LAWS ON DRINK DRIVING

DRINK driving has been in the news too much recently. The number arrested for the offence jumped from 2,929 in 2004 to 3,733 last year, say the Traffic Police.

Whatever the reason for this spike, there is a case to be made that your drinking buddies - and bartenders, bouncers, valets or those who ride in your car - are morally bound to stop you from taking to the wheel after you have had a few stiff ones. But since they do not seem to be doing that frequently enough, why not impose a legal duty on them to do so?

Bartenders could be empowered to hold on to a patron's car keys before he starts drinking and refuse to hand them over at the end of the night. This might require such establishments to have breathalysers, for instance. The law could require valets, bouncers and friends to even pull car keys from the ignition if an intoxicated fellow were to try driving off.

Some lawyers, however, caution against passing a law that requires a person to do something to help another, even if it potentially prevents people other than the helped one from getting maimed or killed. In contrast to laws that forbid murder or rape, for example, such a law would punish not an act of commission but one of omission, something not traditionally accepted in common-law countries like Singapore.

Yes, taking a life is different from failing to rescue one, but do the two differ so much that, while capital punishment is justifiable in the former, no legal condemnation is acceptable in the latter case?

Detractors say criminal law punishes individuals for what they do, not for being selfish, callous, uncaring or for thinking bad thoughts. Whether or motto do a good deed is something you decide as your conscience dictates. In a pluralistic society like ours, there is no consensus on the moral values on which a duty to rescue might be based, so the Government should take no stan don the issue. Moreover, the Government should not be in the business of monitoring the religious and moral system, opponents argue.

But it seems to me that no Singaporean would vigorously disagree that your drinking buddies, say, have a moral duty to stop you from driving if you are quite intoxicated. The only disagreement is whether to enforce this legally.

Most of us, in fact, have no problem with the legal enforcement of shared moral values. For instance, we can all agree that parents are morally obliged to protect and provide for their children, so legally requiring them to do so is uncontroversial. Also, criminal law assumes that I do not rape, murder, or rob because I (should) know that it is (morally) wrong to do so.

This is true even where the law requires me to do something instead of merely refraining from an act. For example, the law requires me to stay put at the scene of an accident in which I have been involved, call for aid and assist law enforcers in their investigations. Just to be sure I do, there are penalties in place - including jail time - to ensure there is something else to deter me from evading my responsibilities if my moral restraints are weak.

We also ask of a person accused of a civil or criminal wrong not just if he had committed the act but also whether he was blameworthy. That is, the ethical quality of his actions determines whether he is to be blamed.

But if the law focuses on not just if an act was carried out but also if the actor is ethically worthy of blame - that is, if moral culpability is the real basis of legal responsibility - we should also be moving away from distinguishing between whether harm resulted from a person's act or his willful non-act, to asking, instead, whether failing to act is equally blameworthy.

Sure, it takes a lot to stop your friend from driving off but doing nothing takes some effort as well. Opponents of such a law also say it would infringe upon the individual's right to liberty. But when the liberty to choose is agonisingly sullied by bad conscience, it must be a liberty worth little.

At any rate, there are times when the moral duty to act supersedes our freedoms. Thus, we pay taxes so that, among other things, the poor can be helped and we do not flinch from prosecuting those who evade taxes.

By analogy, requiring friends and bartenders to prevent the intoxicated from driving off is yet another situation where the duty to help others - including potential victims of the drunk driver - is arguably more important than our own liberties.

Finally, some opponents even suggest that any action that is not freely chosen is not truly virtuous, so a law that imposes the affirmative duty to act does not bring out the best in us. Surely no one who could be saved by such a law should have to lose life or limb while the rest of us good folks ascertain if our altruism is truly beyond reproach.

The problem with these objections is that they are raised in the abstract, so that failing to help means simply a lack; that is, a lack of response to someone else's problem.

But in real life, there is no telling who your inebriated friend might run into down the road.

The concreteness of such situations - of which all are morally significant -justifies a law to compel people to stop the inebriated from driving.