fried, who just resigned from the Democratic super PAC Mind the Gap as the board of directors chairperson, penned a 2013 essay in the Boston Review titled, “Beyond Blame,” which argued in favor of harm-reduction policies like rehabilitation over incarceration.
“The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy,” Fried wrote at the time. “It’s time to move past blame.”
“Public reactions to wrongdoing have been studied most extensively in the context of crime,” she wrote. “Researchers have found that peoples’ evaluations of serious wrongfulness vary significantly across social conditions and individuals. Tellingly, the more information people have about the context of the crime, the person who committed it, and the circumstances he or she came from, the more nuanced are their views of moral responsibility.”
“The fact that we alter our judgments of blameworthiness as we acquire greater knowledge of the person and the context in which she acted should put to rest any thought that our blaming practices are naturally immutable, or even recalcitrant,” she continued.
Fried argued that harm-reduction policies are “not to coddle criminals, or to deny their accountability or volitional capacities. It is to reduce future harm at a tolerable cost to all of us, wrongdoers included, by influencing wrongdoers’ future choices through rehabilitation, more carefully calibrated deterrence, and, when necessary, isolation from society.”
Fried concluded that “we have gotten nothing from our 40-year blame fest except the guilty pleasure of reproaching others for acts that, but for the grace of God, or luck, or social or biological forces, we might well have committed ourselves.”
- https://PayPal.Me/lukeisback
"Luke Ford reports all of the 'juicy' quotes, and has been doing it for years." (Marc B. Shapiro)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
- What the Arday Coverage Established: A First Claim-Level Audit, Including the Results That Cut Against My Own Thesis
- Two Carrier Groups and a Market in Testimony: Cultural Trauma Theory and the Arday Affair
- What the Institutions Were Buying: A Demand-Side Account of the Jason Arday Appointments
- Who Is Cheap to Threaten: Legal Deterrence and the Selection of Publishers
- ‘Jason Arday: The Most Extreme Academic Plagiarism Case in Modern History | Nathan Cofnas’
- The Vanishing Author: First-Person Density in Luke Ford’s Archive, 2007 to 2026
- Four Dates and No Cause: What Changed Luke Ford’s Blogging Between Late 2023 and Late 2025
- Two Defensible Denominators: What a Standard Accusation Dictionary Says About Luke Ford’s Archive, and Why It Says the Opposite Thing Twice
- The Second Collapse: Twenty Years of Luke Ford’s Publication Threshold, Measured
- Luke Ford and the E-Personality: Twenty-Nine Years of Disinhibition, Self-Regulation, and the Price of Friction
- The Room Around the Argument: Audience Sorting at Outside the Beltway, 2003-2026
- Steven Taylor, James Joyner and the E-Personality: Aboujaoude’s Virtually You Tested on Twenty Years of Outside the Beltway
- Amy Wax and the E-Personality: A Claim-Level Analysis, 1996-2026
- After Cathy’s Table: How Digital Platforms Reshaped a Generation of Professional Writers
- Nathan Cofnas and the E-Personality: The Auditor, the Performer, and the Cambridge Investigation
- The E-Personality of the Public Intellectual
- NYT: ‘What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?’
- Another National Treasure is Falling to AI (Fiction)
- What Percentage of Philip N. Cohen’s Blog Passes the Front Page Test?
- Paul Bloom’s Small Potatoes Archive
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)