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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Take a relatively grey-filled topic like: One person has caused the death of another. Now show me the simple law covering that?

How is that "grey-filled"? There's murder and there's negligence, basically reflecting direct vs. indirect role in causing the death. Both scenarios consider intent to gauge the severity. So you have two knobs you can turn, but which cover the entirety of human-caused deaths.

This is not a "grey-filled" scenario in the least. In fact, it's probably one of the most accessible and clear-cut cases of the law being reducible to simple rules.

What's often not simple is fulfilling the standards of evidence required to know which rules to apply, ie. how much evidence is needed to establish mens rea? But that's not what you claimed. You claimed that you can't have simple, intelligible rules that cover many shades of grey.

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>There's murder and there's negligence

And self-defense? or any of the dozens of other shades (car accidents?)?

So two people getting in a fight in a bar and one unintentionally kills the other should receive the same sentence as car accident victim? Or accidental sports injury?

You are attempting to simplify the world to simple morality tales. Hope you never have to live in such a world.

> And self-defense?

Good point, being under threat is a third knob. Still very simple.

> or any of the dozens of other shades (car accidents?)?

Again, car "accidents" are always due to negligence somewhere, either mechanical failures making the manufacturer liable, or distraction on the part of a driver, or inebriation, etc. These are all very simple considerations that everyone understands.

> So two people getting in a fight in a bar and one unintentionally kills the other should receive the same sentence as car accident victim?

Killing someone in a bar fight is third degree murder, so I've already covered that. If your "car accident victim" had intent to cause harm with his vehicle, that's murder too.

>Killing someone in a bar fight is third degree murder, so I've already covered that

So in the space of a minimal online discussion you've gone from 2 classes of murder to now 5 classes (3 degrees of murder + negligence + under threat).

Now continue this exercise for the next 250 years and you will eventually have a codification of the classes of murder which roughly mirrors our current laws. Which is to say, it will get progressively more complex.

No, you're not paying attention. There are 3 independent variables, negligence, intent and threat, and the various permutations of these are what define the classes of murder, criminal negligence, and so on.

3 independent variables is not a complex model. The complexity of the law that people bemoan are not about simple issues like murder, they are issues like zoning laws, tax law, and the numerous byzantine exceptions that are carved out to serve special interests, or laws that are archaic and have never been revisited or are only selectively applied.

How many different sub-variations of "intent" are there?

So if I plan to kill Person A, but miss my shot and kill Person B whats the charge? What if I was under threat by Person A? Who should even be charged for Person B's death...me or Person A?

Moreover, you've neglected to mention that there are all sorts of "human killing another" which are not even considered a crime (abortion, do not resuscitate orders, etc).

>The complexity of the law that people bemoan are not about simple issues like murder, they are issues like zoning laws, tax law

Lets not get ahead of ourselves, we still have barely scratched the surface with the 'easy laws'

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