Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

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As the article mentions, the driver will have to deal with the knowledge that they killed an entire family by accident, which can’t be easy. Of course, it is nothing compared to what the killed family’s fiends and loved ones feel, but “NO consequences” isn’t exactly fair.

Which is also part of the point of the article: the problem is that it’s missing the forest for the trees to treat just the driver as responsible — one could argue the driver was also failed by the entire system described here, the system that privileges vehicles and their occupants over pedestrians, that treats death as an unavoidable, and therefore acceptable, consequence of vehicle use, which itself is treated as an unalienable right.

Where are the:

- fitness-to-drive tests every few years?

- geofenced enforced speed limits?

- protected sidewalks with higher boundaries?

- physical smartphone restrictions on use while driving? (Paired with your car, moving > 5 mph, single occupancy? Car mode.)

- pedestrian-focused safety mechanisms? (E.g., external airbags?)

- traffic calming measures on major roadways shared with pedestrians?

- standards around signaling at crosswalks on major roadways?

- heavily subsidized transit that runs frequently enough that it’s preferable to driving?

Every regulation has a cost, of course, and many of these are horribly privacy-violating if naively implemented. But let’s be 100% clear what we are privileging when we make these decisions!

It would be less frustrating if our society was willing to take this systemic view of low level crime as well. But there are people in jail and even prison for shoplifting, or stealing a car, or such unforgivable violence as a punch that left someone bruised. Because yes, we demand a system that creates these kinds of crime, but no, people aren’t willing to think that way about anything except killing people with your car.

I don't disagree with you -- I'd only add that I think a major factor here is premeditation.

The law already treats harms from negligence or even from "heat of the moment" actions differently than harms from premeditated action.

Few of the vehicular deaths here are the result of a person making a particular decision to kill someone -- even if that is a statistically likelier outcome of distracted driving. That stands in contrast with shoplifting and vehicle theft, which are almost always planned actions, or at least actions undertaken with the knowledge that they are crimes.

Whether this is the right line to draw or not is, of course, a major question.

Relying on the driver to have some kind of moral anguish the rest of his life as punishment is shaky at best.

The driver might not even give a fuck. He might rationalize he wasn’t a fault.

What about the anguish it would cause a parent to know their child and their whole family were killed off and the driver gets to pretty much live his life as normal? Would you just accept that?

I am not suggesting anything of the sort. The family should absolutely sue the driver for everything he's got, an avenue available beyond the paltry criminal penalties applied here.

Of course, that will not make the family whole. Additional punishment for the driver will also not make the family whole.

The question is: what are our priorities as a society? This article is arguing that our priorities are terrible: as a society we create the conditions that allow and perpetuate this kind of tragedy on a daily basis, and then point fingers at the individuals when the tragedies inevitably happen.

We can't do anything to make this family whole. Advocating for greater punishment will do approximately nothing to make the next family whole.

This article is arguing: all we can do to make the next family whole is to stop treating traffic fatalities as unavoidable, and prevent the next tragedy by treating cars as the dangerous objects they really are, by supporting alternative modes of transportation.

So because people can’t be made whole, we shouldn’t bother with greater punishments.

Keep that same energy when a relative finds the driver and murders him in a rage.

No? Sounds like maybe you didn't actually read my post.

In fact, I described the penalties here as "paltry" and it is totally reasonable to expect greater punishment in this case.

I am also saying that this will do nothing for the next family, but you seem to have missed that point.

Why does it have to do anything for the next family to be worth doing?

Why would it better to impose more severe punishment here, than to save the next family?

We need to do more than just punishment, few here are saying punishment is not "worth doing".

What do you propose we do exactly? Because it sounds like you’re basically saying nothing.

At the bare minimum, keeping this driver locked up behind bars prevents him from doing the same thing again someday.

He said nothing a lot in this thread.

He basically wants to keep repeating the virtue signalling idea that all people are good and punishment is bad.

He thinks you can cure bad actions by restricting freedom of actions in the first place. It's pretty sad and unfortunately terrible. But it is definitely "easier to feel good" with it.

Oof. You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity. It’s fine, it provides a mild disincentive, in some cases it works a bit, but it overwhelmingly doesn’t solve the problems discussed in this thread: mistakes people make, sometimes innocently, and sometimes because of lapses of judgment. You can’t punish your way into better judgment, people will continue to make mistakes. We’re not talking about crimes with intent here. We’re talking about screwups that killed people.

The approach that works is to fix systems so that mistakes are harder to make or their consequences are mitigated. This is sometimes called defense in depth: many overlapping protections mean that accidents are less likely. Extra defenses mean that when mistakes do happen their consequences are less severe. (None of this has anything to do with whether you punish people who act maliciously, and is actually independent of whether you also do that.)

The FAA is a good example: mandated redundancies, the NTSB does a root cause analysis on every accident to figure out how it made it through defenses. As a result flying is one of the safest modes of transport, even despite Boeing’s recent attempts to undo that legacy.

For the cases in question here, roads could be redesigned to reduce the likelihood and severity of vehicles impacting pedestrians. In another message in this thread I listed eight possible measures society could take to do this.

Honestly it’s starting to feel like it’s the “more punishment!” crowd that’s virtue signaling at this point. Of course it’s easier to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you punish any person you can point a finger at, it’s much harder actually getting to the root of anything.

>You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity.

It's not debated nor under debate, it's worked for that long. Not only has it worked that long but the effects are not even minor... otherwise it would have disappeared as it's pretty hard to maintain.

Not going to read the rest.

The punishment isn’t about corrective action, it’s about justice. If you kill off a whole family being a reckless idiot, you should not be able to just go on living your own life happily ever after. You should be rotting in prison without being able to live your own life. Both sides of the tragedy should be balanced out.

Yes, and neither this article nor I are advocating against justice being served. We are just making the point that this kind of justice alone doesn’t prevent future tragedies.

We can have justice, and we should, and then we should also feel a moral obligation to reduce harm from reckless or mistaken action in the future, no?

If we only have “justice” in the sense of punishment for harm, but do nothing to reduce the chances that we end up needing “justice” again later, then we’re just setting ourselves up for more future “justice” in the form of multiple destroyed lives: some through negligence, some through state action pursuing justice. Who does that serve?

I (and the original article) are advocating that we do more to reduce the likelihood that “being a reckless idiot” causes a whole family to be killed, because “justice” doesn’t prevent people from “being a reckless idiot” — and I for one would vastly prefer that my whole family not be killed, even if I knew that killer would be brought to justice.

I proposed 8 things we can do in the message you originally replied to.

It's statistically very unlikely that this driver will accidentally kill someone else. Keeping this driver locked up behind bars may be a reasonable punishment, but it doesn't change the stats one iota, and it doesn't prevent others from doing the same thing. That's why we also need systemic interventions like the 8 I listed earlier.

Oh, another hilariously inept take on the situation.

Now I know why you're attacking me in the other comments. Because you have an agenda.

Vehicular deaths are unavoidable in a vehicular society. This isn't rocket science, you're free to keep refuting the inevitable though.

I wonder if you'd change your tune if we were talking about drug use, or obesity.

"Just stop them eating food if they're fat and hungry." "Just eliminate unhealthy food that tastes good and is natural." "Meat is a sin"

> the driver will have to deal with the knowledge that they killed an entire family by accident

Do you think the term "accident" accurately describes what happened? In that particular case, the driver of an SUV was speeding on the wrong side of the road, ran onto the sidewalk, and struck the family and the neighboring library.

In the sense that the outcome was not maliciously intentional, yes. Doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility, of course, or that their egregious actions didn’t cause it—just means they didn’t set out to do it.

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