A healthy society has few enough laws that you can be told all of the ones that apply to you. This couple should have been able to learn.../
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...all the relevant laws applying to them as a married couple, on immigrating. You cannot expect people to reinvent all of morality... 2/
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...on their own. You could not take somebody out of the Bronze Age, wait for them to do something evil, and then pounce, while calling... 3/
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...yourself a good person, possessed of empathy and perspective. You couldn’t pass that test if the Future seized you and ran it on you.
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Let’s be clear: the attacker was missing a spark of goodness that could let him guess by himself that a scream meant something wrong... 5/
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...but it cannot be the business of Society to bust people for lacking sparks of moral intuition! Society has to tell you what the laws are!
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Ignorance of the law may be unavoidable in complex matters, not about "you should not rape".
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You would not be able to reinvent every idea that important on your own. It is society’s job to have few enough laws to say that one aloud.
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No matter how few laws a country has, there will always be a large number of different ways to hurt other people. Kick, burn, rape, etc etc.
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Humans do have some ability to generalize. The 20 top failures of generalization like “But she’s my wife” could all be listed on one slide.
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... Yes, exactly. So too many laws is not an important problem for this type of crime. (It may be for other types.)
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What I’m saying is that all the laws governing them should have been read aloud to them over a couple of days. Too many laws and you can’t.
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But you could read "don't hurt people" and 20 top failures of generalization. Done. (For that type of crime.)
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And if that had *actually been done* I’d be, “Sure, lock him up and throw away the key.” But *in fact* our Bronze Age Guy was told “Guess!”
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this is a bad example for this argument b/c the law here is simple: all rape is illegal always, including in a marriage
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How many centuries did it take for that simple idea to win? But yes, with fewer laws it would have been very easy to teach this one.
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again, this is a bad example for that argument- rape and murder laws are clearly on the top of the stack of things everyone needs to learn
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Yeah. Except that if you took the real laws and taught them over 2 days, we’d have to admit that ignorance of the rest was a thing... 1/
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...and only 30 seconds would elapse before somebody insisted that potato pricing had to be included so ignorance couldn’t be a defense.
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i mean if you want to go reductio ad absurdum, you're advocating that immigrants should be able to claim ignorance on any law
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so yes, we should simplify law- but also obvious that naturalization process should include when it is okay to rape people (never)
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I do think it’s reasonable to claim ignorance of a law you were not told about, or a demonstrably common comprehension failure not mentioned
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