Quote Originally Posted by Monty92 View Post
On a related note, people generally speaking are weird when it comes to ethics. If someone moderately drink drives and gets away with it, they'll be considered little more than naughty scamps. yet if someone moderately drink drives and kills a kid, the opprobrium goes through the roof. Why? The 'crimes' were identical on a moral level.
Yes, I've always felt dubious about the principle of scaling punishment on the basis of its consequences. It's always seemed to punish bad luck to an unfair degree. I remember that chap who fell asleep at the wheel a few years ago and somehow managed to cause the Selby train crash. He got five years. If he'd given into sleep a few minutes earlier, there's every chance he might just have veered onto the hard shoulder and gone up the bank. Result? A few points on his licence, maybe. The disparity between those punishments for essentially the same offence has always seemed arbitrary and unfair to me.