Raising the chances of is not at all the same as happened. Excessive speeding can be a civil violation punishable by fines, not jail. Civil infraction != crime.

> If there was a statistical link between a drug and increasing the chance of the user committing violence would you still consider drugs victimless

Yes I would. Consuming drugs never creates a victim, that is an indisputable fact, you cannot victimize yourself. If you commit violence against another person, that's already illegal and already punishable and is a crime regardless of why you did it.

Drug use is not drug abuse and we don't need pre-crime in our world. Punish people who actually do the bad things, not those who might do something bad, otherwise we should start locking up all poor people because they might statistically commit more crimes than the rich. This is a dangerous line of thinking.

Is there any action that is potentially dangerous enough that an instance of it in which no one happened to be harmed should be a criminal offense?

Say I walk down the street firing a gun randomly, but I don't strike anyone with a bullet. Civil remedies only?

I think we have laws that cover those cases. Attempted murder not being the same as actual murder even though the only difference might be bad aim and all that.

If by firing randomly you were assured nobody else would be hurt, would anyone still care? The real problem with firing randomly is that you can't ensure nobody will get hurt.

Taking drugs is two steps removed from that. The idea being that by taking drugs, you are more likely to walk down the street firing a gun randomly, therefore a criminal. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

> Say I walk down the street firing a gun randomly, but I don't strike anyone with a bullet. Civil remedies only?

Why not? If you are in actual fact endangering people then you are risking the severe criminal penalties that would be imposed if you hit someone. That is enough to deter anyone acting rationally. On the other hand, if you are not deterred because you have somehow ensured that your actions will cause no damage, why should your actions be prohibited?

Incentives that apply perfectly to rational actors have a pretty poor track record of influencing human behavior in the desired way.

Yes. The fact that no one was hurt should make it not a criminal offense, maybe it's still severely punished civilly, but it should not incur being jailed.

> I'd assume you do agree that excessive speeding constitutes a crime as a it raises the chances of inflicting injury on others.

That is a poor assumption. The government is incompetent (and corrupt) to choose what course of action best manages risk.

The better answer is to make people (and their insurance carriers) liable for the damage they actually cause. If you drive too fast and kill someone, you should be liable for a Very Large sum of money. If you drive 90MPH and cause no damage, you should be left to your devices. If driving fast has a high correlation to causing damage then insurance companies will figure out a way to charge higher premiums to people who take more risks (with risks defined scientifically by statisticians rather than corruptly by politicians), and the higher premiums will either deter the risky behavior to the extent that the damage caused by the risk is in excess of the value of getting there faster to the driver, or alternatively cause the driver to pay money in the amount necessary to compensate for the risk being imposed on others.

There is no need for criminal penalties, which do nothing but create animosity between the police and the population, encourage lawbreaking, encourage the police to issue unwarranted citations (and set inappropriate speed limits or unsafely short yellow lights) in order to generate revenue, etc.

The same applies to illicit drug use. If there are negative externalities then require purchasers to carry insurance, or impose a tax, and use the money to mitigate or compensate for the damage actually caused.

How do we estimate a fair market price on what the average person is willing to be paid to be hit? Let's not forget to price in what people would accept for you taking away a loved one through reckless behaviour. I'd hazard in a lot of cases the cost they would settle for given a choice would be your blood. Maybe a fair market value considering this fact is your time in jail.

Society is obviously willing to accept a certain level of loss of life as the cost of faster transportation, otherwise we wouldn't have motor vehicles whatsoever.

You can't actually give someone your life. Killing the perpetrator doesn't bring back the victim, it's just revenge. And revenge is never justice.

What benefits the victim more? Setting the perpetrator on fire, or making the perpetrator [carry insurance sufficient to] pay the victim the most accurate estimate we can make of the monetary value of the damage caused? I know people hate assigning dollar figures to human life, but in the absence of some technology capable of resurrecting the deceased, how else do you propose to compensate the victim's loved ones?

The point is that value is not directly mutable for a person. For instance you would probably happily give up all your property in exchange for surviving something that would otherwise kill you but would not do the same for some John Doe. Just like the victims may be happy to exchange the wrongful death fee in exchange for punishment and a millionaire might happily pay a wrongful death fee to drive around town so drunk that he can't stand up.

Then there is the key point that jail costs time which is proportional to the individual fined rather than the victim. In a proportional payment system there would be an even larger perverse incentive to get hit by moneyed people if the fine was in anyway punitive.

"But it costs society to incarcerate and is a net negative from the point after the accident on", Yes but we decided that prisoners shouldn't incur debt for being imprisoned for some very good reasons.

What of the victims? What benefits the victims more than giving them money after the fact is reducing the risk of it happening in the first place. A payment system has either a more harsh proportional punishment than the current system to decrease this happening further, or reckless driving will increase because it is more tenable for the drivers (or people are irrational when assessing jail time and money as punishment and the deterrent affect is not proportional).

So my main point is while I agree that it may be utilitarian to lower the cost to society after the fact there can be even more utility to play the ultimatum game before the event.