The Philosophy of Drunk Driving

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Article:
Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property. Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.

In even the most charitable reading, the author is guilty of sloppy language. By his words, we cannot punish a terrorist for attempting to blow up a building if he fails because we can only punish "insofar as he damages person or property". Even if we reassert some sort of criterion for intent into the proposition, he provides no argument for his conclusion, and the conclusion is disputable. What can be asserted with no evidence can be denied with no evidence.

There seems to be a place for punishing gross negligence in our laws. These blood-alcohol content laws seem to be a way of defining what is negligent enough to be blameworthy.

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Bradylama:
No, it really isn't. The very nature of inebriation is that you aren't making the same kind of judgements you would when you're sober, so a drunk who intends to drive isn't likely to be concerned about the law.

If he is unable to make a good judgement about obeying drunk driving laws, then I wonder if he will have the same disrespect for traffic laws.

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If someone is set on driving while high on a substance, no amount of legislation is going to stop them.

Since you didn't state your conclusion, I am assuming that you want to say, "therefore, there should be no legislation against drunk driving".

When we say that someone is 'intent on doing x', we seem to be saying that nothing will stop them from doing x by the very definition of the word 'intent'. So what? If I am intent on killing Sally, does that mean that we cannot legislate against intending to kill people? Why is driving drunk a special case?

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Current drinking laws aren't doing much to curtail instances of substance use and driving than they couldn't without a culture shift as we've seen with all of the beer commercials telling us to set a designated driver.

Current murder laws are not working in my home city of St. Louis, which was recently rated as the most dangerous city in the United States. Does that mean that we should abandon our murder laws, too? The number of murders in east St. Louis will not drop without a culture shift, either. But that doesn't mean that the laws should be dropped. What is the different between St. Louis' murder laws and current drunk driving laws?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

BlueMikey, take the following example: if someone kills Sally, I will give him a million dollars. If there were no consequences in place for murder, it seems plausible that more people would be willing to take me up on my offer. The negative consequences to the person seem to serve as a preventative measure for those who choose not kill for reasons that aren't humanitarian. For example, no one with high personal moral standards against murder would take the offer, so the law doesn't prevent these people from killing because there are other factors preventing them from doing so.

However, the laws do seem to prevent people who do not have a good moral compass, but rather think only in terms of their own self interest. Hence, if there were no punishments for murder, then earning a million dollars for killing would not seem like such a bad thing to such a person. However, in this case, the consequences outweigh the benefits, so these people do not take the offer.

Hence, it seems that murder laws do have a preventative aspect to them. I have just given an instance of where a murder law does seem to prevent some people from killing. And I deny that murder laws were only intended to punish. I have just demonstrated a plausible example which is not so out of the ordinary that legislators could not have possibly had it or something similar in mind when they thought up murder laws.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Bradylama, my analogy specifically compared the preventative aspects of murder laws to the preventative aspects of drunk driving laws. I was responding what I perceive to be your general conclusion: if a law is not able to prevent the act from happening, then it is a bad law. I am merely pointing out that in general the conclusion does not hold regardless of whether the law is intended to prevent murder, drunk driving, or walking down the street. The analogy was meant to provide a counterexample to the general claim. If you do not think that you made such a claim, then I'm glad we are in agreement.

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Bradylama:
Yeah, you can wonder, but because one has broken a law does not mean that he is naturally destined to break others.

If someone is so inebrated that they cannot judge that driving drunk is probably not good for him, then I highly doubt that they are capable of obeying the traffic laws which they agreed to when they passed their drivers test. It's called gross negligence, and it doesn't matter what our intent was in that situation or not. I don't care if no one gets hurt or not, there should be laws against firing several hundred rounds into the air in the middle of New York on New Year's, even if their intent is only to celebrate the coming of the new year. Their actions are needlessly putting other people's lives in danger.

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It'd be a faulty conclusion to make because it would be like implying that the impossibility of preventing drunk driving is the only reason for legalising drunk driving. You'll notice I've used other examples in order to illustrate my point, that drunk driving should be legal. In that case, I'm refuting the notion that drunk driving laws actually "keep drunk drivers off the streets."

I don't think the argument assumes that it is the only reason. I am arguing that it is not a reason at all. If the behavior is detrimental to society, then we cannot sit back and do nothing, even if the current laws do not have the intended effect of preventing the act. The unsuccessfulness of the laws could prove just as easily that we just need better laws. It does not prove that we should just get rid of the laws outright. The only good reason I can think of to get rid of all DD laws is if drunk driving is not harmful. However, that very point is up for grabs, so talking about the effectiveness of the laws as preventative measures seems entirely irrelevent.

Your other examples, such as muscle soreness and fatigue while driving may therefore only prove that we needed to restrict those things, too (and I know for sure that fatigue is restricted to some degree). Even if we granted that all things that can impair driving must be restricted, that still doesn't prove that they all must be restricted to the same degree as drunk driving is. Until I see the numbers on how many people muscles soreness kills in car accidents every year, I am more hesitant to place as heavy-handed restrictions on it as we do on drunk driving.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

As for probabilities, how high of a probability of someone/something getting hurt must we see before we restrict drunk driving?

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Bradylama:
What I'm saying is that the idea that the law prevents crime is false.

The NHTSA cites nearly 30 studies which say that it does.

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/inju...Laws-08BAC.pdf

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Bradylama:
However, driving while drunk, and firing into the air represent two different actions. If you shoot into the air, those bullets have to come down somewhere, and your actions represent a danger to people within a mile's radius. Driving drunk doesn't present any immediate danger, but driving wrecklessly does.

Also, because one has broken the law does not mean that they are incapable of acknowleging the fact that they have broken said law. For instance, if one is drunk and doesn't have a designated driver, one will feel compelled to drive himself regardless of the law. There's not much alternative in areas like mine where there aren't 24 hour taxi services. It may be an example of a lack of personal negligence, but doesn't represent an act of malice.

Ah. So do you disagree with what the author of that article said, mainly "the law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property?" And, could you point my to what your second point is addressing?

The fact is, the largest plurality of motor deaths in our country belong to drunk driving incidents. Again, at what point is correlation between drunk driving and accidents considered high enough before we consider it to be harmful? If I am a cop and someone is so inebriated that they are having trouble walking straight, why should I have to wait for him to start driving recklessly before I have him arrested? Or should I wait for him to disobey some minor traffic violation, such as cutting in between lanes, and punish him for that small offense and only that small offense?

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Not legislating against drunk driving isn't a case of "doing nothing" because the concerns of drunk driving are involving driving performance. Poor driving should still be legislated against, but drunk driving does not equate to poor driving performance as a rule.

The only way you could conceivably "do something" to prevent alcohol-related behavior is through prohibition of the substance in question, and a century of history regarding that measure has established its ineffectiveness.

I'd like to know what your definition of a 'rule' is. There seems to be an awfully high correlation between driving drunk and reckless driving. How high does the correlation between driving drunk and reckless driving before we can see the former as a good sign of producing the latter?

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Bradylama:
I have to question the totality of those studies. How much can the drop in fatalities be attributed to the .08 laws as opposed to the License Revocation laws and public education efforts? What sociological efforts did they put into confirming that the .08 law was a direct cause? ALso, clearly, if you revoke licenses you're going to lower the amount of negligent drivers on the roads, and thus reduce fatality rates.

Do you often just dismiss sources that disagree with you a priori? Why don't you read their research methodology, and then come back and complain about how incomprehensive they are.

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Even with the current laws in place, people shouldn't be arrested simply because they can't walk straight. They have to express intent to drive, and take appropriate actions to drive in order to justify an arrest.

To clarify, yes, I do believe that if an officer is aware of a drunk driver, he should wait for the driver to commit an infringement. At which point, the driver can then be issued a punishment in accordance to the severity of the crime, which is in this case violating traffic laws while intoxicated. The actual law being broken is the traffic one, but the severity of the punishment is dependent upon the context in which the crime was commited. I feel that's a reasonable compromise.

And then, after they break a small traffic infraction, you book them for that small traffic infraction and send them on their way like you would any other violator? Or do we have to wait for someone to get hurt or killed before we actually charge them? And that would make our drunk driving accidents per year numbers go down...how?

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If every drunk driver was involved in a crash, then I would be supportive of BAC laws. As it stands, though, I think it's an impossible figure to measure, because you would first need to get people to admit that they've broken the law and allow themselves to be monitored while they're breaking it.

Wow. That's messed up. I'm really sorry for wasting my time in this conversation.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?