[vkou]

> If an action is "wrong" but not illegal you can't actually be sanctioned for it. See: pretty much any large company in the news over some kind of outrage that will ultimately go unpunished.

Law is subject to human interpretation, evaluation of intent, and error correction. Every case has a number of unknowns that judges and juries are supposed to clarify. This is a feature, not a bug.

Code does not. The source for any non-trivial program encodes an uncountable number of unknowns that frequently lead us to absurd conclusions, with no ability to sanity check or correct them.

[mindslight]

This flexibility is a feature for human-scale situations (eg it's really nice to distinguish between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder), but it doesn't scale - either to larger organizations, or across different cultures.