The human category is limited, I believe, to intentional killing. Otherwise you open up a whole can of worms about macroeconomic trolley problems. (Am I killing people right now by making insufficiently-optimal donations to charity?)
Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.
It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.
This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.
Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.
It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.
> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.
> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.
Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.
> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.
I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.
Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.
I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.
Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally
While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.
Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.
At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"
We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.
Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.
There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].
[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding
[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...
Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?
It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...
I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).
Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.
You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.