More law

Having had a skirmish with class action suits yesterday, another brush with the law this morning, following a dose of Agatha - the Pale Horse - last night.

Suppose we have three witches. Three witches who, for a fee, go through some kind of satanic ritual involving an item of clothing of a first someone whom a second someone wants dead. The first someone reliably dies shortly thereafter.

The twist being that the first someone dies, but has actually been murdered by someone else altogether, a third someone, in a more or less conventional way. We suppose that there is no connection between the witches and the actual murderer, at least no connection that they might reasonably be expected to know about. The witches just believe that they are doing the business.

We suppose that all this is taking place in an advanced western country where the performance of a satanic ritual is not in itself an offence, let alone a capital offence, in the way that it would have been as little as three hundred years ago.

I am clear that the three witches are very guilty. Certainly very guilty in the heavenly sense that when hailed before the judgement desk on the day of judgement, they would be cast down into hell-fire.

But I am not at all clear that they are guilty at all in a criminal sense. Perhaps one could pin attempted murder on them on the grounds that that was what they were trying to do, with the fact that someone else actually did the deed being irrelevant.

Then I get to think that this is a very contrived situation, very unlikely to happen in real life, at least in aforesaid western countries where belief in witchcraft is more or less extinct. We can therefore afford to neglect this hole in our legal defenses. There is no need to legislate for this sort of thing because it is very unlikely to happen and doing something about it would not be a good use of scarce & expensive legislative resources.

We don't need our laws to cover all conceivable eventualities, just those with a reasonable chance of cropping up.

I am reminded of the way in which it is quite easy to devise experiments in laboratories or conjuring tricks in theatres which make the brain do silly things. First thought is how on earth could evolution have come up with such a dumb bit of brain. Second thought is that evolution has not wasted time & effort on things which do not happen in the real world. Our brains are geared up to cope with real life, red in tooth and claw, on the primeval savannas of what is now east central Africa, not with some cock & bull story dreamed up in third millennium London.