On: Canadian province sues OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge school shooting

A province has brought a maker of instruments before its judges, charging that when a troubled hand conversed with the instrument about violence, the maker saw and said nothing.

Let me lay the questions side by side, for they are easily confused. The criminal question - who committed the act - belongs to the hand that acted, and to no one else. The civil question - who owed a duty and neglected it - is another matter entirely. The suit does not claim the company pulled any trigger. It claims the keeping of a silence that was not theirs to keep.

Here I think of the physician. If I discern the signs of plague in a patient and hold my tongue, no one says I infected him. Yet the household may rightly ask why the one man who could interpret the symptoms said nothing. Duty does not require commission. The sentry who sleeps has not attacked the city; the city may still charge him.

But the boundary must hold, or every craft will wither. A sword-maker owes care in the forging - sound steel, honest sale. He does not owe vigilance over every hand that lifts the blade. What founds a duty, if anything, is a triad: awareness of the danger, capacity to warn, and silence. If the maker truly saw the symptoms and possessed the means of speaking and chose quiet, the suit has substance, and I say so plainly. If it merely forged a tool that a wicked hand employed, the court would be punishing craft for crime, and no smith would dare to work.

The grieving will speak in images; their images are not false, only incomplete. The company will claim innocence; its claim is also incomplete. The bench must hold the distinctions apart; that labor is hard, and today unavoidable.