It is understood that intentional torts chart the boundary between socially acceptable and antisocial behavior – between, for example, offensive and inoffensive contact or between reasonable and unreasonable invasion of another's emotional well-being. The connection with social cohesion is clear. Yet it is also common to think of intentional torts as a different class of torts from those encompassed by the negligence regime. That division is understandable if we consider the paradigmatic case of the person who knowingly and maliciously hits another. The fault in that kind of a case seems to be a far cry from the fault in the case of the person who inadvertently fails to check the blind spot in the mirror when changing lanes.

Yet these two tort regimes are joined together by the theory of other-regarding behavior, for each represents a situation in which one person has failed to appropriately consider the well-being of another. Moreover, the border between negligence torts and intentional torts is far thinner than is normally supposed. For example, the cases discussed in the last chapter are not usually thought of as implicating intentional torts, but they do. In those cases, the defendant knew that harm would occur and that knowledge was one of the reasons they were responsible for reacting reasonably to the harm.

In this chapter, I explore our understanding of the relationship between negligence torts and intentional torts by showing how intentional torts embody the theory of other-regarding behavior developed in this book.