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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of 'victimless' crimes - speeding in your car (reckless driving), buying drugs to consume yourself (use of controlled substances), planning to murder your partner (conspiracy). The victim is either 'society' or the person committing the crime. If you commit one of these crimes you're punished for demonstrating a willingness to do what society as a whole has decided it doesn't want people to do. Whether or not that's correct is a matter for debate, but the idea of 'if there's no victim there can't be a crime' is probably nonsense. There's bound to be at least one or two victimless crimes you think should actually be criminal.

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Vehicle speed can be easily measured and is a fact and an offense. Here there were conflicting informations about the other person's age and the offendents could have believed that the other person is 20+.

Let's put that differently. If your speed meeter is broken and you believe that you are not speeding, but in fact are still speeding, then the situation is clear. Here the other person was really 20+, so his judgment was actually correct.

Victimless is not victimless. I propose the criterion of counterfactual victimhood - whether given the behavior of the subject, there exists an alternate universe in which there was a victim of a crime. For instance, consider an attempted murder that failed before the murderer even got near the target. In that case, the victim is counterfactual. However, there are true victimless crimes even under this definition; crimes that never would have had a victim. Speeding for instance doesn't pass this test, but "smoked a joint at home" does. This seems to make it a good fit for my moral beliefs.

I think it's less about whether or not actually intending to commit a crime should be punished, but about whether there was ever such an intention in the first place.

The article makes it sound like this person didn't really believe that the person he was talking to was only 13 years old and, given some of the messages mentioned in the article, that sounds reasonable.

He was talking to a bunch of adult using the photo of an adult woman. People on the internet are not exactly known for never bullshitting people just for the lulz.

The problem here is that this is just the pedo version of asking a prostitute if she's a cop and the intention is exactly the same--to limit the police's ability to catch them.

No, the problem is that the people being caught aren't "them" (the actual paedophiles you would actually want to get) in the first place.

Speak for yourself, I don't have a problem with going after people trying to have sex with people who claim they're 13.

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