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It goes without saying that plaintiffs habitually exaggerate the harms done to them by the alleged wrongdoing or negligence, and no claim is so outrageous that its very exaggeration is taken as evidence in itself of the plaintiff’s dishonesty. Moreover, a subtler mechanism is often at work: Nobody likes to think of himself as dishonest, and so many a plaintiff comes to believe his own exaggerations. He feels obliged to suffer the suffering that he claims the wrong has done him, and even if he wins the case and receives the grotesquely inflated sum that he claimed, he feels obliged to go on suffering, for otherwise his own dishonesty would stand revealed to him. It is all a highly poisonous business.

This is not to say that there are no justified civil actions. I have noticed, however, that where they are morally justified, and where monetary compensation would go some way to righting the wrong (which is not always the case, far from it), the plaintiff rarely exaggerates his suffering or the consequences of what was wrongfully done to him, but is on the contrary matter-of-fact about it; and, even more curiously, that actions are often most ferociously defended when they are justified, and when defense against them heaps yet more suffering on the head of the plaintiff.

In Europe in particular the population was encouraged by tax concessions to buy cars with diesel engines, concessions made in an attempt to meet self-imposed carbon emission limits. This, of course, encouraged car manufacturers to manufacture diesel vehicles (I do not exclude the possibility that the manufacturers may have misled the government about the possibilities). If the standards they were expected to meet were in fact impossible to meet, then they were faced with a choice: either ignore the demand or ignore the standards. The latter they could do only by lying and cheating, which, I predict, is what all of them will sooner or later be revealed to have done.

A government will change its policy and start to penalize those whom it previously encouraged. In England this has already happened, admittedly so far only at the level of local government. Owners of diesel cars will seek compensation from wherever and whomever they can find it. Tort law makes the world, or at least the money, go round”€”even if it lessens the quantity in the end.