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There's a whole safety industry that I'm sure will say they can be prevented, but do they really? I looked up the word's definition:

accident | ˈaksədənt |
noun
an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause

— Any kind of accident, whether it happens to a living being and/or it's related to objects/particles/energy regarded as an accident.

To me, it seems you can at best try to prevent it because to truly prevent it you would need full control of the environment; if that were the case you could simply not have it the first place, that's a little too out there though, so sticking to definition — perhaps I should've asked in the linguistics Stack — it would appear they can't be prevented, right?

Vita
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  • agreed you should probably have asked there. there is the philosophical term "contingent", which is close to 'accident', and these things could have been otherwise. i don't really understand your question. perhaps what is accidental could have been prevented by someone else or with greater vigilance –  Nov 12 '22 at 20:57
  • I think there must be a distinction made between an honest mistake and a dishonest mistake which I find synonymous to negligence. I tried asking about this on English SE but the question was deleted [There's the term 'honest mistake', so what is 'dishonest mistake' synonymous to?](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15179/please-help-me-improve-my-question-on-dishonest-mistake-re-the-term-honest-m) – BCLC Nov 14 '22 at 09:47
  • Obviously, colloquially speaking if I go outside during a thunder storm and get hit by a lightning, I could have prevented it by staying home. Accidents are prevented by minimizing risk factors. Now, if we enter the philosophical discussion of "could things have happened differently than they did?", in our case "stay home would have been safe, but could I have decided to stay home in the first place?", it's pure metaphysics and we will never have a definitive answer. – armand Nov 14 '22 at 11:15

3 Answers3

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Risk has to go somewhere. So while an accident might or might not be preventable, its risks can usually be transformed. That is, the failure of a transformed system will not kill a human being, for example, but rather will cause serious damage only to machinery. The failure of the system might be inevitable and unpreventable, but the consequences of that failure are not. In this sense is an accident preventable: the accident might surely happen, but nobody cares.

Mark Andrews
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  • A friend of mine says that six independent things have to go wrong before an accident occurs, for example in a manufacturing plant. So if you can stop any of those 6, it won't happen. This makes it pretty stupid and culpable for an 'accident' to occur in a known environment. It is helpful when working somewhere to feel empowered to prevent injury. – Scott Rowe Nov 13 '22 at 00:27
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We are dealing with an instance of equivocation here: if accident is defined as a purely chance event than it cannot be prevented by definition. Accident can however mean other things, notably in the context of safety industry:

  • the consequences of a chance event
  • the likelihood of a chance event

E.g., the risk of your car hitting a tree does not depend on whether you wear a see belt or not, but the consequences of the hitting the tree will be different in the two cases.

On the other hand, the likelihood of a side collision with another car does depend on whether you stop at stop signs or not. In either case, when such collision does happen, it happens because you didn't foresee it (i.e., by accident.)

Roger Vadim
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In the physical world there is no such thing as a causeless accident. Instead there is always a causal chain leading up to the point where the accident occurs. If we know the physics behind each causal step we can associate an occurrence probability for each step and the overall probability of the accident will then be the product of those individual probabilities.

So, imagine an engine on a jet liner explodes at takeoff, resulting in a disastrous accident. Examination of the engine wreckage demonstrates that the engine exploded because it ran out of lubricating oil. Further examination reveals that the oil plug which is unscrewed from the engine in order to fill it with fresh oil during maintenance was screwed into the engine without its sealing gasket, called an O-ring. Examination of the maintenance records for the plane reveals that the mechanic whose job it was to top off the oil level in the engine had not attended the training session in which the proper insertion of the O-ring had been demonstrated. His HR records revealed that his new supervisor had not signed him up for the training session when he was hired, and the HR department had no way tracking compliance with required training sessions, and so on.

Full control of the environment cannot be guaranteed always and in every circumstance which is why we have invented things like checklists and structural redundancy and safety factors and standard procedures and mandatory inspections- and the systematic study of causal chains in complex systems.

niels nielsen
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