It reminds me of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. At the end, after a whole chain of perfectly intelligible social behavior produces a killing, the result is accepted as an “accident.” One of the characters dryly remarks: “A new definition of the word accident.”

The interesting point isn’t that “accident” is an excuse for individual responsibility. It’s almost the reverse: accident has become an accepted output of the social machinery. Everyone behaves according to reasons, incentives and rules that make sense locally, yet the aggregate produces an outcome that nobody quite chose.