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In determining what is or is not a crime and worthy of harsher penalties, our society tends to punish more severely those purputrators who commit crimes with purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or at the very least negligence. In fact, almost all criminal offenses require some intent, whether general or specific. The exception of course are strict liability, or public welfare crimes. These are familiar to any of you who has ever been pulled over for a speeding and been ticketed despite telling the officer that you had not been aware of how fast you were going.
I personally believe that under circumstances where the cost of the punishment and disregarding intent is less than the cost the offense exacts added to the cost of proving intent, strict liability is a sensible concept.
However, there are areas of human behavior where it is appropriate to distinguish between the mind state of purpose and the mind state of total ignorance. Even not believing in free will or the moral blameworthiness of any given act, it is clear that our society must seek to protect itself by regulating the behavior of our members. The answer to ultimate questions of human freedom and culpability not forthcoming, we must make pragmatic decisions now. In this vein, there is still clearly a distinction between goal-oriented dangerous behavior and accidental dangerous behavior. Those with purpose are far more probable to succeed in accomplishing the actus reus of a crime than those without purpose. They are in a sense, more broken, and it is a far more efficient use of society's resources to fix them than to fix those who bumble. Clearly we wish to regulate knowing commission above all else.
It is obvious that if we were to punish equally all who kill another human being without regard to their reasons, or exactly how they accomplish it (so long as a clear causal connection between the agents act and the result is shown) there would perhaps be less incidents of one human killing another. However, there may be other less desireable effects if this philosophy is adopted.
Firstly, the philosophy assumes that the incidence of human mistake would decrease and that there is not a natural incidence of error inherent to all human undertakings. I would hold we cannot hold ourself to a standard which allows no mistakes because that's an inhuman standard. It seems we as society would be saying to ourselves, do as i say, not as i do.
Largely we would be locking up people who are, other than some unforeseen misfortune, fully functioning members of society. Many people who would be punished if strict liability were established would go from being great benefits to society, to great costs (assuming we incarcerate them). These are people who pose no greater risk to society than the risk inherent in all people engaged in certain risk prone activities necessitated by modern society.
A second argument against strict liability in serious offenses is that it serves as a deterrant function in unintended ways. An accident by nature is something that happened despite often reasonable efforts to not obtain the result obtained. If the efforts were less than reasonable there are mental states we could punish to a lesser degree (such as recklessness). And certainly some strict liability offenses such as running a red light are so well known by society that the commission of the act creates a presumption of reckless disregard. This presumption perhaps should not be rebutted since the cost of punishing unconditionally in cases where the cost to society on the whole of the crime is greater than the cost of strictly imposed fines.
This argument does not hold for all human behavior, however, or for all punishments. If the killing of a human being is treated the same across the board, always as murder, there could be a chilling effect on human behavior that might eliminate some of the free expression our society thrives upon. People would certainly be more hesitant to own cars and perhaps even to leave their homes. There simply must be some margin for error when we live in a society that requires a certain degree of risky behavior. The solution could be a less strict punishment, but this would somehow allow those who kill on purpose to benefit from the shorter punishment we would have to enforce to keep society running smoothly. The truly aberrant killer would be benefitting from the average accidental killer. Equating purposeful killing with accidental killing would require we average out the punishments as the cost/benefit analysis dictates.
However, by requiring intent, we focus our resources on those clearly more dangerous individuals who have the distinct goal of killing others. By spending less resources on one group, we can address the more serious threat.
In closing, sometimes the cost of punishing inadvertance is greater in its chilling effects and disruption of society than the cost of having to prove mens rea despite the entailing fact that some who satisfy the actus reus will get off.
However, in those cases where the social danger in the act great and the occurence of the act common, it makes sense to spread the cost over society by ennacting small punishments regardless of the actor's reason for commiting the act.
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