The universe is a fully integrated system of causality; nothing is uncaused and nothing exists in a vacuum. If an event occurred, there was an unbroken flow of phenomena that brought that event into being, artificially separated into discrete episodes by human perception.
If a law states that a certain event is illegal, it must at some point define (literally to limit) and generalize that causal chain into approximate episodes, reducing what is by all means infinite and irrational to a finite and false interpretation.
E.g.
* ...A man murdered a 90-year old man.
* ...The 90-year old was a member of the Nazi Party and worked as an administrator of a concentration camp and the murderer was a Nazi hunter.
* ...The 90-year old was not allowed to be employed in his interbellum position without being a member of the party.
* ...But he also believed in its economic tenets.
* ...He believed in the economic tenets because he and his family starved, losing multiple siblings during peak hyperinflation caused by the requirement of the Versailles Treaty to be paid in raw materials and hard currency.
* ...The Versailles Treaty had to be paid in such because Germany debt-financed their war machine and their fiat was devalued.
* ...But this was just a story he told other members--in his heart he was virulently anti-Hitler.
* ...But he still enabled policies that led to deaths.
* ...At the expense of causing greater deaths elsewhere.
* ...Ad nauseam until in the beginning the universe was without form and void (maybe).
Each one of these episodes is a gross reduction of reality that if you pick at anywhere, attribution falls apart--there are infinite points between them that contributed, up to and including the individual mental registers in each mind that determined whether that person would choose the path less travelled or not.
If the causality of the event for the sake of legality is limited to the final culminating event ("he did/did not pull the lever that sent the trolley down the track that killed four doctors and a hideously fat man"), the reality of the situation (i.e. all the surrounding circumstances which contributed in unknown quantities to the culmination) is lost and all pretense towards negative attribution (e.g. punishment) are lost with them. The messenger has been shot and the message ignored.
If this is acknowledged, then either the function of enforcement is palliating (i.e. treating the fever and not the infection) because it ignores discovering fundamental attribution as a goal, or it implies that explicating legality is [turtles all the ways down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down) and attribution is pointless, but we're going to do it anyway. And then you get the dynamic of siblings fighting otherwise known as [brinksmanship]. "Don't hit your brother" becomes "Don't touch your brother" becomes "Don't put your hands in front of your brother's face while saying 'I'm not touching you'" ad infinitum.
(2018)