4 ms·

>If they don't cause harm, then they shouldn't be penalized, at least not by the law. If they cause harm, they should. I think that drunk driving checkpoints a

• pdonis 10y ago
  making it legal to drive drunk unless you harm someone is insane. Drunk driving directly causes around 10k deaths per year in the US. And every drunk driver who causes a death should be penalized, no question. But penalizing people who have caused no harm undermines people's respect for the law. It also undermines personal responsibility: people figure that if it's legal, it must be ok, instead of exercising their own judgment. Actually, the very fact you quote should make you doubt the effectiveness of penalizing drunk drivers who have not caused harm. Everyone knows you can lose your license for drunk driving, yet drunk driving still causes 10k deaths per year? What sort of draconian system would it take to actually deter all those drunk drivers if the law is the only tool we have to do it? I don't want to find that out. What if I decide to walk down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over my head, under your system is that fine until I actually hit someone? Do you have no legal recourse to stop me? Once again, you're conflating "legal" with "ok". Obviously walking down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over your head is stupid and carries a huge risk of harm. And everyone around you should be ducking and screaming at you to stop, for goodness' sake, you're going to hurt someone. But no, the law should not punish you unless you actually do hurt someone. Your underlying fallacy here is that the only way to prevent people from doing something is to make it illegal. That is both too weak and too strong. Too weak, because, as noted above, even severe legal penalties aren't sufficient to deter some people (including, apparently, 10k drunk drivers a year). Too strong, because there are lots of ways to deter people without any legal penalties whatsoever--but that requires us, as individuals, to take responsibility for regulating our own behavior and pointing out obviously stupid and dangerous things that others around us are doing and asking them to stop, and imposing non-legal penalties if they don't. Sorry, you can't come into my house with that sword, it's too dangerous. Sorry, you can't come into my store with that sword, it's too dangerous. Sorry... Pretty soon the idiot will get the idea that nobody is going to interact with him if he persists in swinging his sword around all the time. (Applying similar logic to people who are prone to try driving while drunk is left as an exercise for the reader.)
  • learc83 10y ago
    Look at the number of drunk driving deaths (and accidents) from 30 years ago or so and you'll notice that the rate has been dropping since enforcement became more regular. Of course some of that is likely from social pressure, but most studies have shown that enforcement does reduce the number of drunk driving deaths. But let's not argue in vague generalities about using social pressure instead of laws. A company builds a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. There is a 10% chance per year that the plant will fail. The failure will catastrophically damage Lake Michigan and the surrounding area. The company decides that it's worth it. Under your system, a boycott is the only way to stop them? A lab decides to manufacture biological weapons to sell to dictators. There is no chance of a boycott doing any good because the owner doesn't sell to anyone in the US. There is a 5% chance per year that safety procedures will fail, releasing a virus that will kill an estimated 50 million people in the US. Under your system, what do we do about it? These hypothetical situations are extreme, but I'm trying to find out what your limits are. Because I really don't think you've thought this through.
    • pdonis 10y ago
      >most studies have shown that enforcement does reduce the number of drunk driving deaths But there are still 10k of them a year. Why, by your logic, don't we tighten up enforcement until there are none of them? What justifies stopping anywhere short of that? > Under your system, a boycott is the only way to stop them? How did they manage to build a plant with a 10% per year chance of catastrophic failure? It takes thousands of people to build a nuclear plant. Why would all of them participate in such a thing? > Under your system, what do we do about it? Under our current system, what do we do about it? You have described the current world situation: someone could have such a lab right now and we couldn't stop them. So why hasn't it happened? > I really don't think you've thought this through. I'm not sure you have either. You are assuming a world in which we have eliminated all penalties against people who have not done actual harm, but nothing else has changed from our current world. That is not at all what I have been assuming. I am trying to contrast what we have now--a system in which the law penalizes people who have done no actual harm, and which has evolved for a long time under that assumption--with what we would have if a system in which the law does not penalize people who have done no actual harm had evolved for a long time under that assumption. In such a world, many, many things would be different from today's world. As an illustration, I'll redescribe your two scenarios: A company wants to build a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. However, when they try to acquire the land, they find the landowners asking what they are going to use the land for, and when they say a nuclear plant, they start getting asked all kinds of hard questions about the risks involved. They can't give satisfactory answers, so the landowners refuse to sell. Similarly, when they try to recruit people to help work on the plant, they find the prospective employees asking the same hard questions, and refusing to work for them when they don't get satisfactory answers. A lab wants to manufacture biological weapons. However, they are unable to get funding to even start, because there are no dictators or similar insane rulers to sell to. Plus, once the lab's employees find out what the owners are thinking, they all quit. In short, in our current world, where we allow the law to penalize people preemptively, everyone expects the few people who make the laws to be responsible for stopping people from doing harmful things. So nobody feels individually responsible for doing it. In the world I'm describing, where everyone understands that the law won't step in until actual harm is done, everyone feels individually responsible for stopping people from doing harmful things, which means stepping in preemptively based on their own individual judgment instead of expecting the law to do it. Would such a world be free of harmful things? Of course not. But neither is our current world. The question is, would the world I'm describing have fewer harmful things happen? Would it have fewer than 10k drunk driving deaths a year? We don't know because we can't run a controlled experiment, but I think it's quite possible that the answer could be yes.
• pdonis 10y ago
  You added some more items while I was posting my first response, so I'll address them separately here. Clearly there is a limit where a behavior is inherently dangerous enough that we've decided to outlaw the behavior before it causes harm. Clearly in our current system we do this, yes. And clearly it doesn't always work (as we see in the drunk driving numbers). And even in cases where it does "work", I think that's more because of the cost of the dangerous behavior--very few private individuals have enough wealth to be able to build their own personal nuclear reactor, and the ones that do appear to have better things to do with their wealth--than because of legal prohibitions. ("My house has anti-tiger protection." "But there are no tigers within thousands of miles of your house." "See how well my protection works?") The fundamental problem is that some people have a propensity to do stupid and dangerous things. How do we stop them? Legal prohibitions don't seem to work very well. (If personal nuclear reactors were affordable, do you think making them illegal would really stop all the people who want to build one?) Plus, legal prohibitions preempt other possible methods, and reduce respect for the law, and undermine personal responsibility. So what are they really gaining us?
  • learc83 10y ago
    >The fundamental problem is that some people have a propensity to do stupid and dangerous things. How do we stop them? And fundamentally the only way to stop some people from doing stupid and dangerous things is with force. Let's say my neighbor sets up steel target in his backyard. Directly behind the target is my kid's swingset. My neighbor insists that he is such a good shot that he will never miss. He hasn't actually caused any damage yet. Let's assume my neighbor is an asshole and asking him (and other forms of social pressure won't work). You've taken the libertarian anti-regulation stance much further than anyone I've ever met. Most libertarians would say that the mere threat of him missing the target causes me harm, just like the threat of swinging a sword around on a crowded sidewalk causes harm. > Legal prohibitions don't seem to work very well. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. You can't seriously look at the history of regulation over the past century or so and not realize that there are some successes and some failures. I used to be a hardcore libertarian when I was younger, but I've learned that the world is rarely binary. Dogmatic approaches to governance rarely work, and no regulation is just as bad as a command economy. The search for a simple set of fundamental governing principles is a search for elegance--the same as trying to design an algorithm with no edge cases and no exceptions. The problem is that I've yet to encounter a system that didn't require edge cases and exceptions.