Is there anywhere that doesn’t have that principle? It seems like a system of laws where ignorance was a valid excuse would be impossible to manage, and nontrivial even for a superintelligent AI. You would have to be able to peer inside someone else’s specific brainstate for awareness of a specific concept, or of their entire past history. And how do you judge someone who had once know the law, but has since forgotten it?
Besides that, abandoning the concept of ignorantia non excusat creates an incentive to never learn the laws. Even with a perfect AI running the judicial system, that’s undesirable.
You would have to be able to peer inside someone else’s specific brainstate for awareness of a specific concept, or of their entire past history.
In principle, I suppose. In practice, several real-world legal structures depend on the court deciding, as a question of law, what was going on inside a person’s mind at a particular time.
And are those legal structures actually accurate? I have very strong doubts about the potential accuracy in the absence of overwhelming circumstantial evidence such as statements they made at the time away from witnesses they’d want to conceal the truth from.
I’m not claiming they’re accurate. I’m claiming that our inability to reliably read minds does not in practice prevent us from creating legal structures that depend on the court deciding what was going on in someone’s mind, and consequently it is insufficient to explain the “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse” principle.
If the court’s known inaccuracy about a defendant’s state of mind is sufficient to explain why we don’t treat people who break a law differently based on the court’s beliefs about their knowledge of the law, it is also sufficient to explain why we don’t treat people who break a law differently based on the court’s beliefs about other states of mind, such as the difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.
Unfortunately, that second thing turns out to be false… we do treat those people differently.
When an explanation turns out to explain falsehoods just as easily as truths, I don’t consider it an adequate explanation for those truths.
I chose my words carefully: I said “avoid it wherever possible”. Some distinctions will naturally fall on the side where it’s deemed appropriate/necessary, generally, as in the case of manslaughter, when the difference is of enormous perceived moral significance.
So, if the “ignorance of the law is no excuse” principle were repealed by some culture C, would that surprise you, or would you merely consider it a demonstration that punishing people who are ignorant of the law is of enormous perceived moral significance to members of C?
It would greatly surprise me if any culture viewed the possibility of punishing an accidental crime, no matter how severe, as worse than allowing people guilty of serious crimes to go unpunished using a specious claim of ignorance.
For my own part, I would find that no more surprising than discovering a culture that viewed the punishing of an innocent person as worse than letting a guilty person go free.
I view that as basically the same, and would consider that, also, to be highly surprising. No culture I’m aware of ever took an absolutist stance on that issue, in either direction. Largely because it’s incredibly impractical.
I’m not precisely sure what you mean by “absolutist” here, but I would certainly agree that for every culture there is some (P1,P2) for which that culture accepts a P1 chance of punishing an innocent person over a P2 chance of letting a guilty person go free.
Basically, every culture ever is such a culture to an extent, so the only sense in which it could be a discovery would be if a culture had (P1,P2)=(epsilon,1-epsilon) or (P1,P2)=(0,1). Which I would consider highly surprising.
Yes, which is why I said I would agree this is true for every culture.
if a culture had (P1,P2)=(epsilon,1-epsilon) or (P1,P2)=(0,1). Which I would consider highly surprising.
Yes, I would consider that surprising as well. If that’s what you mean by an absolutist stance, I agree with you that no culture took an absolutist stance on this issue, and that doing so is incredibly impractical.
But… consider two hypothetical criminal justice systems, J1 and J2, for which generally-accepted statistical studies demonstrate that J1 acquits 30% of guilty defendants and convicts 1% of innocent ones, and J2 acquits 1% of guilty defendants and convicts 30% of innocent ones.
Given a randomly selected culture, I cannot confidently predict whether that culture prefers J1 or J2. (Can you?)
Given a culture that prefers J1 to J2, all else being (implausibly) equal, I would comfortably describe that culture as viewing the punishing of an innocent person as worse than letting a guilty person go free. (Would you?)
I would not consider discovering C1 particularly surprising. (Would you?)
It’s a matter of the best results that can be attained. The legal system can choose between being unambigious (which requires very complicated language) and being understandable to an ordinary person (which requires simple language). It is impossible to have both.
The problem is that any system which chooses the latter option is itself unjust as it will inevitably create ambigious scenarios. You then have to choose between generousness in interpretation whenever an ambigiuity exists, ignorance of the true meaning of the law as an excuse, and having to convict people ignorant of how to interpret the law as there is no correct intepretation to apply to the facts. The alternative of ‘the spirit of the law’ is illusionary, as shown by the massive amount of bias humans have interpreting such a vague concept.
Yes, ignorantia non excusat is basically abandoning the entire purpose of Rule of Law and stare decisis. I don’t know why more people don’t see this; it’s basically what Kafka was talking about in The Judgment.
Or at the very least, don’t have a principle like in Australia that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Is there anywhere that doesn’t have that principle? It seems like a system of laws where ignorance was a valid excuse would be impossible to manage, and nontrivial even for a superintelligent AI. You would have to be able to peer inside someone else’s specific brainstate for awareness of a specific concept, or of their entire past history. And how do you judge someone who had once know the law, but has since forgotten it?
Besides that, abandoning the concept of ignorantia non excusat creates an incentive to never learn the laws. Even with a perfect AI running the judicial system, that’s undesirable.
In principle, I suppose. In practice, several real-world legal structures depend on the court deciding, as a question of law, what was going on inside a person’s mind at a particular time.
And are those legal structures actually accurate? I have very strong doubts about the potential accuracy in the absence of overwhelming circumstantial evidence such as statements they made at the time away from witnesses they’d want to conceal the truth from.
I’m not claiming they’re accurate. I’m claiming that our inability to reliably read minds does not in practice prevent us from creating legal structures that depend on the court deciding what was going on in someone’s mind, and consequently it is insufficient to explain the “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse” principle.
I claim that their (known-but-unquantified) inaccuracy is sufficient to explain it. When you know a tool is flawed, you avoid it wherever possible.
If the court’s known inaccuracy about a defendant’s state of mind is sufficient to explain why we don’t treat people who break a law differently based on the court’s beliefs about their knowledge of the law, it is also sufficient to explain why we don’t treat people who break a law differently based on the court’s beliefs about other states of mind, such as the difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.
Unfortunately, that second thing turns out to be false… we do treat those people differently.
When an explanation turns out to explain falsehoods just as easily as truths, I don’t consider it an adequate explanation for those truths.
I chose my words carefully: I said “avoid it wherever possible”. Some distinctions will naturally fall on the side where it’s deemed appropriate/necessary, generally, as in the case of manslaughter, when the difference is of enormous perceived moral significance.
So, if the “ignorance of the law is no excuse” principle were repealed by some culture C, would that surprise you, or would you merely consider it a demonstration that punishing people who are ignorant of the law is of enormous perceived moral significance to members of C?
It would greatly surprise me if any culture viewed the possibility of punishing an accidental crime, no matter how severe, as worse than allowing people guilty of serious crimes to go unpunished using a specious claim of ignorance.
OK, that answers my question, thanks.
For my own part, I would find that no more surprising than discovering a culture that viewed the punishing of an innocent person as worse than letting a guilty person go free.
I view that as basically the same, and would consider that, also, to be highly surprising. No culture I’m aware of ever took an absolutist stance on that issue, in either direction. Largely because it’s incredibly impractical.
I’m not precisely sure what you mean by “absolutist” here, but I would certainly agree that for every culture there is some (P1,P2) for which that culture accepts a P1 chance of punishing an innocent person over a P2 chance of letting a guilty person go free.
Basically, every culture ever is such a culture to an extent, so the only sense in which it could be a discovery would be if a culture had (P1,P2)=(epsilon,1-epsilon) or (P1,P2)=(0,1). Which I would consider highly surprising.
Yes, which is why I said I would agree this is true for every culture.
Yes, I would consider that surprising as well. If that’s what you mean by an absolutist stance, I agree with you that no culture took an absolutist stance on this issue, and that doing so is incredibly impractical.
But… consider two hypothetical criminal justice systems, J1 and J2, for which generally-accepted statistical studies demonstrate that J1 acquits 30% of guilty defendants and convicts 1% of innocent ones, and J2 acquits 1% of guilty defendants and convicts 30% of innocent ones.
Given a randomly selected culture, I cannot confidently predict whether that culture prefers J1 or J2. (Can you?)
Given a culture that prefers J1 to J2, all else being (implausibly) equal, I would comfortably describe that culture as viewing the punishing of an innocent person as worse than letting a guilty person go free. (Would you?)
I would not consider discovering C1 particularly surprising. (Would you?)
It’s a matter of the best results that can be attained. The legal system can choose between being unambigious (which requires very complicated language) and being understandable to an ordinary person (which requires simple language). It is impossible to have both.
The problem is that any system which chooses the latter option is itself unjust as it will inevitably create ambigious scenarios. You then have to choose between generousness in interpretation whenever an ambigiuity exists, ignorance of the true meaning of the law as an excuse, and having to convict people ignorant of how to interpret the law as there is no correct intepretation to apply to the facts. The alternative of ‘the spirit of the law’ is illusionary, as shown by the massive amount of bias humans have interpreting such a vague concept.
Yes, ignorantia non excusat is basically abandoning the entire purpose of Rule of Law and stare decisis. I don’t know why more people don’t see this; it’s basically what Kafka was talking about in The Judgment.
If that principle was abandoned, there would be every reason to never learn the laws.