Thread: YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED...RESISTANCE IS FUTILE...

Originally Posted by Wildtim

Anyone wonder why no one has yet made a fish shaped Douglas Adams memorial Bluetooth headset?

Dude, you should have just gone out there and marketed that idea, you'd make a bundle! Cool idea! Babel Fish Bluetooth. That'd be so cool even KP and JMS would wear one behind the wheel, and then I'd feel safer!

Dude, I can only assume that you're playing the Philosophy 101 student's Devil's advocate on this one.

The criminal legal system isn't a mechanism of punishment and retribution used whenever something bad happens, as though assigning culpability is a panaceatic bandaid. That's what the US civil law system is for .

Criminal law is designed to make explicit rules of conduct for those who are incapable of exercising common sense or putting acceptable social conduct ahead of their own self interest. Its purpose is to deter individuals from acting dangerously or harmfully outside the accepted norms of our society.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

...What might be dangerous for me to attempt, might be perfectly safe for someone else who has more experience, skills or natural talent. Why should the law be written to limit the abilities of more competent people when less competent people mess things up? If too many incompetent people are doing stupid things while driving, maybe the qualifications for getting a driver's license needs to be made much harder. It's not like driving is a right, after all...

Because I'm a competent chainsaw juggler, I should be able to wander through a crowded July 4th National Mall flinging Husqvarna ABs above everyone's heads as I stroll along?

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

...What if the person were a trained race car driver who had impeccable instincts for the road? Why should they be held to the same speed limit as I, or be forbidden from having their hands otherwise occupied while driving?

Then they should be driving as fast as they want, on a race track where their actions don't impact on the rest of us who have chosen not to be on that race track.

Except in very very special circumstances you can't have laws variably applicable depending upon the skills and talents of the individuals involved. To argue that you can and should is talking rubbish.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

...Moreover, the nature of such "crimes" is that the number of probable violators far exceeds the capability of law enforcement to detect those crimes and prosecute the offenders. This invites selective application of the law, according the best judgment of the arresting officer, and that's never a good thing. Because they can't get everybody who doesn't use "hands-free," they can and very likely will enforce that law against people they don't like or who were arrested for some other reason. There's far too much potential for abuse....

This part is true. After years of rum running, smuggling, intimidation, and murder Al Capone was finally sentenced to 12 years for SMSing while operating a motor vehicle.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

...Remember, this is supposed to be the land of the free. Government should not be getting in the way of our choices, including the choices to be irresponsible and criminal...

It isn't. It is trying to prevent your poor choices from impacting the rest of us.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

It's not the cell phone that causes the social damage in terms of property loss and injury or death, it's the accident. The cell phone can be a factor, and indeed the determining factor when it comes to assessing responsibility. But that doesn't mean cell phone use while driving is the cause of the harm.

Agreed, cell phones don't kill people. Idiots who drive while choosing to impare their ability to do so by talking on cell phones do. That's why cell phones aren't illegal, but why there are restrictions on how you can use them while driving.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

... government... threatens to insert itself into each individual's daily lives as a replacement for his own power of judgment, after all, why not make sugary cereal illegal for much the same reasons?

And it does so because some people show an appalling inability to exercise judgement or, at the risk of repeating myself, choose to place their own self interest above that of the functioning society in which they choose to live and from which they derive benefit.

The same thing could be said of seat belts. Who does it hurt if you decide not to wear a seat belt, or ensure that your children wear one? Well obviously your children. And my insurance premiums. And the price of automobiles from the ubiquitous and inevitable law suit. And my taxes which pay for the emergency workers who have to spend their Saturday night stopping traffic and civil servants who have to go out and scrape you off the armco.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

...And pernicious because, in attaching penalties whose severity far outstrips the real harm done by doing these things, and instead matches the potential harm that might be caused, we make our laws and penalties look silly.

Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

..Treating a whole population as a single thing, where the rate of cell-phone usage while driving has a definite effect on the rate of serious accidents is fine if we're doing a sociological, anthropological or marketing research. But when it comes to the law and enforcement of the law, we must treat individuals as individuals and not as members or instances of a population. This means holding an individual responsible for only the harms he has really (not potentially) committed. Otherwise, you make every man guilty for any man's crime.

That is a) impossible to effect, and b) rubbish.

If you want it in Philosophy 101 terms - I believe your namesake, before driving around chatting on his cell phone, would ask himself what would the world be like if everyone was chatting and driving all the time? If you sacrifice my safety as a means to your convenience you are denying me my autonomy, the very thing you claim to be defending.

Notes:
1) I made up "panaceatic".
2) US civil law is, these days, anything but.
3) I'm not a competent chainsaw juggler.

Originally Posted by Wildtim

Anyone wonder why no one has yet made a fish shaped Douglas Adams memorial Bluetooth headset?

Remember when they tried that back in the 80's?

The fish sticking out of his ear acts as a nice distraction from that bad sports coat...

Hey, Mark. Nobody's forcing you to drive either.

X

To an extent, I am merely playing devil's advocate, but much of what I am saying regarding jurisprudence I do believe, and I believe Kant would have agreed with much of it as well.

Here's the problem. There's literally nothing I can do that doesn't affect everybody else in some way. As I sit here typing this response, and drinking a liter of Coca-Cola I bought at a nearby convenience store, I'm using electricity which is power that nobody else gets to use now. The same thing goes with my coke. And I haven't even walked out the door of my apartment yet. When I get out into the world, and my interaction others becomes more direct and also more complex, I affect others even more. Given the vast complexity of the world, there's no way I can know whether what I do is going to benefit others or harm them until the consequences of what I do completely manifest themselves. I am reminded of a piece of advice I read once, that whenever you do something, whether what you intend is brought about or not, at least three other things will also happen, and usually at least one of them will be something you did not expect, and likely don't want.

That's the problem with using consequences to judge whether something is the right or wrong thing to do. Nobody knows what the consequences of an individual act will be ahead of time. If we use statistics, we can take a large sample of many of these kinds of acts, and characterize the consequences that result in a probabilistic manner. So we can say that using a cell phone while driving increases the likelihood of being in an accident. But we can't say that an individual's using a cell phone during one of his car trips has any effect whatever on the likelihood that he will get in an accident during this one trip. Either he's going to get in an accident or he won't, and the cell phone will either have a role to play in causing that accident or it won't. This is how inferential reasoning works. We generalize from a set of individual instances to a universal or abstract statement, but, unlike with deductive reasoning, we are not automatically allowed to apply that general statement back to the specific instances. There may very well be a 10% increase in accidents that occur with drivers who use their cell phones over drivers who don't, but this doesn't mean that if I use my cell phone on this particular trip, that my chances of getting in an accident are 10% higher.

Because the consequences of an individual act are so obscure before that act is done, I don't believe that government can or should have the role of trying to prevent us from harming one another. Since we literally can't know beforehand whether what we propose to do will benefit or harm others, mandating government to prevent harm would give them a mandate to regulate and severely limit the actions and interactions with others that can take place, and this limitation would have the effect of greatly limiting social progress by constraining the domain of behaviors we can negotiate to work through our mutual interests and disagreements.

Indeed, Kant himself does make this point. The judicial system cannot have as one of its legitimate ends the goal of preventing harm, because this makes those individuals who are restricted from doing some things or who are forced to do other things in order to reach this goal mere means to this end, and does not respect their own autonomy. Fear of consequences is not a moral motivation, and if we build a judicial system around the fear of consequences, in such a way that such fear becomes an inescapable and universal motive for not doing criminal things, we deny human dignity to those who choose not to do these things because they are not the right thing to do.

Let me be absolutely clear here. I do not think you should drive while talking on your cell-phone, hands free or not. I do not think you should juggle chainsaws in a crowded place, or randomly fire off guns on a college campus. I don't think people ought to use recreational drugs. But I also don't think any of those things should be crimes unless and until someone else, who was not privy to the decision to do those things, is harmed by them. Justice is essentially retributive and distributive, not preventative. It does not care one way or another whether the consequences of an act are good or bad. It simply says that the good consequences of an act ought to be distributed to those who deserve them, typically those who were responsible for creating the good in the first place, and likewise with bad consequences. Justice does not require us to only create good consequences. First of all, this would be impossible, and second of all, it would mean that we wouldn't be able to tell whether an act was "just" until after it had been performed and all it's consequences were in.

Justice is not equal to goodness, and where the government's concern is with justice, it cannot pay any attention at all to the goodness or badness of the consequences of an act. This does not mean that government cannot be concerned with goodness, or build programs to bring things about that are nearly universally recognized as good. National security, economic stability, education and the environment are all areas where the government can and does act to bring about what it thinks is good. More often than not, it's wrong, but this fact is not particularly concerning, as all humans get these sorts of judgments more wrong than they do right.

What justice is about is freedom, and freedoms should always be maximized, and not restricted. The ONLY justification for limiting freedoms is not that, without restrictions, others might be harmed, but that, without restrictions, other's freedoms are infringed upon. To be sure, harm can cause a loss of freedom, you can't do as much with a broken arm as you can without one, and this is why jurisprudence often relies on the Harm Principle to justify a limitation on freedoms, but the harm alone is not what justifies the limitation, its effects on one's freedoms does. What's more, the punishment that attaches to such an act should only attach when such a limitation on freedoms occurs, not simply because such an act runs a risk of causing such limitation. Otherwise, you would be justified in charging someone with 1st degree murder even when they didn't kill anybody, but just tried to.

Let me re-iterate my central point, as it is the area where I think we have our fundamental disagreement. Government, in writing and enforcing laws which govern our interaction with each other, cannot and should not have as its intent the creation of good consequences or the reduction of bad ones. It's sole interest must be in the maximization of freedoms or available ends to its citizenry and the proper distribution of whatever consequences arise from their mutual interaction. Distribution of bad things to people who have not yet caused bad things to happen is unjust. Ticketing someone for speeding, arresting them for smoking weed, citing them for using a cell-phone while driving, all of these things involved distributing bad things to people who, for all we know of them otherwise, might be the very best people in the world. We certainly don't know that they have caused harm and the harm we distribute to them by ticketing or arresting them has nothing to do with, and is not proportional to, whatever harm they may have caused.

Originally Posted by gratewhitehuntr

Keep em coming! I love it!!!