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?
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.
Keep that same energy when a relative finds the driver and murders him in a rage.
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.
We need to do more than just punishment, few here are saying punishment is not "worth doing".
At the bare minimum, keeping this driver locked up behind bars prevents him from doing the same thing again someday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.