Reasonableness - Personal Circumstances

Personal Circumstances

While the legal fiction of the reasonable person represents the ideal human actor, one would be hard pressed to characterize any individual human as meeting the standard, whether in whole or in part, all of the time. Since some human actors have limitations, the standard only requires that people act similarly to how "a reasonable person under the circumstance" would, as if their limitations were themselves circumstances. As such, courts require that the reasonable person be viewed as experiencing the same limitations as the defendant.

For example, a disabled defendant is held to a standard that, by necessity, represents how a reasonable person with that same disability would act. One should not mistake this allowance for physical limitations as an allowance for poor judgment, attempting acts beyond one's abilities, or acting too quickly, etc. Were such allowances made for every defendant, there would be as many different standards for negligence as there were defendants; and courts would spend innumerable hours, and the parties much more money, on determining that particular defendant's reasonableness, character, and intelligence.

By using the reasonable person standard, the courts instead use an objective tool and avoid such subjective evaluations. The result is a standard that allows the law to behave in a uniform, foreseeable, and neutral manner when attempting to determine liability.