My law paradox
February 27th, 2007Two naughty kids play a stupid game: they throw bricks off the terrace roof of their high-rise apartment building. Basically, they hold the bricks over the railing, let go, and run off to hide so that nobody sees them.
One day, a man walks out of the lobby on the ground floor, just as two bricks are following a parallel free-fall trajectory in mid-air. One brick hits the ground two feet to the right of the man and smashes to pieces with a loud thud, while the other kills him.
When the two bricks were still in mid-air, both kids had performed the exact same stupidly dangerous action. But the victim walked under the left brick. The kid who threw the left brick is a murderer. The other kid is not. The victim made the murderer.
Another example
Alice has severely beaten Bob and she gets a thirty year sentence because Bob died, but if the cleaning lady had not moved the bed stand to dust underneath, then the victim’s neck would not have hit the corner of the bed stand in his fall, and Alice would only have served a couple of months’ time. The cleaning lady made the murderess.
These cases of quantum undetermination show that being judged for the consequences of an action (even those consequences over which we had no control at the time we fulfilled said action) and not for the intrinsic characteristics of our action can be unjust.
Action vs consequence
In a similar way that we should not mix the role of victim and judge, we should not assimilate the action and the consequence. People should be punished in proportion of their actions. Victims should get compensation in proportion of their prejudice. The difficulty is to assess how serious an action is when it only statistically results in bad consequences.
We can prove that when I shoot my neighbour at gunpoint, he has 100% chances of dying, then obviously I get a life sentence.
If we reckon that Alice’s blow with a baseball bat had only one in ten chances of killing Bob, can we say she gets a tenth of a life sentence?
If we compute the probability the brick would fall on someone, can we say each kid should get a hundredth of a life sentence for each time he dropped a brick?
How bad is speeding? Can we say that one in a thousand speeding cases results in a lethal accident, so that all people caught speeding should serve a thousandth of a life sentence?
I dare not think about the amount of legal burden this kind of thinking process would bring, but don’t you agree it looks more just in its principle?
Read on
The rhino analogy
An apologia of the scientific mind
Air crash damages
Old (and dead) Mr. Russell would have loved to read this post. The brick example shows how starkly a fixed legislation can fail, and how it is nearly impossible to legislate for all possibilities. The only thing to do seems to be to have a rational body treat each case separately.
How strange that I read this only a few minutes after looking at BlogLily’s post titled “Sacrifices”, which has to do with jury duty.
“how starkly a fixed legislation can fail”: I had not thought of that. I will now.
Legislating in this prospective manner would be nightmarish to administer. In most situations someone or something needs to suffer harm before the law kicks in. Kids can drop bricks and not hurt anyone or anything. Should the law be involved in this act ? While dangerous, it isn’t illegal.
There is also the question of intent. In the example of Alice and the bat, it seems to me you have to factor in whether or not Alice intended to kill or to injure Bob with the bat. If she was merely playing baseball and Bob walked too close to the baseball mound, then it would be an accident. In your example, Alice would be found 1/10 guilty when she didn’t intend to injure Bob.
We’d basically need to monitor every single action of every single individual, then run computer simulations to determine whether the action is dangerous and what the probability is, then query the intention from the perpetrator (”this has a 1/10th risk of killing Bob, is it really what you want to do?”), then signal the action to the police server for immediate arrest (or remote incapacitation). It takes some technology, but with the progress of bio-implants and wireless communications, maybe it is conceivable in a near future (at least in a spooky science-fiction book).