Ignorance of the law is no excuse (where common sense is not concerned)

Thank you for your challenge, I think you have chosen an excellent debate topic. To restate for the sake of clarity you are Pro to the idea that a person cannot be held responsible for breaking a law out of ignorance, except in the case of acts that fall under "common sense crimes," correct? This assertion is faulty for several reasons: 1) The entire concept of "common sense" is socially relative. The ethics and morals of US society, for instance, are largely "inherited" from past generations and are in fact mostly based in religion. Even the founding documents of the United States are written with religious language ("that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"). I am not validating religious morals or practices, but I am merely pointing to the fact that our idea of "common sense" has a traceable source. If the US was founded and colonized by primarily Buddhist individuals, we would have a different kind of "common sense!" Throughout history moral values have gone through extreme changes: the Romans used to throw people into a ring with a lion and eat dinner while the victims died horrific deaths. Even in US history: a husband used to have the legal right to beat is wife. Today it's "common sense" that beating your wife is wrong! We cannot simply assume that the average citizen will behave appropriately on a daily basis off of his "common sense." Lacking some universal standard by which we can judge what falls under "common sense," we have laws that protect citizens of a country and they must be followed without any excuses. We cannot rely on some arbitrary set of mental no-nos to keep society functioning. 2) My argument about common sense leads nicely into my next point, which more potently addresses the issue of "ignorance of the law is no excuse from it." Common sense is something that exists only in the mind; when a person commits a crime we as witnesses, victims, police officers, lawyers, judges, or jury cannot predict or guess what a criminal knows or what he is thinking; therefore, we cannot possibly know if that person understands their act as criminal. It is not possible to prove that a person is cognizant of the law without near science-fiction advances in technology that allows us to read minds. The justice system already spends an inordinate amount of time and money in investigations and legal battles to simply prove a person committed a crime! Now you want to add the burden of proof of cognizance? How would that be proven? Would detectives question teachers and parents to see if by chance a criminal was exposed to some form of the law in youth? The whole idea would simply make our justice system even more ineffective and put criminals back on the street. 4) Furthermore, allowing cognizance to enter the realm of arrest and conviction essentially gives corrupt lawyers and criminals a new way out of crime. Most repeat offenders are con artists: they learn how to play the legal game to their advantage. It would be a very simple act to find smaller crimes that don't easily apply to the "common sense" rule and then repeatedly commit them under the "ignorance of the law" excuse. 3) Finally, there is one simple fact that your assertion misplaces: the law does not punish individuals for thinking. Your argument is based on the idea that is unfair or unjust to punish a person for doing something they didn't know was wrong. The purpose of the law is to make the definition of "wrong" absolute. The law punishes citizens for breaking it: nothing more. Whether a person knew of it is irrelevant. Your argument is primarily an emotional one: you feel that it is unfair for a person to be punished in ignorance. However, a person's ignorance does not make their actions ethical, and that is what the law punishes: actions. A person is arrested or ticketed for doing something wrong, not for knowing if they did it. If a person drives down a road and kills a small dog without realizing it, that dog will remain dead, regardless of the driver' level of cognizance. This is the major fault with your assertion: you fail to address how justice will be carried out in the face of a crime being committed. If a crime is committed it is irrelevant that the person knew it was a crime or not: a crime was committed! Society was wronged or damaged in some way and justice must be given, that is all that matters. Your argument is akin to saying that an action isn't wrong if you don't get caught: you are assuming the knowledge of wrong is what creates wrong. If a person breaks a law they have committed wrong and their knowledge or ignorance of the law will never change the fact that it was broken. Thank you for a lively debate topic!