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Presumably if you're speeding or driving while intoxicated, you're doing so intentionally. It's not as if someone is forcing you to drive too fast or too drunk. These things (especially speeding) dramatically increase the likelihood of being in a collision.


It's difficult issue.

While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.

Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.

At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"


"Malfeasance" is the general term for doing something bad (usually professionally) for your own gain (or your own laziness), that can end up harming others, but where this is not the goal per se, just something that is an "acceptable loss" for your gain. An engineer who doesn't bother to verify the safety of a design before signing off on it, is committing malfeasance.

We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.

Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.


Your aim isn't to kill anybody. A careless maintenance worker in a factory also doesn't intent to kill someone when he intentionally skips a job. Or a shopkeeper when he sells cigarettes to a customer. You would end up including nearly all deaths as caused by humans if you go down that road. The bus driver who gave an overweight person a ride instead of making them walk.


Well, my point was that most automobile collisions aren't 'accidents' in the true sense of the word, and most automobile related injuries (and deaths) occur when someone does something negligent. The vast majority of collisions are caused by some combination of being distracted, intoxication, speeding, or just being reckless. Deaths (or serious injuries for that matter) rarely occur at low speeds, it's most often in situations that involve speeding.

There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].

[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...

[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero


But how do you exclude all those other causes? We know that cigarettes kill people too so if you intentionally sell them to somebody, you're being reckless or negligent too. It's a continuum so where do you draw the line? At breaking the law? That's arbitrary and depends on the country.


Negligence implies a standard of reasonable care.

Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?

It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.




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