Imagine that you owned a house, and you discovered what might be a serious problem with its construction. This is a problem that you yourself are not qualified to deal with – let’s say that it’s some combination of engineering and local construction code which only someone with intense training and experience could competently solve. You call a contractor, or an engineer, someone who professes and certifies their expertise in exactly this sort of matter. You pay this person to inspect the damage and give their honest opinion, and recommend a way forward. They tell you bad news – not only is this damage severe, you must tear down your whole house. There’s no way around it. You ask why and they tell you ‘it’s just how it is, I know, because I’m an engineer.’ What else could you say? In the interest of your family’s safety and obeying the law – you tear down your home, presumably to move into an apartment nearby. Maybe you have to money to rebuild, maybe you don’t.
Let’s say that down the road, in about six months, you find out that not only was your house not unsafe, but no laws requiring it to be torn down even exist, and your engineer was lying. They did this to your face, in a public setting and in an official capacity, and they were wrong. Would that person not be responsible? Imagine that this house was in the family for years – wouldn’t that kind of willful fraud be a crime? Isn’t it a gross violation of trust and common decency to profess expertise that one does not have, with the knowledge that people will make decisions on your advice which could impact their lives and those of their family?
