It is notorious that all extended systems of norms run up sooner or later against hard cases in which they produce shocking results, especially when norms of equal value clash. Free speech advocates debate these kinds of problems all the time. Law, our society's most detailed expression of norms, is not science. Most of us recognize that law, untempered by compassion, produces brutality. Even people who support the death penalty may be shocked by the decision of a Delaware prosecutor to seek the death penalty against a frightened teenage couple who delivered their baby in secret, then killed it or let it die.
Norms are fuzzy.
If you try to write rules that cover every imaginable situation, you will have rulebooks thousands of pages long, and they will still not deal with every possibility. As a young attorney drafting contracts, I recognized that shorter contracts are better, giving basic rules that the parties can use, in good faith, to resolve differences. Otherwise, a contract, like any other kind of rulebook, would need a thousand pages of detail. Ethics and law are both fuzzy systems. Bart Kosko tells the story of Descartes' plug of beeswax.