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crayzz wrote:I'm pretty sure Alex got it right above.

The example given was a split second decision; it was a primal reaction. There's a huge difference between reacting in fear while about to fly off a cliff and planning the murder of another. One is held accountable for the latter, not the former.

Exactly, in the former situation mens rea isn't an issue. ( I don't know why american law insists on using latin terms when my language is latin based and it doesn't)

MysticWav, your quote is still remissive to the term antisocial though, and of course, a law that is consistent to the system it's integrated in certainly cannot be criminal ( it can be illegal though). The problem with your reasoning is that the first two pursuits don't have your life depending on their fullfillment. In regards to the third, and the example of organ failure, one of the conditions I affirmed to be necessary ( though I would understand why one wouldn't catch it the first time, as it wasn't a point I insisted on) was that the necessity was immediate. Therefore, the situation of death by organ failure doesn't seem to match - if you will die in a moment if your organ isn't replaced by a healthy one, you certainly wouldn't have time to perform the transplant anyway. If the problem threatening your life won't end it with a pretty severe degree of immediacy, then it isn't justified. To help illustrate with a less extreme example, while hoping to help resolve Alex's question, if you see someone getting robbed, it's okay to incapacitate the offender( to not go to murder, let's say you're perfectly able to do a sleeper hold on the person without their being able to escape or hit you, and assume the assailant is buck naked so they won't have a hidden weapon, and just have mirror shattering ugliness from the front that compells the victims to give them their money). If you see the same person and think that sometime in the future they're going to rob someone with their Herman looks, but don't actually see them rob anyone, then it's not okay to incapacitate them ( you should call the cops on them for indecent exposure though).

And of course, because immediacy is an issue, so is specificity. In the case, you couldn't have not hit Person B and hit Person C instead, as that denotes choice ( after all, if you can choose targets you can probably also choose to not hit anyone at all). In the situation, your hand was "forced". And of course, the case will be investigated even if you're not accused, so if it turns out that Person A could have done a totally different think that it would be reasonable for them to think about at the time and they didn't do it, guess what, it's jail time for Person A. In the organ failure case, unless this is a zone of Hypothesitania ( what I like to call the land where all these hypothesis occur) where stabbing someone gives you all their healthy organs and you have the ability to gauge the exact second of your death, and you do it just a few seconds before that time, it wouldn't be justified.

Plus, there are tons of legal exceptions to the hole fist and nose saying - the right to go into a house that was throwing a party whose stereo was so loud it was both impeding your sleep and breaking legal regulations for loud noises at night, and cutting the wire the stereo was hooked to; the right to go over your neighbours lawn because it's the only way that doesn't require unreasonable effort to get to a public road; and yeah, the right to swing your fist at someone else's nose if it's done in self-defense. Now you might say these are all reactions to unlawful actions, but the truth is the legal rabbit hole goes pretty deep on all these situations ( look up putative crimes for an interesting read, but actual cases and not just the definition.)

BTW, my country is Portugal, and no problems brah, you don't come off as insulting at all.

I don't think you can go to specificity. You've already given a greenlight to our driver to run through a crowd of people to avoid the cliff. He could conceivably hit oneside of the crowd or the other side of a crowd. There is a choice of who he hits, just not a choice as to whether someone (himself included) dies.

Now if crayzz and alex have the right of this and it's just about incohate reflexive panic where no thinking is done at all, that's one thing. We can stop the argument there and move on, as there are no judgements being made. If thats the case just let me know and ignore all that follows.

That is not the impression I got from your prior posts though. They seemed to emphasize a rationalization that certain lives are worth more to certain people than others, that this was reasonable by your socities judgement, and thus no one should be held accountable for following through on it. In that case immediacy should have no bearing that I can understand. Let's take our ridiculous example to a further notch of ridiculous. We have a steep road, no brakes, an inattentive crowd lining either side, and at the end, a fatal cliff. As before, remove random tertiary solutions where everyone gets out alive. At what point is it no longer immediate enough to justify? A 10 minutes slide? A 1 hour slide? A 1 day slide? A one week slide? Is he guilty if he turns earlier than the very very last second? Or given the inevitability can he choose his moment? Is he guilty if he fails, for example waiting too long and killing someone with a swerve, but still not managing to save himself?

the right to go into a house that was throwing a party whose stereo was so loud it was both impeding your sleep and breaking legal regulations for loud noises at night, and cutting the wire the stereo was hooked to; the right to go over your neighbours lawn because it's the only way that doesn't require unreasonable effort to get to a public road;

Neither of those things actually sound particularly like rights or moral to me. That sounds like vandalism and trespassing respectively. The self-defense thing is a whole separate scenario that isn't particularly germane to this discussion so I'll leave it be.

With the car metaphor: Let's say the driver has legitimately no fault for being in this situation, and while he's stuck either killing one person or himself, he still has some time to think... Fuck why, fuck the realism, just this is the circumstance. I'd say he's still justified in killing the other person to save himself. In a different scenario, where two men are starving in the forest, and there's enough food for one to survive, I wouldn't blame either for eating the food and letting the other starve.

In turn, I also feel it's entirely valid for him to decide he doesn't want to burden himself with the death of another human or that his life isn't as valuable as a strangers (for whatever reason). However, I think it's asinine for anyone to say he has a 'moral obligation' to die.

Now, if there's a crowd and he has time to think, I'd definitely say there's a difference, but still, I don't think there's a moral obligation. If the driver is at fault for being in that situation, then he should take the fall because he made the mistake and someone else shouldn't die for it, but if he's panicked, I still think I'd let the moment of him killing a guy go. I'd probably still consider it manslaughter if negligence on his part could be proven, though.

As to the thing about the party/music, I agree that it's trespassing and vandalism, if he gives zero prior warning. If he goes over and informs the person that they are being loud and they work out a compromise fine. If the guy at the party is breaking noise ordinances (presuming here that the noise ordinance level is reasonable, and let's just say for the hypothetical that such an objective measurement exists and is being used), and doesn't have the consideration for his neighbor, then I'd say the neighbor is totally justified in fucking up his shit for being an asshole.

Well, in real-world terms, the things Alex and crayzz said are pretty much the situation, only the justification isn't based only on the fact that the reaction was due to reflexive panic, but that the reflexive panic itself is justified because one's life is worth more to themselves than another's, because in the eyes of the State, people's lives have the same worth, therefore the offender's ( in our case, driver's) guilt is offset by what is, undoubtfully, a more valuable imperative to him, namely preserving his own life over that of another, as is demonstated by his panicked reaction - basically, it's not enough to qualify it as a panicked reaction, but also to justify said reaction.

To take what has become our Rollercoaster Tycoon-like example ( and imagining we've come off of Hypothesitania's largest cliff-climbing competition whose goal is a very steap and slippery road), the driver should wait until the latest possible time, as it would give the most time for people to get out of the way. If the Hypothesitanian sidewalks glued them all in place life roach traps that made it so wherever he decided to crash into the wall would kill the same amount of people, and he had those really extended amounts of time, then he should crash at the place that would cause the least impediment to traffic, because hey, if our test scenario has gotten silly let's get silly orderly ( by this time in the argument I'm just making lame attempts at humour ).

I think that if we were going to discuss the theme to the point of attention I'd like to, then we'd be going back to study the social contract, discuss Locke versus Hobbes, then contemplate the functions of penal law in the greater scheme of society to then the roots of the definition of legal-public goods ( this is the translation google gives me for the portuguese legal term), their penal dignity and/ or necessity, to see if we could reach the broader conclusion that things such as societal values or even laws only work and exist because enough people agree/ believe that they do, to finally be able to discuss if it's okay for a person in society to place their own life over every other legal-public good.

As far as those last two examples, those are actually textbook examples of cases where breaching other people's rights is completely justified ( literally textbook, as they are in my textbooks). The first is because the right to a proper rest is seen as more important than the right to hold a really loud party during the late hours of the night ( given that the person hosting the party doesn't have an extraordinary permission from an organ in the public admnistration, such as a nightclub might have, and the cops cannot be called/ haven't responded in a reasonable amount of time), and the very last example ( the one about crossing lands) is actually really, really common, has several articles in the civil law code regulating it, and its justification stems from a valuation of the right to acess public grounds over the right to deny people passage on your property. Those cases almost always come with the option of forcibly selling said terrain - or as I just found out by googling the proper translation for the word I wanted to use, reading the wikipedia article on easement. The technical legal term is servitude, but that gets way too technical on wikipedia.