Why Criminal Law Depends on a Fictional “Rational Person”
The Person the Law Invented
LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
Tejaswi Pandey
4/12/20262 min read
The law assumes that every person standing before it is a rational being, someone who has the ability to think before acting, who possesses common sense, and who can calculate whether the cost of precaution is less than the probability of an accident. If that calculation favors caution, a rational person takes it. That is who the law believes you are.
Take the example of a chain snatcher. He sees a gold chain and has a split-second decision — snatch it or lose the opportunity. He doesn’t have time to calculate. He runs, he snatches the chain, and he runs away. But he doesn’t know that the friction in the pulling and pushing can severely damage the neck of the victim or even kill her. He didn’t want that. The law doesn’t care that a robbery that went wrong is now a murder case, whether he wanted it or not.
And he can’t prove any of it. No court will take his word for it. He only wanted to steal, but he couldn’t prove that in court. The jury will not believe it, since he is already a robber, and the law holds that he is rational and calculated the risk before committing the crime. The law is also not completely wrong. It is there to protect victims and to protect the idea of justice. And what if he wanted to commit the crime?
Nobody is perfectly rational. That person does not exist outside a law textbook. This ‘perfectly rational person’ is just an ideal, not a real human being. It believes that every person can think before they act or has a basic level of common sense, which is not viable in all 8 billion human beings present, so it is practically impossible, but theoretically possible.
The system punishes every single person who commits a crime. It does not matter whether he thinks or he doesn’t think, whether he calculated his decision or whether he wanted to harm the victim or didn’t, the system will punish him regardless.
But it is not fair. The problem is, we have no way to find out whether the person is telling the truth. Everyone is there to protect themselves. Everyone will say they never wanted to harm the victim, so there is no way to determine whether that person truly wanted to cause harm, whether he even had the time to calculate what he was doing.
And so the justice system does what it always does. It falls back on its imaginary standard. Every person must live up to it. If he fails, he is punished, whether he was truly guilty or not, whether he wanted to hurt the victim or not, whether he calculated the risk or acted on pure impulse. In the eyes of the law, if you cannot meet the standard imagined for you, you are guilty.