For example… Speeding
Going down the highway doing 10 oven the limit and you get pulled over an dgive a hefty ticket… But Nothing bad happened.
Another example… Letting a Tesla do full self driving but you aren’t paying attention. The car is driving itself quite well but you are ticketed for undue care and attention… But there was no accident or anything… Nothing happened.
Asking this question explains a lot of why things are a bad as they are.
They’re bad because people like trump and hegseth are in charge
They’re bad because the path that led to Trump began a long time ago, but nobody cared until something bad happened. We must identify situations that have too high of a risk to cause something bad to happen, like unsafe driving habits, unchecked capitalism, and prejudice, and find ways to prevent them before something bad happens. The world can’t function by only reacting to bad things when they happen - it has to work to prevent them.
This response strengthens my original.
The act itself is unsafe and could kill you or another person so the punishment is supposed to act as both a deterrent from doing those things and a response to irresponsibility that put others in danger.
There are acts that we’ve determined are unsafe enough that we don’t want to allow them so even in a “successful” execution of that act you still violate a law.
Found out recently a friend of mine scrolls tiktok while driving. He has a kid too btw. The law is there to protect OTHER people, not to give you a mild annoyance
Because you weren’t able to know nothing bad would happen. Your guilt is dependent on the risk you took.
Imagine shooting a gun with your eyes closed in a random spot. Is it ok to do if noone was in the line of fire?
It’s shocking how, despite all the response, no one has presented a clear general case.
It’s called risk management. We learn about risk when a bad thing happens. When a bad thing happens, that means it was possible for it to happen. The next question is “under what conditions will this bad thing happen again”. And as it turns out, there is no deterministic answer to this question. It’s all probability.
So condition X increases the probability of bad thing Y happening by amount Z. When a bad thing (Y) happens, we commission studies to look into all the possible conditions (X1, X2, etc) that contribute to Y and what the probability increase is for each X.
Armed with this information, we then set about the political process of determining the negative value of the bad thing and the negative value of eliminating the contributing conditions.
So for example, people get skin cancer (bad thing). The sun is a contributing condition to people getting skin cancer. If there was no sun, less people would get skin cancer. But if we destroy the sun, we destroy all of humanity. So addressing the condition of “the sun exists” is more negative than the bad thing “some people get skin cancer”.
Following the same example, another condition for skin cancer is that the skin lacks the physical ability to protect against the sun’s harmful rays. We could solve this by forcibly genetically engineering the entire human population, or by forcing everyone to wear a poncho or burka, or by forcing everyone to wear sunscreen. But politically, we have chosen that since skin cancer’s largest impact is in the individual who develops it, and that the social cost of skin cancer is small by comparison, that the negative effects of removing bodily autonomy from everyone are worse than the bad thing “some people get skin cancer some times”.
So now we arrive at the final component of why we punish people for contributing to the conditions that increase the probability of bad thing happening. Social impact.
If the bad thing we are analyzing affects a lot of people AND the bad thing happens to people who are not exclusively the people who brought about the conditions that increase the probability of the bad thing, then we, as a society, sometimes decide that the best way to reduce the bad thing occuring is to reduce the probability that it will occur and that it is socially acceptable to punish people who raise the probability because that punishment will reduce the frequency and volume of that behavior and therefore reduce the frequency and volume of the bad thing.
In the example of speeding, it’s easy. Speeding is totally legal for drag racers on a closed track and no one punishes them for going too fast. They might kill themselves, but that’s on them. But speeding on public roads leads to the death of people other than the driver. The driver could also die, but especially with pedestrians and cyclists, the speeder usually survives but other people die because of the speeder’s behavior. These things also happen when people drive the legal speed limit. In fact, it’s just a reality of living in a society with tons of motor vehicles.
But the research shows speed is a major contributor to deaths of people other than the driver, and that limiting speeds absolutely results in fewer deaths caused by motor vehicles. In fact, literally every single speed limit set in the world is backed by a speed study that you can challenge with empirical evidence and trigger an empirical review to determine whether the speed limit is set too high or too low.
We could go to the next step and automate speed governance. We could require all cars be installed with a speed governor, we could put up digital beacons to announce speed limits and require all cars be designed to respect the speed limit at all times. But, we have decided that the negatives of doing that are worse than the number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents where speed was a contributing factor. Costs would be very high, effectiveness would be very low at the outset, false negatives and false positives would be rampant, and people could disable their governor system and then we’d still need traffic monitoring to catch the speeders (although disabling the governor might be punished by jail time and vehicle destruction).
It’s all math. We do it because the math shows that it works. Reducing the risk factors of a specific negative outcome reduces the negative outcome. And we do it because we do not want to wait for every single human being to have to experience the bad thing to learn to govern their own behavior, especially when that bad thing could be the death of innocent people.
Same with killing if you are caught by the cops, you should be free to go home.
Tesla … The car is driving itself quite well
hahahaha
I understand what you are trying to get at but those 2 things are equivalent, that’s comparing apples to oranges. Also someone died in your example which anyone would believe to be “something bad” happening.
The real answer to OP’s question is because the laws that are in place are to be enforced regardless if anything bad happens so everyone is held to the same standard. On the other side of that all citizens are expected to follow the same rules/laws regardless of anyone being around to enforce them. These 2 things are the basis of any society to function in any meaningful way.
Almost there but not quite. I’m not a lawyer, but have friends who are. The two examples are actually equivalent. Because, by principle, laws evaluate actions. Not consequences or intentions, those can be qualifiers in criminal cases, or discussed in civil cases. But in general the law prefers to deal with things that happened, not risk or what could happen. As it is far less ambiguous to argue that someone did something, than arguing whether or not something could’ve happened.
That’s why pre-crime was such a big deal in the sci-fi movie Minority Report. Similar to thought crime, it is a tough ethical and legal discussion without a clear possible answer that doesn’t lead to violent authoritarianism.
“I was speeding but nothing bad happened” is equivalent “I was shooting in his general direction not at him, I missed every time”. That’s still attempted murder and the former is still speeding. The crime is the action, not the result.
Yeah, I was about to mention Sideshow Bob making the same argument that attempted murder shouldn’t be a crime.
Nothing bad happened yet. Keep doing it, and something bad’s going to happen. An ounce of prevention is better than a truckload of cure. Some things can’t be cured. You can’t punish someone hard enough to undo road deaths. The victims are still going to be dead. They don’t come back to life once the killer goes to jail. There is no other reasonable way to handle road deaths than by stopping them before they happen. Drive at a reasonable and appropriate speed, or someone’s going to die. Those are your options.
No it’s not a perfect solution, people still die on the roads, and they probably always will, but we’ve chosen the speed limits at a point that prevents some deaths, you cannot realistically argue that, and that is all you have to know to understand that they are justified, and they do have an appropriate punishment.
Does that help you understand?
But at the same time you can’t hold people responsible for something that might happen but hasn’t yet
I absolutely can and do.
I go around waving a gun around that’s loaded and safety off at the range. Nothing bad happens, but I took a risk that put not just myself but EVERYONE ELSE in danger.
I kinda get what you’re saying. I can’t remember how many times my parents would yell at me as a kid for climbing too high up a tree or swimming too far past the shore, and I always came back. I knew what I could handle, and made sure I didn’t go further than I was able, but my parents could only understand what they could see, and they didn’t trust that I was able to handle it. The issue is that they had no way to know what I knew, and they can’t do their job of keeping me safe by trusting that I knew what I was doing, because if I was wrong and got hurt, we’d all pay the price.
Different people carry different risks, even when performing the same task. A professional driver is a safer driver than a teenager with a permit. The question is how much risk we’re willing to allow before we say it’s too much. The law is there to make sure that everyone is safe, and so everyone has to operate at the same level. The sacrifice we make is that, for example, the professional driver who could probably drive safely at 100 mph in a 60mph zone has to drive at 60 mph, because the teenager with a permit is barely able to drive safely at 60, and if we let the professional drive 100, we’d have to let the teenager drive 100, too.
Yes, you can hold people responsible for doing something that has a very high probability of causing harm or injury. It doesn’t matter if it actually happens.
Why should we punish someone doing Russian roulette while holding a gun against another persons head if nothing happened?
There is a risk threshold that gets crossed due to certain actions. They’re punishing rolling the dice, not the result.
Because rational thinking isn’t common and some people have to be told or discouraged to not do something dangerous or reckless. Your example is oddly specific, sounds like you got a ticket for putting your Tesla in self driving mode and starting making tik toks and got a ticket.
Not me…but it did just happen in Vancouver… Got me thinking
I mean the person was allegedly sleeping but the car was driving along just fine and nothing happened…
Imagine someone points a gun into a crowd, closes their eyes, and pulls the trigger, but the gun jams so no bullet is fired and everyone is fine. Do you think that person should be let off scot-free just because nothing bad happened?
By this logic there’s no problem with Russian roulette… well, until there is. Same general concept.
Because the whole idea is to discourage people from behavior that is likely to cause bad things to happen. Obviously when bad things happen we go “I wish someone had stopped the person before people died”.
If everyone started driving 10 kph over the speed limit we’d see a significant uptick in the rate of accidents. That is just a fact.
We don’t want that so we’ve set limits that still get you where you’re going as fast as possible while keeping that particular stretch of road relatively safe. To enforce those limits we’ve decided that if you get caught going over you get punished for it. Not for driving fast per se but for breaking the rules you agreed to in order to be allowed to drive there in the first place. Fining you even when you didn’t get into an accident is just carrying out the threat so that it keeps its credibility.
spoiler
Also, as a related sidenote: I don’t believe in free will so in a way punishing people even for murder doesn’t really make any sense since in my view they could not have done otherwise and simply can’t help themselves. I view a situation like that in a similar way to a bear mauling a person in the woods. What sense does punishing the bear make? It’s a bear for crying out loud - what did you expect it would do? However, we’re not bears. People regularly get the urge to similarly maul another person but most of the time they don’t because they know they’ll get in trouble for it so in that sense the punishment makes sense. Not as a punishment per se but as a deterrence to protect others. If you did a bad thing despite the deterrence the only tool we have left is to lock you in a facility so that you don’t harm anyone else. It’s like shooting a bear that wandered into a neighbourhood. It’s not to punish it for doing so - it’s to protect innocent people.
To actually answer the question: because bad things happened.
First of all, this is a public road used by a lot of people. This is a shared space/resource that we all want to benefit from, and that means that it needs to be safe for everyone to use it (otherwise, people are not going to use it and thus no benefit from it).
By speeding (or letting a Tesla do the self-driving without paying attention), they broke important rules. The other point is that had there been an accident, then we would have punished the person for the accident too.
We can argue about whether a given speed limit is adequate for a given stretch of road, but the core of it is that someone (usually experts) settled on a speed under which it is safe to travel. Going above that speed means that you are now taking on more risks than accounted for when designed.
Why is breaking these rules bad? Because, for example, normalization of deviance. The long-story short is that safety rules are an important part of keeping a system safe, and ignoring them removes the safety margins built into the system and either makes accidents more likely, or makes any accident that does happen more disastrous.
To stay around the speeding example, consider the following: people take a set amount of time to react. The faster you go, the more distance you need to react. If you are traveling down a road, and an animal crosses 100 meters ahead, the faster you go the less time you have to react.
Also consider the following: roads are not perfect. If you go over a patch with sand, or a recently-rained-on surface, you may end up with much less grip than you thought you did, and you end up spinning on the turn, or not breaking enough. And you won’t know you need it until you do, and now you’re too late to not speed.
If you were on a private road? Good luck. Its on you. But you are in a public space, and it’s likely you’re putting others at risk, either directly, or by (as linked above) normalizing deviance and making it more likely for others to not follow the rules when it matters.
punish people when nothing bad happened ?
Well, we don’t. We just make them pay a fine.
But where are you from, where is it a punishment?
