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It is undoubtedly possible that those who have the making of the law should deem it wise to put the mark higher in some cases than the point established by common practice at which blameworthiness begins. For instance, in Morris v.
A short reflection told him that this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for silence as any degree of blameworthiness. They had informed him at the school where she was living, and having no immediate anxiety about her comfort his thoughts took the direction of a burning indignation against the training school committee.
That individual may be morally without stain, because he has less than ordinary intelligence or prudence. But he is required to have those qualities at his peril. If he has them, he will not, as a general rule, incur liability without blameworthiness. The next step is to take up some crimes in detail, and to discover what analysis will teach with regard to them. I will begin with murder.
Then, we form further associations with the causes of praise and blame and thus acquire the sentiments of 'praiseworthiness' and 'blameworthiness. The sensibility to praise and blame generally forms the 'popular sanction, and this, when praiseworthiness is concerned, becomes the moral sanction.
The reference to the prudent man, as a standard, is the only form in which blameworthiness as such is an element of crime, and what would be blameworthy in such a man is an element; first, as a survival of true moral standards; second, because to punish what would not be blameworthy in an average member of the community would be to enforce a standard which was indefensible theoretically, and which practically was too high for that community.
For it is to be remembered that the object of the law is to prevent human life being endangered or taken; and that, although it so far considers blameworthiness in punishing as not to hold a man responsible for consequences which no one, or only some exceptional specialist, could have foreseen, still the reason for this limitation is simply to make a rule which is not too hard for the average member of the community.
His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline to take his personal equation into account. The rule that the law does, in general, determine liability by blameworthiness, is subject to the limitation that minute differences of character are not allowed for.
This seems to be one of those cases where the ground of liability is to be sought in policy coupled with tradition, rather than in any form of blameworthiness, or the existence of such a chance to avoid doing the harm as a man is usually allowed.
As the law, on the one hand, allows certain harms to be inflicted irrespective of the moral condition of him who inflicts them, so, at the other extreme, it may on grounds of policy throw the absolute risk of certain transactions on the person engaging in them, irrespective of blameworthiness in any sense.
In such cases he will be liable, or not, according as the law makes moral blameworthiness, within the limits explained above, the ground of liability, or deems it sufficient if the defendant has had reasonable warning of danger before acting.
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