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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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