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by NhanH 4099 days ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Law does not equal to the "rules of society", at best they asymptote the "rules of society", if there is even something like that.

In programming term, law is the formalized code (ie a program) of a society's moral stance. And as any computer program, it has bug, unintended behaviours, and changing one part of it will affect other parts due to unknown complexity. Imagine how hard it is to do random stupid CRUD app at scale, our moral code itself is complex and ambiguous, applying to a few hundred millions users and it's a big fat mess that's barely coherent.

I don't have an opinion on the whole "war on drugs" one way or another. But it's straight up dangerous to believe that the law is the be-all end-all in a society, especially when more basic ideals are put down to be less important.

> they broke the rules of society and now society wants to punish them

Contrary to popular belief, every single one of us here on HN are still human, not robots. And we are decidedly part of society.

1 comments

Then perhaps you should use societies systems in place to change the rules, since you're part of it. Ignoring the law because you think you're morally right is kind of meaningless when talking about law enforcement. That's my point. This isn't about morality. This is about reality. You know they will punish you, you break the law, get caught, then complain that it's unfair? That's what a fool would do.