Law Is a Collective Negotiation of Our Moral Intuitions
The laws we make are complex because humans are complex.
Law is a collective negotiation of our moral intuitions.
We’re trying to turn our sense of right and wrong into rules we can actually live by together.
It would be very simple if we could just say, “Don’t ever kill.” But then we encounter someone killing in self-defense, someone committing a premeditated murder, or someone causing a death by accident. Someone has died in each case, but our judgment changes. We care about what the person intended, what they could have avoided, and the circumstances they were in.
And we have to work out what those differences mean in practice. We’re constantly juggling intuitions about the individual and the collective, about harm and responsibility. Sometimes those intuitions pull us in different directions. A law has to give us a shared rule for what to do.
The laws we make are naturally complex because humans are complex. Even a rule that sounds as simple as “Don’t ever kill” asks us to work out what we actually mean.