2) lazy governments often apply sweeping blanket bans and fall back to police discretion. Carrying a hammer? Technically illegal in my home country, and the police can stop you. Whether or not they have have reasonable cause to charge you is a different matter. If you look like a tradesman you probably won't be bothered, but if you don't, you're breaking the law.
3) Laws can be mutually contradictory until legally tested and a precedent is set. If you're unlucky, you could be the one who has to test it. Regulations are notorious for this.
I'm not saying that we don't want to enforce laws, because generally we do. But when and how laws are enforced requires nuance. And certainly the idea that always enforcing them is a net good is very, very far from the historical reality.
> I'm not saying that we don't want to enforce laws, because generally we do
You are in ageeement.
It's almost like they believe taking people out of the gene pool will eventually eliminate crimes of passion
I miss my slap drones
-[0]: Weird hibernation future prison: https://www.reddit.com/r/CineShots/comments/1gk5ffn/minority...
It's most obvious on the roads. Few non-commercial vehicles will limit your speed to the national maximum. Wouldn't a strict interpretation of your opinion imply speed governors?
Shouldn't we have them, if we generally agree that speed limits are good? If not, why have speed limits at all?
Would it not be better to physically limit your speed to 20mph in school zones, for instance? What "freedom" is being limited, in that case?
(Let's ignore stupid edge cases: sure you could need to get to the hospital - in that case you should call an ambulance. The availability and expense of that service is irrelevant to the question, here.)
In any case, I am not obsessed with cars so I find thinking of the particulars in your example simply too boring to contemplate, and the general objection that not all laws are perfect is likewise uninteresting.
We could track people’s movements without AI. We could implement curfews and have 24x7 police checkpoints. Would you consider it worth it if it reduced crime? Most people would not I’m guessing
Is that satire?
In a world where as if by magic all crimes are prevented, then there is total power in the hands of those who define what a crime is, including being able to label protest as a criminal act.
Complete crime prevention is a totalitarian police state.
The problem is the means not the ends. This magic doesn’t exist. In practice is authoritarian surveillance.
If we could kiss a mushroom and bias the universe’s dice such that crime just…wouldn’t happen, yes, that would be good, though it would also open up a plot hole of consequences we, in the real world, don’t need to worry about in general.
If we had a complete, utopian set of amazing laws that provide happiness to all, and I add just one law : "All citizens have to agree with every edict, statement or choice of SiempreViernes. Expressing disagreement or doubt is a crime, punishable by exile, lynching or lifetime imprisonment."
All of a sudden this society just became a nightmare. Yes the majority of people can probably still live an OK life, but that single law has a gigantic downstream effect on happiness, stress levels of all, and life expectancy of free thinkers.
Now add the idea that you're able to perfectly prevent crime, and you now have a totalitarian surveillance panopticon in place to prevent me from even writing any doubts into my personal journal.
Consider a Schindler's List type scenario. It's a crime to help a Jew escape. Now mostly I believe in the rule of law and if I broke a law because I thought it was justified in that particular circumstance I would accept my punishment.
But in that scenario, accepting my punishment would mean I couldn't help others.
are you projecting your fears?
The general point of society is that there is a collective agreement that people should live by a set of rules, and if you step outside of those rules, you will be punished.
It could be simple as someone telling you off for being rude, all the way up to prison for a huge transgression.
As ever with all things human, life exists on a spectrum. on the one had you have complete anarchy, where you are on your own with no redress from others, to complete cult like rigidity, where you have no agency.
However putting barriers up in the way to stop people easily committing crime (ie locks, drink driving bans, drivers license, restrictions on what items you can call miracle cures) are noble and mostly uncontroversial. It only really becomes a controversy when it either causes hardship, or more likely it means that people who are currently profiting from a morally grey action will lose money.
Infact I would go so far to say that it requires a constant introspection to evolve society to adapt to its current environment. This would be impossible in a "perfectly" enforced system, or even a vaguely rigid one.
The locks, the speed limits, the restrictions all remind one of how they're being limited; not by their own ability but rather an extrinsic force. I'm sure that this can breed subconscious resentment. I'd question if this is ultimately a good thing at all, but it IS hard to imagine a world without locks
But nothing is ever free. So what is the cost.
<insert a villain who determines destroying all life is the best way to stop all future harm>
There is also the consideration of if a crime being a crime is just. Consider crimes that use to be on the book that we now consider horrible things to have outlawed or even crimes that are still on the books but not enforced because we reject them.
For example, some places us to make it a crime for kids to play pinball. Is preventing kids from playing pinball, even if it came at no cost, an unquestionably good thing?
For a sufficiently bad crime, at sufficiently low costs, preventing it is good. But those two factors are both very big questions, directly challenging the notion of "unquestionably good".
Under Nazi government laws, resistance fighters were of course considered criminals. Actually there was effectively a form of "thought crime." The regime did not require actual criminal actions to punish individuals—mere suspicion of disloyalty, lack of enthusiasm for the regime, or even passive resistance was enough to be arrested, imprisoned, or executed.
https://www.normandy1944.info/underground-resistance-movemen...
https://study.com/academy/lesson/gestapo-definition-holocaus...