And will your legal system include only such clear-cut cases as premeditated murder? What do you do when someone starts file-sharing your program? Apply a single, simple, almost certainly ambiguously worded law about theft? And let's pretend your law is perfectly worded so as to have a clear application in every single situation: do you deem file-sharing theft?
What about if, in self-defense, someone goes further than necessary? He's attacked and choked by someone bigger and stronger. He reasonably fears for his life. Through chance or skill, he gets the upper hand, and knocks his attacker out. Then, before caveman adrenaline has faded, he slams the guy's head into the pavement until he dies. Do you apply the single "thou shalt not kill" law?
I don't really want answers to these specific questions, but to the meta-question: how do you handle actions which are harmful to society, but which cannot be resolved by straightforward common-sense ethical reasoning?
The hard, borderline cases that you mention are relatively rare. No matter how complicated your system of laws, these cases tend to require humans, either judges or juries, to make a careful decision.
If you have 10,000 laws rather than 10, you end up instead having to decide which of the many conflicting laws that could be applied should be applied to the situation. In marginal cases, human judgement is extremely difficult to replace.
Well, from this and another post, you seem to be concerned mainly with overlap between similar laws -- a natural result of a large and fragmented legal code. Why not prune it instead of scrapping it? Refactor instead of rewrite? Insert jwz quote.
What do you do when someone starts file-sharing your program? Apply a single, simple, almost certainly ambiguously worded law about theft?
One simple law about theft that can't neatly answer the question seems preferable to the current tens or hundreds of possibly applicable pedantically worded laws that can't neatly answer the question.
What about if, in self-defense, someone goes further than necessary? He's attacked and choked by someone bigger and stronger. He reasonably fears for his life. Through chance or skill, he gets the upper hand, and knocks his attacker out. Then, before caveman adrenaline has faded, he slams the guy's head into the pavement until he dies. Do you apply the single "thou shalt not kill" law?
I don't really want answers to these specific questions, but to the meta-question: how do you handle actions which are harmful to society, but which cannot be resolved by straightforward common-sense ethical reasoning?