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

Originally Posted by Seraphim

The problem with this approach is that someone has already been killed/injured.

And? People are injured and killed every day. Sometimes, it's someone's fault and they deserve to be held responsible for it, and sometimes it's not and they don't.

The idea is to make the dangerous behavior illegal in the first place, so that someone can be stopped before harm can happen to someone else.

But see, this is exactly the problem. 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.

If a loved one were killed/injured by some jackass who just couldn't wait to yammer away on his/her cellphone, or at the very least use a hands free version of it that would be a tradgedy.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. It would be very sad, yes, and IMO criminal, but it would not be a "tradgedy" or even a tragedy. A tragedy occurs when a virtue of some individual turns out to be the cause of his or her downfall. Oedipus Rex and Hamlet are tragedies, The Day After Tomorrow and the events of 9-11 are not. Neither are car crashes caused by negligent disregard for others or reckless endangerment.

By allowing the police to stop that jackass at any point prior to him/her being involved in an accident and issuing him/her a ticket is much more preferable, and will make the offender think twice about trying it again. "Hmmm, should I risk another $100 ticket, or just spend the money on a hands free?"

Is it really such an imposition to ask you to use a hands free cell phone adapter? A few years ago we all somehow managed to survive without cellphones in our cars at all.

Preferable to what? Sure, you can make the case that getting a ticket is preferable to causing an accident, but that presumes that you know that the person getting pulled over was really going to get in an accident in the first place. Nobody can know that. 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? 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.

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. This means any program of crime prevention run out of the sheriff's office or the DA's office violates the spirit of free choice. You have to run that program out of the Department of Education and local school boards. What government should be doing is making sure the social consequences of our actions are visited back upon us, so that if you really harm others, you are harmed, and that if you really benefit others, you are benefited and both in proportion to the harm or benefit you really caused. But this means that Government shouldn't be getting involved until the social consequences of our actions become more or less clear. 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.

Put another way, when we make things like speeding or prostitution or recreational drug use or using a cell phone while driving crimes, we diminish the effectiveness and austerity of government itself. These "crimes" are so prolific that enforcement becomes a matter of probability, making government seem ineffective, no one has ever specified real harms that come from them, merely an increased risk that some harms might occur, and worse, the punishments for these crimes is not proportionate to the crime itself (how could it be if no real harm was caused?) but to the harms that might, maybe result if other things happen too (things which might well be outside the defendant's ability to control). These latter two make government pernicious and mundane, mundane because it 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 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.

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.