The lack of a social scientific foundation across the field of negligence means that social life and scientific knowledge are transformed and mutated by a negligence paradigm that is unable to fulfil the social purposes typically attributed to it. Analysing the extent to which the reparation ideal has polluted and confused attempts to find radical alternatives to negligence, this book argues for a critical separation between the issue of harm minimisation and reparation, a separation that, it is argued, provides the basis for a different policy approach to the human experience of injury, error and misfortune.