> I, on the other hand, don't think its ridiculous that homicide is, in fact, an element of the offense of murder.
> Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
I suspect we might just have an irreconcilable difference of framework in that respect:
I view the purpose of law to be to minimise the maximise the public good while causing the minimum restriction of freedoms. That being inherently a balancing act, freedom/security, the exact value of which is responsible for a lot of the problems with the actual application of law.
In that framework whether someone's acts resulted in death is dramatically less important than whether they were likely to, and whether the person who did it is likely to do so again unless restrained. (That their acts actually did lead to the death is evidence in favour of that class of act being more likely to lead to deaths than it would be without that bit of evidence, so in that sense it matters.)
Beyond that, whether someone dies or not, the drink driver and the speeder who didn't kill anyone but committed equally dangerous offences - they're all guilty of murder in the sense that matters to me. To borrow the way of phrasing it from the Christians: They've all already killed people in their hearts. It's just luck that no-one's dead for them, and luck's not a property of people, it's a property of limited knowledge; you can't rely on it.
In so far as we have knowledge, under such a system, if you lock the guy who actually killed people up, the rest should be locked up too.
> Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."
I suspect we might just have an irreconcilable difference of framework in that respect:
I view the purpose of law to be to minimise the maximise the public good while causing the minimum restriction of freedoms. That being inherently a balancing act, freedom/security, the exact value of which is responsible for a lot of the problems with the actual application of law.
In that framework whether someone's acts resulted in death is dramatically less important than whether they were likely to, and whether the person who did it is likely to do so again unless restrained. (That their acts actually did lead to the death is evidence in favour of that class of act being more likely to lead to deaths than it would be without that bit of evidence, so in that sense it matters.)
Beyond that, whether someone dies or not, the drink driver and the speeder who didn't kill anyone but committed equally dangerous offences - they're all guilty of murder in the sense that matters to me. To borrow the way of phrasing it from the Christians: They've all already killed people in their hearts. It's just luck that no-one's dead for them, and luck's not a property of people, it's a property of limited knowledge; you can't rely on it.
In so far as we have knowledge, under such a system, if you lock the guy who actually killed people up, the rest should be locked up too.