[drzaiusapelord]

>If law were derived from universal morals (heh...) then that might be accurate.

Well, there's a pretty big difference between "I shouldn't get arrested for smoking pot" and "I shouldn't get arrested for murdering rival pot dealers."

Maybe western law is mostly derived from a sensible universal moralism with certain exceptions. That doesn't mean that all criminality is rational or that the OP's opinion that most criminals are irrational is wrong. For every Robin Hood there's hundreds of thousands of street thugs. I think you're overpleading the edge cases here. Many studies have shown your average criminal to be a fairly messed up individual: mental illness, strong personality faults, poor reasoning skills, poor executive control, poor discipline, etc.

[nickpsecurity]

Alternatively, the law makes a distinction between types of harmful activity that are legal and types that are illegal with interesting results. The kind of very damaging activity smart, disciplined people do that ruins lives is often legal. These are [Wall] street thugs. Then, there's other types of harm the lesser people can pull off that are illegal. There's also stuff they do that doesn't harm other people but is severely illegal.

So, I don't think there's an average criminal given the variety of crimes, levels of harm, and criminals themselves. However, the average criminal on drugs in my area is a working class person who poses no threat to society but smokes weed on occasion. There's also a number of addicts who are similarly not a threat but will receive long sentences. There's also thugs who range from your description to well-educated people who say "screw being someone's b for minimum wage when I can be my own boss for $50k slinging this stuff!" On thugs, similar predatory behavior as many business owners except their type of harm is allowed and affects more people. Even when it's indirect murder.

What's law and what's ethical isn't the same. The law can enforce evil, stop good, and do arbitrary things hard to judge.

[thaumasiotes]

> Maybe western law is mostly derived from a sensible universal moralism with certain exceptions.

It's actually easy to show that this isn't possible, because the amount of western law is much larger than a single person could ever hold in his head. This could not be the case for "universal" moralism, which is by definition shared by everyone.

> Many studies have shown your average criminal to be a fairly messed up individual: mental illness, strong personality faults, poor reasoning skills, poor executive control, poor discipline, etc.

I suspect these are studies of caught criminals. They can't apply to uncaught criminals, and they specifically don't apply to Paul le Roux (caught or not) without adjustment for the type of crime being committed. He filled a managerial role; "most criminals" in those studies (and most criminals generally) don't.

[pizza]

Is there a meta-analysis that corroborates your last claim?