9th
Half-Baked Thought on the Law #1
Blameworthiness is really just an inverse measure of our empathy. The more empathetic we are to a bad act, the less blameworthy it is. Culpability is a huge factor in how much we (the law) punish people for doing bad things. Like all things that are subjective, the majority interests get represented more than minority interests so what the majority can empathize with will be the primary driver of assigning culpability. There will be unjust sentencing in the law. In criminal law, murder is sometimes reduced to manslaughter when the homicide is committed in the heat of passion rather than when someone draws up a plan and then kills the person. This, as you can imagine, is pretty controversial and there’s no clear justification for it, but while our empathies may differ based on our backgrounds, we all know what it’s like to envision killing someone in the heat of passion and, if we don’t wish we had the guts to do it ourselves, we at least gain pleasure from secretly living out these fantasies through manslaughterers. Few of us, however, consider seriously going about arranging to kill someone with a cool head remotely envisionable. That we don’t empathize with. And so, one might view mitigating murder to manslaughter for heat of passion crimes as symbolic of our all coming together as one in a showing of compassion for the innate infirmity of mankind, while throwing the latter to the wolves. But then you read a few of the heat of passion cases and get the feeling that they’re about dudes who flipped their whigs when their significant other was talking shit about the size of their dick and you wonder, “wait a minute, what does it symbolize now?”
