I'm not talking about applying DUI to marijuana or people sleeping in cars, which is why I'm saying drunk driving and not DUI. I'm talking about why drunk driving is legitimately criminal even when it doesn't result in harm. And that's because it's voluntarily reckless conduct that creates risk to the public.
Law is absolutely logical, you just have to be willing to look at the premises. And it is absolutely a structured expression of what people think is just.
The premise of criminal law is that it's an action taken with malicious intent that makes someone a criminal, not just causing a bad outcome. The law follows that logic to its conclusions. For example under the Model Penal Code, an attempt at murder is punished the same as a completed murder. Someone who, with intent to kill, points a gun and shoots at someone is no less criminal if he misses than if he hits. Criminal law is about punishing culpable conduct. It's illogical to punish two people differently who engage in the same culpable conduct because circumstances outside their control lead to one result versus another.
Now, you can disagree with the basic premise and apply a different logical framework. Just because the premise of the law is that intent is the most important thing does not mean you can't believe something different, such as actual harm being the most important thing. But you gotta wrestle with the implications of that. If harm is the most important thing, killing someone should always be murder. Shouldn't matter whether you hit a jogger wearing all black at night or whether you ran over your boss in broad daylight on purpose.
In my experience, the people who complain about the law being illogical and not the same as justice are the ones abandoning logic. They know what resuls they want, based on what "justice" means to them, (X should not be illegal) and get upset that's not the law. They don't take the time to look at the premises underlying the law to see if the rules logically follow from those premises. If you do that, you'd be surprised how often you conclude "well I think that premise is incorrect, but I can see how the rule follows logically from that."
Ps: also, reckless is a precisely definable concept: when conduct causes a measurable rise in the risk of some negative outcome. Where the line between acceptable and unacceptable rise in risk can't be precisely defined and must be established by social concnsus, but that doesn't make it an illogical concept as you imply by calling it an "opinion."
> I'm not talking about applying DUI to marijuana or people sleeping in cars
Great, but I am, and that's the disconnect. I agree with most of your comment, but the issue isn't that the premise is wrong, it's that the implementation is wrong. When I say that law isn't just, that's what I'm referring to.
The law may be logical in its premise in the abstract, but the actual implementation of DUI laws strays far outside those logical premises, the real world doesn't match the abstract. You're talking about what the law intends to be, I'm talking about what it actually is because imho that's what actually matters. I don't care about the good intentions behind the laws, I care about those being fucked by the poor implementation of said laws.
We don't have the highest incarceration rates in the first world because our laws are just, we have it because they aren't.
> Where the line between acceptable and unacceptable rise in risk can't be precisely defined and must be established by social consensus
That's just rephrasing what I said, something that relies on social consensus "is" just opinion and is not precisely definable, and by that I mean it isn't empirical, rather it's a popularity contest, i.e. political.
Very interesting comment, thank you. I guess as this applies to drunk driving, the tricky thing is the intent to cause harm. One one hand there is very rarely an intention to hurt someone while drunk driving, however on the other hand there is a demonstrably increased risk of hurting someone. It seems hard to me to square those two things up.
Law is absolutely logical, you just have to be willing to look at the premises. And it is absolutely a structured expression of what people think is just.
The premise of criminal law is that it's an action taken with malicious intent that makes someone a criminal, not just causing a bad outcome. The law follows that logic to its conclusions. For example under the Model Penal Code, an attempt at murder is punished the same as a completed murder. Someone who, with intent to kill, points a gun and shoots at someone is no less criminal if he misses than if he hits. Criminal law is about punishing culpable conduct. It's illogical to punish two people differently who engage in the same culpable conduct because circumstances outside their control lead to one result versus another.
Now, you can disagree with the basic premise and apply a different logical framework. Just because the premise of the law is that intent is the most important thing does not mean you can't believe something different, such as actual harm being the most important thing. But you gotta wrestle with the implications of that. If harm is the most important thing, killing someone should always be murder. Shouldn't matter whether you hit a jogger wearing all black at night or whether you ran over your boss in broad daylight on purpose.
In my experience, the people who complain about the law being illogical and not the same as justice are the ones abandoning logic. They know what resuls they want, based on what "justice" means to them, (X should not be illegal) and get upset that's not the law. They don't take the time to look at the premises underlying the law to see if the rules logically follow from those premises. If you do that, you'd be surprised how often you conclude "well I think that premise is incorrect, but I can see how the rule follows logically from that."
Ps: also, reckless is a precisely definable concept: when conduct causes a measurable rise in the risk of some negative outcome. Where the line between acceptable and unacceptable rise in risk can't be precisely defined and must be established by social concnsus, but that doesn't make it an illogical concept as you imply by calling it an "opinion."