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DeVliegendeHollander comments on If you could push a button to eliminate one cognitive bias, which would you choose? - Less Wrong Discussion
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No, the circumstances of my upbringing made me do things that make me safer, they did not directly, but only indirectly, through changing my behavior, caused the relative safety.
If you wouldn't blame people for things they do, e.g. for safety precautions they have not built a habit for, then what would be the use of blame at all? You wouldn't blame people for driving 200 km/h without a seatbelt at night blind drunk, because they had a bad upbringing where it was seen kinda normal? You gotta draw the line somewhere, and I think a sensible place to draw the blame-line is "if you would have done X and Y your outcome would be different"
Let's not even start the free will debate, as it is entirely pointless, even if from some absolute viewpoint every behavior is externally conditioned, choice is still useful, predictive term in human interactions, because we don't use the absolute angle, and blame just means "could have easily chosen otherwise".
Finally, this does not demonstrate the just world heuristic is useful, it would be easy to point out there is nothing particularly just about people in 1940 could fuck everything that moves without condom and not get AIDS and in 1980 it was much harder, rather it demonstrates how the behaviors it causes are not necessarily incorrect or immoral.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt? It seems obvious to me that the scale on which a line has to be drawn somewhere is the extent to which you consider external factors affecting the decision when assigning blame, in which case your "sensible place" is the furthest extreme on the blame end of the scale.
How could such a world possibly exist for more then a couple of years without people noticing that there is a problem?
I'm quite confident it wouldn't, hence "bizarre", but I don't think that matters to the questions I'm actually trying to address with the hypothetical. I just used a drunk driver because that's what DeVliegendeHollander used.
The point is that traditions, especially long established traditions, generally do in fact contain good advice.
I think the point is weaker: long established traditions do not contain self-destructive advice and contain good advice for the times in which they were created. If the circumstances have changed sufficiently, the advice of ancient traditions could, in fact, be bad.
That tendency exists, and is part of why I'm confident the thing I described as a bizarre alternate universe wouldn't really happen, but it seems as true-but-irrelevant as the simple fact that such a tradition probably wouldn't develop.