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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

Please explain the difference, in terms of how it should affect my opinion of the person who carries out the act. Pretend, for the sake of argument (and because it’s true) that I don’t see it.

A factory boss decides to release some toxic pollutant. They know that it will result in some number of deaths over the next years. They choose to go through with it anyway, because they make more profit than if they disposed of the stuff properly, and that money matters more to them than the lives they’re ending.

What’s the difference between that and some petty criminal shooting someone in the street so they can take the victim’s wallet?

And yeah, smoking counts too, why not? The saving grace there is that the harm from an individual smoker isn’t very large. Even over a period of years, someone who habitually smokes near people who don’t consent to it only takes a tiny fraction of a life. That’s why I think smoking bans should be enforced with reasonable fines rather than life in prison.

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> Please explain the difference, in terms of how it should affect my opinion of the person who carries out the act.

Sure.

> A factory boss decides to release some toxic pollutant. They know that it will result in some number of deaths over the next years. They choose to go through with it anyway, because they make more profit than if they disposed of the stuff properly, and that money matters more to them than the lives they’re ending.

This depends a lot on context you haven't provided. Most importantly - is this legal?

If releasing this toxic pollutant is illegal, then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. For good reason, that is usually not a death sentence. But if you have an issue with how harsh or not the sentence is, that's a question to take up with the legal system, not with the individual.

Either way, vigilante justice is not needed.

If releasing this pollutant is legal, the question is different. Firstly, why is it legal? If it shouldn't be, then again - this is something to take up with the justice system. Sometimes it's legal for good reasons - it's not clear yet that it is truly toxic. That should definitely inform how we treat someone - releasing something that might be a pollutant is definitely different.

There's just a lot of nuance to this question, it's not an easy soundbite, because the real world is complicated.

> What’s the difference between that and some petty criminal shooting someone in the street so they can take the victim’s wallet?

Let me make a very important point here.

The legality of an action matters a lot more for society than the morality of an action. That's kind of the whole reason we have a legal system, and for good reason! And a pretty fundamental principle of the legal system is that intent matters a whole lot.

Here's some of the differences of the two cases:

- With a criminal shooting someone in the street to take their wallet, I am very scared that he will continue doing this - he will likely shoot more people to get their wallets, because he ignores the laws and morality.

As opposed to the factory boss, who (assuming this is legal), would presumably not do something if it were illegal. So I don't have to worry about his actions - he's not likely to "kill" anyone else if it's against the law.

- A criminal shooting someone is almost certainly trying to kill or at least harm them. The action is very direct. This matters a bunch, because we can be pretty certain of their intent, and therefore how they will act in the future.

As opposed to a factory boss - where the indirectness of the action is far more ambiguous. Did he really know that this would cause deaths? Are there mitigating circumstances (like him being pretty sure it's far enough that it won't cause deaths because it's small amounts, or far from populations)?

---

The biggest problem with your examples is that there are really two options here. You either agree with the legal system - in which case, there's a perfect remedy for actions like releasing toxic chemicals, which is using the legal system to prosecute such people.

Or you don't agree with the legal system - you think some things should be illegal, but they aren't.

And this is what is secretly (or not so secretly) motivating most of the pro-vigilante comments. They think that what they consider to be moral is good enough to use to enact justice - they don't need to actually convince their fellow citizens, or convince their lawmakers, to enact their ideas into law. It's enough for them to fervently be sure they are right - that's supposedly a good enough reason to inflict their morality on other people using violence.

And that is a disgusting, anti-democratic worldview, that would leave society in tatters.

Society can't function if everyone can just decide that their morality is the ultimate justice. We have to come together as a society and agree on rules. Because as everyone understands - 99% of people do something that someone else considers wrong.

If our society functioned via "well I'm sure I'm right about what is moral, so I can execute people based on my morality", then pretty soon we'd have total anarchy.

Do you think abortion is murder? Go ahead and kill some doctors. Do you think creating weapons should be illegal? Go ahead and kill the CEO of a weapons manufacturer. Do you think protesting war is terrible because it puts "our soldiers" in danger? Go and shoot up people leading protests. Perhaps you think that climate change will kill us and anyone who works in the car industry is therefore tainted? Go and blow up some car factory workers.

I agree with some of the position above, disagree with some others, as I'm sure most people do. And that's fine! But decent people understand that disagreeing about things, even things that directly pertain to life and death - is not a good enough reason to start killing each other over. We all have to live together, so we all have to work together to agree on what is right or wrong, and to appoint people to collectively enact the will of society - not just have individual citizens run off and do what they want based on their ideas.

> This depends a lot on context you haven't provided. Most importantly - is this legal?

Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law. The entire point of the person you are replying to is that acts with moral equivalence are treated differently by the law because of the social and economic status of those likely to commit those acts.

A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for charges of simple possession as well as charges of possession with intent to distribute. Both are effectively the same drug, but one version of this drug is more commonly use by poor and non-white people, and the other version used by rich white people, and so we ended up with a gross disparity in the law over exactly morally equivalent acts.

You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.

> Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law.

There are various ideas about morality. But I think even in the most common-sense interpretation of morality, most people agree that there are things that are legal, but immoral, things that are perfectly moral but illegal, and that respecting the law is a meta-rule that is important regardless of morality.

Simple example: Most people agree that cheating on a spouse is wrong and immoral. Not illegal though. Do you think it makes any sense to suggest that the only options are either we change the law to make adultery criminal, or we take vigilante justice on adulterers? Or is it just possible that some things might be immoral (to some people) but should be legal?

> A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines [...]

Yes, and I think the law was wrong in this case, like it's been wrong many times in history (slavery was once legal too). The correct thing to do was to try and change it, which is what eventually happened.

An incorrect option would've been to jailbreak prisoners because you disagree with the law, despite lots of people being imprisoned for longer than they should've been.

> You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.

I am engaging, because I disagree with this idea. The law and morality are connected, but distinct things, as I've shown above. We have to have legal systems in place to make broad decisions - we can't go based off of people's personal moral ideas. Explain to me how you would like things to work and still be compatible with that idea, given the above examples I've given.

And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.

The biggest question here is: what is the purpose of the law?

The standard answers are things like, the law exists to protect people, or enforce broadly agreed conduct, or to deter or punish criminals.

Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.

Civilization depends on people mostly not taking violent revenge when wronged. The law exists to replace revenge with “justice” in the minds of the aggrieved. Everything else is window dressing.

If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.

> If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.

I agree. I just don't think the system is as broken as you seem to think it is. Compared to almost any other place and time, the system is the best.

> Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.

Btw, while I do agree with this in a democracy, note that many, many people throughout history (and today!) live and have lived in places where some people really are above the law. That doesn't seem to preclude society functioning.

If the system is the best then it should work. If it worked then there wouldn’t be a bunch of people cheering on a cold-blooded murder.

Have you lost a loved one because health insurance refused or delayed payment for treatment? I can't take you seriously when you say the system isn't that broken when I see people sharing their experiences of how people died and suffered unnecessarily because some health insurance company fought them on it. How is that not insanely broken?

Here in Germany, I've never had to worry about whether my healthcare would pay my treatment when I've had to go to the hospital and had to be operated on. The idea that this is possible in other countries is unfathomable to me. I didn't choose to have whatever illness I might have. My doctor decided the best way to treat my illness. Why does some third party get to decide "but nah bro, it can't be that bad, let's just wait and see how the patient does in a week or two". Why can they override what a doctor thinks is best?

And why are there people like you who thinks "it's not that bad/broken".

Let me clarify. First, I'm not from the US. I completely agree with you that their healthcare system seems incredibly broken.

That, however, is not what I was referring to - I was talking about the system of laws, of democracy, etc. That was what the discussion was about - whether it's "ok" to kill someone in a vigilante way, and whether the legal system or general system of Western countries works well in terms of aligning the law to what people think it should be.

> And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.

I would say almost the entire body of social science and moral philosophy (setting aside the replication crisis for the moment) more or less proves the correctness of saying "nobody gives a shit what the law says". Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes. Without the law, we'd have more direct culture clashes around topics like immigration, because people try to bring their cultural values and social mores with them, the law encodes and enforces whatever social mores exist, as much as the people of a society can control its laws.

It's not the law people care about, it's the social mores. And the social mores extend from the collective consensus of morality. People don't generally kill other people, not because it's illegal, but because it's wrong. But sometimes, killing other people isn't wrong, such in the case of self-defense or protecting your family. Sometimes the law even convicts and punishes people for committing crimes, because the law has a narrower interpretation at the margins than wider social mores. This is exactly what you're observing here. There is a moral equivalence between murdering thousands of people via a bureaucratic decision and pulling the trigger on the gun, but the law treats them differently, society does not. /This/ is why so many people condone the shooter's actions.

You aren't getting it. The law does not matter. The law is a reflection of society, society is not a reflection of the law. The law is a tool of language to try to explain, communicate, and enforce something that exists outside of it, but the thing which gives law power is the thing which exists outside of it. Morals are way more important than laws.

For all situations that actually matter, nobody gives a shit what the law says, and they never will. They only care about what other people will think of them, what they will think of themselves, and how their moral compass and social mores guide their decision-making process. This is exactly why we generally think of people who murder as being sociopaths, lacking a moral compass, because it's the moral compass and not the law that prevents most people from being murderers.

You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.

> You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.

I think it's a bad approach to assume that you're making incredible points and I'm just not getting it, rather than assuming we're just disagreeing and that, potentially, you are wrong.

> Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes.

Maybe we're talking past one another by talking about whether the law "matters" or not.

Social mores are against adultery. Many people do in fact commit adultery, and continue to have totally fine lives, despite this.

On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.

I don't think the law is a reflection of social mores - almost everyone agrees that the law, while obviously based on many in society, shouldn't encompass all social mores, and has to include things that are not, prima facie, moral. You shouldn't, in general, put someone in jail for being too poor to afford food, and stealing some food. Very few people agree that that's moral in a specific instance. But if you don't jail people for stealing, very soon society breaks down.

I'm not sure which of the above, if any, you disagree with. Maybe none of it - in which case maybe we just agree with each other and are using different language to explain ourselves. If you disagree with something in specific, maybe we should drill down on that.

> On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.

You seem to be making the argument that the law has a life of its own, which isn't entirely untrue, but case in point: While most people don't enjoy paying taxes, they do so because they understand it's necessary to have a functioning society they want to be part of. There are many legal ways to get around paying most or all of your taxes, but they're generally so costly to setup that they're only available to the very rich and to corporations, and most people morally judge this as a negative thing even though it's legal, they don't generally morally judge paying their taxes as a negative thing, but the avoidance as negative.

We do disagree, and it's not a question of semantics, it's a question of causality. You are essentially saying that the law and social mores have no causality relationship, I am saying the law comes from social mores, and the law does not influence them. The law is /subordinate/, which is why nobody really cares about it. Obviously "nobody" is intentionally overbroad, policy-makers, lawyers, and judges care quite a lot about the law, but the vast majority of the population (99%+) does not, they do however care very very deeply about social mores and cultural norms.

My entire point here is that there are some kinds of unjust killings which are legal, and that the disparity is heavily skewed such that the kinds that tend to be done by rich and powerful people are the kinds that are legal.

There are a few related but different questions for a given sort of killing: is it legal? Is it just? If the first two answers are different, what should be done about it?

For the first two questions, the answers for regular lead poisoning are yes and no respectively, and for high-speed lead poisoning it’s no and no. I think this disparity is a serious problem.

Why do you think there is a disparity? Is it purely the product of democracy and the will of the people? If so, it seems like a hell of a coincidence that the legal killings are mostly the ones that rich and powerful people do.

I agree that it’s bad to take it into your own hands and kill people you think the law has failed to cover.

But it’s going to happen sometimes. In a healthy society it’s going to be universally condemned. This one wasn’t. What does it mean and what should we do about it?

Some segment of commenters seems to think that it means people are sick and should be shamed into condemning this killing like they’re supposed to.

I think that’s stupid. People are how they are. It’s more interesting and useful to look at why this particular killing gets so much support.

The failing in our society isn’t that too many people cheer on this killing. That’s a symptom. The problem is a system which treats people’s lives cheaply, which allows some people to kill in the name of profit, and not only fails to condemn them, but rewards them handsomely.

If you want people to work within the system, they need to believe that it’s worth doing. They mostly do, but cracks are showing. It would be wise to fix the problem before those cracks produce a total failure.

> My entire point here is that there are some kinds of unjust killings which are legal, and that the disparity is heavily skewed such that the kinds that tend to be done by rich and powerful people are the kinds that are legal.

I think you're flipping the causality. It's not like society looked at all ways of killing people, said "well these ones are done by poor people and these by rich, let's decide what to do about things based on that". It's that rich people in general got that way by working within the system, doing legal things, etc. (Usually, but not always, with a lot of starting privilege that made it easier for them, or course.)

> Why do you think there is a disparity? Is it purely the product of democracy and the will of the people?

Mostly. I think the disparity is because shooting someone is a lot less ambiguous than doing things like using pollutants. I think you're refusing to acknowledge the nuance here.

But just to be clear - you think poisoning someone with lead is legal? Or releasing lead into places that would affect people is legal? Cause I'm pretty sure you're wrong on both counts. Lead is heavily regulated, and I'm fairly certain clear-cut cases of "I released a paint with lead in it" would be illegal.

> I agree that it’s bad to take it into your own hands and kill people you think the law has failed to cover.

> But it’s going to happen sometimes. In a healthy society it’s going to be universally condemned. This one wasn’t. What does it mean and what should we do about it?

Well I think you answered your own question - it shows that our society is unhealthy. That's why I'm spending my time arguing on an internet forum on why I think we should all condemn this kind of thing - I'm fighting for the ideals of a healthy society!

> Some segment of commenters seems to think that it means people are sick and should be shamed into condemning this killing like they’re supposed to.

> I think that’s stupid. People are how they are. It’s more interesting and useful to look at why this particular killing gets so much support.

Not at all stupid (I say, as someone doing this). I don't agree with this "people are people" idea. I believe in ideas, in debate, in persuasion. I believe we as a society are pretty lost if we can't come around such basic ideas as "murder is wrong and we should all condemn murderers".

And btw, I think despite the huge amount of noise we're all seeing about this, in absolute terms I think 95% people the population is firmly on the side of "murder is wrong", with a very large online contingent of people making it appear that there is some groundswell otherwise. I'm also trying to fight this perceived groundswell, if only by showing that the other side exists.

> The failing in our society isn’t that too many people cheer on this killing. That’s a symptom. The problem is a system which treats people’s lives cheaply, which allows some people to kill in the name of profit, and not only fails to condemn them, but rewards them handsomely.

I think this is just an utterly wrong view of society. We live in a golden age compared to any other society that has ever existed. People generally live longer, healthier lives by almost any actual statistic that measures such things. We have access to a vast wealth of almost anything we want, from experiences, to material goods, to entertainment - things that would've looked like miracles to a person at almost any other time in history.

And I think this idea that the system treats people's lives cheaply is absurd, frankly. There are specific problems, the system isn't perfect - but you can't objectively look at current (Western) society and not see that it's the pinnacle of human achievement - so far - by almost any objective measure.

That this translates into a populace that is somehow very upset with some vague "the system" is a problem, but I think you're misdiagnosing it as something actually being wrong with "the system", as opposed to being wrong with people's perceptions.

(Of course a lot of this hinges on what you mean by "the system" here - certainly every country has lots of specific problems that you could point out and I'd agree with. But I usually hear these complaints phrased very abstractly, without any concrete understanding of what specifically is wrong or what better "system" you are imagining. If you want to tell me what your answer is to either of these questions - I'd be very interested in hearing!)

> I believe in ideas, in debate, in persuasion

do you? Are you open to be convinced of the opposite of your view on this issue?

> I think despite the huge amount of noise we're all seeing about this, in absolute terms I think 95% people the population is firmly on the side of "murder is wrong"

I think you are wrong. Society very often sides with the side that is perceived as the threatened person acting in self-defense even when they use violence.

Also we cannot rule out racism. If the killer wasn't white (then fit for the role of hero in the US), it would be all different.

> do you? Are you open to be convinced of the opposite of your view on this issue?

Yes, always.

But I think it's a pretty high burden of proof to convince me that murder is OK, or that it should be celebrated.

> I think you are wrong. Society very often sides with the side that is perceived as the threatened person acting in self-defense even when they use violence.

I think very few people would consider killing someone in cold blood an actual act of self defense.

I could be wrong of course. Hard to tell how people genuinely feel without some kind of real survey.

> Also we cannot rule out racism. If the killer wasn't white (then fit for the role of hero in the US), it would be all different.

I'm not sure what you mean here, could you explain?

Society did precisely what you say it didn’t do. As polluting industries arose, society decided what to do about it. For a long time it was nothing. Then some restrictions, generally increasing over time. The fact that restrictions were enacted and changed means there was a deliberate choice here. We looked at industrialists profiting from mass poisoning, and our response was, could you tone it down a bit? And not, killing innocent people for money is wrong, so you’re going to prison.

There are plenty of circumstance where it’s legal to release lead into places where it would affect people. Sometimes outright not forbidden, and sometimes technically illegal but barely enforced. Examples of the former include leaded gasoline (still legal for some application) and coal power plants (they exhaust all sorts of nasty stuff, including lead). For the latter, consider Flint Michigan, or you can find random cases such as Smith Foundry where they exceeded limits for years and consequences were light.

I recognize that it’s a lot easier to draw a causal line for a gun than for pollution. I don’t think it should matter aside from the increased difficulty of proving guilt. I recognize that it does influence perceptions, but I don’t think it should.

Interesting thing about living longer, healthier lives than ever before. In the US, that leveled off about 15 years ago. Lately it has started getting worse. Health care costs continued to rise steadily. Insurance bureaucracy gets ever more onerous. And the wealthiest people in society continue to get vastly more wealthy.

You could say that people are still a lot better off than they were 50 years ago or whatever. And you’d be correct. But people really don’t like it when things get worse. They especially don’t like it when the pain isn’t shared by the upper crust.

Would you rather have a health care plan that provides quick, easy access to leeches, or a plan with a million forms, an annoying call tree, and opaque decision making, which gives you proper medicine 90% of the time and leeches 10% of the time? The second one is the objectively better option. But the people who offer that plan will probably be lynched. You can acknowledge that and work with it, or you can insist on treating people as rational and get absolutely nowhere.

“Murder is wrong” is a tautology. “Murder” means a killing that is wrong. (Either morally or legally depending on context.) The question isn’t whether murder is wrong. Everyone agrees on that. The question is which killings morally count as murder and which don’t. And don’t say “they all count!” Almost nobody actually believes that and you probably don’t either. People draw the line in different places but you can almost always find some circumstance where they’d say, yeah, that killing was acceptable. It’s a little surprising that a bunch of people think killing an insurance CEO is on the other side of the line, but it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a line.

Society is unhealthy. We agree on that. Why do you think it’s so? Is it just something that happens randomly, or is there an underlying reason?

> Society did precisely what you say it didn’t do. As polluting industries arose, society decided what to do about it. For a long time it was nothing. Then some restrictions, generally increasing over time. The fact that restrictions were enacted and changed means there was a deliberate choice here. We looked at industrialists profiting from mass poisoning, and our response was, could you tone it down a bit? And not, killing innocent people for money is wrong, so you’re going to prison.

So maybe society got it wrong. Maybe you're getting it wrong. Maybe they didn't fully understand things back then, maybe you don't fully understand the actual options society faced.

I'm not arguing that society always gets things right. I'm arguing that single-handedly deciding it got things right and therefore doing whatever you think is best is something society can't condone.

The greatest thing humanity understood over the last 500 years, however imperfectly, is the idea of being able to live side by side and not kill each other, even when you strongly disagree about things. Before that people were killing each other over differences in religious interpretations, differences in ideas, etc. People always disagree about things - but we learned to live together, and in democracies, learned how to work together to steer society to (hopefully) better places. You really want to unwind that?

This isn't hypothetical. I'm asking a direct question - what would you do with a father who, say, kills a doctor who performed an abortion on his daughter? From the father's point of view and ethics, the doctor literally murdered is grandchild. Do you cheer him on? Excuse him? I'm genuinely curious how you answer.

> Society is unhealthy. We agree on that. Why do you think it’s so? Is it just something that happens randomly, or is there an underlying reason?

I think the underlying reason is what I said about - that people are forgetting the fundamental idea of being a unified society, living together and even loving each other, without necessarily agreeing on everything. Even when the disagreements are profound, hurtful and run very deep. I think Western society has misplaced its sense of purpose and sense of being virtuous - so of course it's easy to slide into "well everything sucks, of course we should just ignore the law and do whatever we want".

> I'm not arguing that society always gets things right. I'm arguing that single-handedly deciding it got things right and therefore doing whatever you think is best is something society can't condone.

I keep agreeing with that and you keep arguing it so this all seems like a complete waste of time.

Maybe. What do you think we disagree about? Open to hearing your POV.

I think widespread approval for cold-blooded murder indicates a fundamental problem with the system that needs to be fixed. You think it indicates a problem with the populace that needs to be fixed.

Ok yes. I agree with your summary of our positions.

(Except that I think it's not really "widespread approval", it's just a very vocal bubble that gets amplified online.)

> Most importantly - is this legal?

If legality is determined based on what's beneficial to the rich and powerful, then this is equivalent to saying "most importantly, does it benefit the rich and powerful?" which is, of course, the point of the person you're arguing with. So this is not the gotcha you think it is.

> vigilante justice is not needed.

This does not feel like a good faith argument. This is the exact same "but do they really need to protest about it?" argument made by everyone who wants to see the status quo preserved. You're saying that the status quo is intrinsically good and everything must be done within the legal system as it's set up. That gives no redress to the people for whom the legal system has been specifically designed to fuck over. Your argument completely falls apart if the legal system is not 100% foolproof, and I simply don't believe anyone could argue in good faith that it is foolproof.

I do not want to see vigilante justice. But I also recognize that if the legal system is not producing justice, people will find ways to bring about their own version of justice. This is a predictable consequence of a system that has been specifically designed to never hold anyone in power accountable for anything. The way to stop vigilante justice is to improve the legal system so that people do not feel that it is necessary.

> If legality is determined based on what's beneficial to the rich and powerful, then this is equivalent to saying "most importantly, does it benefit the rich and powerful?" which is, of course, the point of the person you're arguing with. So this is not the gotcha you think it is.

I don't think it's true that legality is determined based only on what's beneficial to the rich and powerful.

In any case, if you think asking if something is legal before deciding whether it's ok to do it is some kind of gotcha, then you're throwing out the whole concept of law and order - of society. I'm not sure where you go from there.

> This does not feel like a good faith argument. [...] You're saying that the status quo is intrinsically good and everything must be done within the legal system as it's set up. That gives no redress to the people for whom the legal system has been specifically designed to fuck over. Your argument completely falls apart if the legal system is not 100% foolproof, and I simply don't believe anyone could argue in good faith that it is foolproof.

Wow, you're making a lot of assumptions there. I don't think the legal system is 100% foolproof, not at all, nor do I think it's intrinsically good. No sane person would argue that.

But there are a lot of ways to deal with that fact, a whole spectrum ranging from "doing nothing" through "trying to change the legal system" through to "just agree to ignore the legal system". You're arguing that if the system isn't perfect, we should skip right to ignoring it.

I'm arguing that we improve the system. Keep working on it, keep arguing and persuading and sometimes getting our way and sometimes not.

When did we get so jaded and decide things can't improve? Western civilization has gotten vastly better for most people, things that are considered moral absolutes today were not even considered in polite company less than 50 years ago (not to mention some things less than ten).

> But I also recognize that if the legal system is not producing justice, people will find ways to bring about their own version of justice. This is a predictable consequence of a system that has been specifically designed to never hold anyone in power accountable for anything. The way to stop vigilante justice is to improve the legal system so that people do not feel that it is necessary.

I strongly disagree with the idea that the legal system never holds anyone in power accountable, there are myriad counterexamples to that. And not as many actual examples of "the system" letting people be unaccountable.

And there's a gigantic difference between understanding that sometimes people want vigilante justice, and excusing it or cheering it on. Of course it's understandable. There are even more clear cases - family members of murder victims would totally understandably want to kill the people who murdered their loved ones. I would very much empathize if someone were to do that; I'd still condemn it as wrong. Wouldn't you?

> I don't think it's true that legality is determined based only on what's beneficial to the rich and powerful ... I don't think the legal system is 100% foolproof

Nor do I, but it sounds like I (and likely some of the others responding to you) think it leans a lot further in that direction than you do. That's a worthwhile discussion, but my point was that "the most important question is whether it's legal or not" feels out of place -- almost bad faith -- in a discussion about whether the legal system is working or not.

> When did we get so jaded and decide things can't improve?

When we saw the United States backslide into 1960s-era Jim Crow discourse, and even 1930s-era Totalitarianism discourse, that we thought we were over and done with.

> Western civilization has gotten vastly better for most people

Over what timeframe? "Western civilization" has gotten worse for almost everyone since the 1980s by many measures. We're drowning in multiple forms of debt. Wages have stagnated. Expected lifespan has plateaued or even declined. Racism and sexism seem to be on the rise. Medical issues can bankrupt even privileged rich kids. More people are in prison or homeless than the 1980s. The rich have much more societal power over the poor than they have since the gilded age. How far back do you expect us to go to maintain this positive outlook? Telling us it was much worse 90 years ago feels hollow when it was better 10 years ago, better than that 20 years ago, even better 30 years ago, and better still 40 years ago. The only thing that's significantly better is technology and science, especially medicine -- but most of us aren't really reaping the benefits of those improvements in medicine for risk of going bankrupt.

> I strongly disagree with the idea that the legal system never holds anyone in power accountable, there are myriad counterexamples to that

Are there myriad counterexamples? There are some salient ones like Elizabeth Holmes, SBF, and Bernie Madoff -- who all fucked over other rich people in addition to the poor. But there are many more counter-counterexamples: our incoming president was convicted of 34 felonies with no consequence and has openly stated he's going to pardon all his buddies for any level of corruption they might be guilty of. The Panama Papers, the Epstein files -- people aren't seeing anyone held accountable for these things. Meanwhile compare the response of the NYPD to the CEO's murder versus the murder of a black teenager in a poor neighborhood. What's the difference, really? Both are a private citizen being murdered. Why the different response? What's really different about those two people?

> law and order - of society ... If our society functioned via "well I'm sure I'm right about what is moral, so I can execute people based on my morality", then pretty soon we'd have total anarchy

A lot of your arguments have this feeling of "maintaining order in society is more important than individual justice or morality". That's a rather authoritative/totalitarian stance, which I don't say just to dismiss it -- it's a valid political viewpoint, and there arguably can be "good" kinds of totalitarianism. I think there are hypothetical societies where I would agree with you, and societies where I would strongly disagree. In the United States in 2024, I medium-disagree. "Maintaining order" usually just means "maintaining the status quo", so you have to actually look at the status quo. The status quo is that people are getting charged $291 for a 10-minute virtual followup consultation, $6000 for an ambulance ride, going bankrupt if they need major surgery, and sometimes just dying without treatment if they need major intervention but get denied by their health insurance. The status quo is that the rich can legally murder others stochastically if it increases their profits, and can even commit actual felonies without very much risk of consequence. The status quo is that few of our representatives are willing to challenge these systems, and those that do get ostracized, and even then their efforts are struck down by an openly corrupt supreme court. The status quo is that overwhelming waves of disinformation and rage-bait have made it impossible to "out-vote the ignorant" to enact any meaningful change in the system. The status quo is absolutely fucked for the vast majority of people. So no, in the United States in 2024, I don't think "maintaining order" -- preserving the current winners and losers in society -- is more important than individual justice and morality.

People, culture, values, morals and ethics predate law. The code of Hammurabi reflects those aspects of ancient Babylon.

Law must reflect to some degree and scope, the morals of its culture or people. If this does not happen for enough time and affects enough people, then you see a regression to tribal or vigilante justice.

Law is a form of centrally managed punishments that strongly influence individuals to behave according to the local population's values, morals and ethics.

What if a small class of people with enough resources, wit and motivation can hack this system to their favor? How will the rest of the population react when they realize this had been going on for years? Will they be able to "patch the bug" in the code of law and stop the exploiters?

What happened with the CEO of a system that is antithetical to American values, culture and morals, is an individual workaround to a long running lethal bug ignored by the maintainers of the code of law. This was ignored because the maintainers are a cog in the machine of that small class.

I agree with law and democracy, but we may no longer have that since the bigger population has no agency to shape laws. We may just have some other unnamed system that on the surface looks like law and democracy, but under the hood seems to be an oligarchy.

I agree with most of what you wrote as hypotheticals, I just disagree it describes things as they are.

I don't know why you are so eager to think people don't have agency or can't influence society. So many things change all the time. Just one example - twenty years ago most gay people lived in secret, because being out was a huge problem for society; the idea of gay marriage was ridiculously distant. Today, in most places, it's seen as a non-issue.

That didn't happen by chance. It happened because of the hard dedicated work of a lot of people, who convinced society to see things differently, and won.

While I feel similarly to you I would argue that society have two well working indicators of disconnect between enacted laws and average morals/perception of reality: - violence - sentiment towards violence justification

And if anything this murder shows the extent of issue of the disconnect above.

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