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Carinthium comments on Free to Optimize - Less Wrong
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Is there anywhere that doesn't have that principle? It seems like a system of laws where ignorance was a valid excuse would be impossible to manage, and nontrivial even for a superintelligent AI. You would have to be able to peer inside someone else's specific brainstate for awareness of a specific concept, or of their entire past history. And how do you judge someone who had once know the law, but has since forgotten it?
Besides that, abandoning the concept of ignorantia non excusat creates an incentive to never learn the laws. Even with a perfect AI running the judicial system, that's undesirable.
It's a matter of the best results that can be attained. The legal system can choose between being unambigious (which requires very complicated language) and being understandable to an ordinary person (which requires simple language). It is impossible to have both.
The problem is that any system which chooses the latter option is itself unjust as it will inevitably create ambigious scenarios. You then have to choose between generousness in interpretation whenever an ambigiuity exists, ignorance of the true meaning of the law as an excuse, and having to convict people ignorant of how to interpret the law as there is no correct intepretation to apply to the facts. The alternative of 'the spirit of the law' is illusionary, as shown by the massive amount of bias humans have interpreting such a vague concept.