Question

For decades, the dominant historical narrative regarding the nineteenth-century "fellow servant rule"—which barred employees from suing their employers for injuries caused by a coworker's negligence—characterized the doctrine as an unprincipled subsidy to nascent industries. According to this orthodox view, courts deliberately insulated employers from liability to promote industrial expansion, essentially forcing labor to bear the costs of economic modernization.

In the late twentieth century, "law and economics" scholars challenged this narrative, arguing instead that the fellow servant rule functioned as a mechanism for economic efficiency. These scholars contend that the doctrine incentivized workplace safety by encouraging workers to carefully monitor the competence of their peers. Furthermore, they assert that employees were compensated for the heightened risks of such employment through higher wage premiums negotiated in the labor market.

However, both the orthodox historians and the law and economics scholars impose a retroactive teleology on nineteenth-century jurisprudence. A more nuanced reading of the period's legal treatises suggests that the rule emerged not from macroeconomic calculation or a desire to subsidize industry, but from a pervasive pre-industrial moral philosophy. As recent socio-legal historians have demonstrated, nineteenth-century judges were primarily concerned with individual moral agency. They viewed the employment contract as a voluntary assumption of known risks, believing it fundamentally unjust to hold an employer vicariously liable for the negligent acts of a theoretically autonomous employee.

The passage indicates that the "law and economics" scholars explicitly assert which one of the following about the fellow servant rule?