I’m sure there’s no incentive for a driver who’s responsible for an eight car crash to pass buck
If this were a normal negligence tort vs an automobile crash there would be a very strong case to be made that the driver who set the whole chain of events in motion is responsible for all of it under something akin to the eggshell skull rule.
When you hit someone from behind, it is your fault, because you should have been driving more slowly or further away
And that is also absolutely correct way of evaluating it - the one in the back controls attention, speed and distance. The one in front does not.
And pretty much every state also has a law drivers not to do things like panic stop in the highway without a reason. The rules of the road have redundant responsibility baked in almost everywhere on purpose
We abridge a lot of normal rules and legal doctrine for handling civil liability when it comes to car stuff because we have to have quick rules of thumb to deal with the sheer volume of incidents. What you are arguing in favor of here is a very sloppy rule of thumb and such advocacy is likely because you have assessed yourself to be far more likely to be the source of a multi-car wreck than one of the people caught up in it.
Ask yourself, if you brake checked someone and caused a chain reaction would you be morally culpable? The overwhelming majority of the population would say yes. So why should you not be financially culpable?
Now ask yourself if instead of brake checking someone you were stopping because a child wandered into the road how would that change things.
On what grounds do you justify using the same allocation of liability for both these situations?
Or maybe to the folks here “some guy claims” is a valid source. Maybe I’m in the wrong lol