comment: >
  
  How does it seem illogical?
  Say someone punched your dad in the throat, and he got a bruise.  What sort of sentence do you think they should get?
  Now say someone punched your dad in the throat, collapsed his windpipe, and he died.  Now what kind of sentence do you think they should get?
  I can't think of a logical reason to treat those two situations as equally bad.
context: Attempted murder charges are lighter so that even if someone starts a murder, they always have an incentive to not finish the murder. It's not great, but it theoritically reduces harm to victims. >
  
  Wouldn't that just mean that if you followed through with the attempt and failed you'd get a different punishment than if you changed your mind part way through? >
  
  No, because "changing your mind partway through" is also a failed attempt at murder. >
  
  
  Scenario A: Individual drives under the influence and hits someone. Victim survives with either minor injuries or none at all.
  Scenario B: Individual drives under the influence and hits someone. Victim is critically injured or is killed in the accident.
  In each scenario, the same exact crime or act is committed yet the punishment for each scenario will differ greatly depending on the outcome or result.
  The offender in scenario A likely receives probation and is required to complete community service hours, among other things.
  The offender in scenario B likely spends over a decade in prison. 
  
  The wider population tends to think in consequentialist terms, which is why we have phrases like "victimless crime". The problem is that if society were to always punish drunk driving with a decade in prison, regardless of the outcome, it would be widely perceived as being disproportionate if there were only minor injuries or no victim at all, and it would make the justice system seem indifferent and unnecessarily cruel.
  One could say that by driving under the influence, drivers freely decide to take part in a "lottery" with potential consequences (severe punishment) that they would receive IF they got into severe enough accidents. Through this lottery, many drivers are lucky enough to get away scot-free (or with minor punishments for DUI only), while some will be punished for killing/injuring someone. That's the risk they took. They could have also chosen to not get drunk, or to get a taxi.
  It's in the same sense that when a heavy smoker gets lung cancer we tend to blame their smoking habits, even though there are also many examples of people who smoked the same number (or more) of cigarettes throughout their lives and never get any lung cancer, and there are lifelong non-smokers who get lung cancer. >
  
  This point is valuable.
  It's worth considering why laws exist. There's nothing inherently immoral about drunk driving, for example. The prohibitions exist because of the harm that impaired driving can cause, so it follows that the response to a crime should match the harm caused, not an arbitrary number. >
  
  Take your example of drunk driving. If we make the punishments equal, you would either  1) give community service and probation to those who kill people with their cars, 2) imprison people for a decade for the first offense of drunk driving even when no harm was caused, or 3) create some suboptimal solution like 2 years in prison for everyone.
  1) is bad because light consequences would just encourage more people to drive drunk and kill more people. I don't think this needs anymore explanation.
  2) is bad because you are giving harsh punishment to people who actually didn't harm anyone. If you disagree with this, I think you need to clarify your beliefs about the purpose of punishment.
  3) is suboptimal because you are giving relatively lighter sentences to people who did the most harm and heavier sentences to people who did no harm. >
  
  
  2) is bad because you are giving harsh punishment to people who actually didn't harm anyone. If you disagree with this, I think you need to clarify your beliefs about the purpose of punishment.
  
  You're literally just saying that people deserve punishment for getting unlucky (or the converse, people deserving less punishment for getting lucky). How does this seem like a sensible system? >
  
  This notion of "unlucky" gets extremely complicated.  In OP's example of A and B, the driver hits two people.  But most likely, they were hit at different parts of the body at different velocities.  Moreover, we can change the scenarios in multiple different ways to make this absolutely convoluted.  
  A.  Driver hits person while intoxicated.  Person dies. 
  B.  Driver hits person while intoxicated.  Person is fine. 
  C.  Driver hits a stop sign that is right next to the person.  Person is fine. 
  D.  Driver hits a stop sign that is across the street from a person.  Person is fine. 
  If luck plays a big role, then does luck only counts after the impact with the person?  Why is that?  One can argue that scenarios C and D, the driver was also very lucky (especially scenario C).  So where do you draw the line on the equal level of punishment here? >
  
  
  If luck plays a big role, then does luck only counts after the impact with the person? Why is that? One can argue that scenarios C and D, the driver was also very lucky (especially scenario C). So where do you draw the line on the equal level of punishment here?
  
  'luck' applies to anything that is out of the person's reasonable control of knowledge of the situation. If the driver in D would've been the driver in C if the only difference was where the person was located, then of course there's no moral difference between the cases. 
  I don't disagree that it's complicated. If your contention is only with complications, we could trivially design a scenario to remove them. In two cases, a person runs a red light while driving drunk and runs directly into a school bus with windows that the driver couldn't see into. The accident is identical identical in both cases except in case A the bus was empty except for a powerful bodybuilder driver, who survived with minor injuries, and in case B the bus was full of 30 children who all died. My position is that these cases are trivially morally identical. If you disagree, then you disagree with the actual principle itself, not just because you think it can be complicated. >
  
  So it seems like you are saying that impact makes a big difference right?  But I would argue that the type of the impact that it has is somewhat within the aggressor's control.  Usually when you hit someone and they die, it happens at high velocity and strong impact.  This means that you didn't see them at all.  That is different type of an action compared to hitting someone and they come away with just minor injuries, that means the driver saw the victim and did his best to avoid the situation.  So you can theoretically concoct two different situations where everything is exactly the same except for the outcome of the victim, but in practice, it is NOT the same leading up to the impact, and that is the major reasons why the outcome was different in the first place.
  Also, run by the argument on why scenarios A, B, C, and D are not all morally equivalent in your mind. >
  
  Regarding the first point, yes I agree that it's complicated. That's why I'm trying to assume that those complications don't exist in the hypotheticals I use. If you agree that luck shouldn't play a part in a hypothetical where the actions are truly the same in every way but that it's not practical to enforce this in reality, that's very different than thinking that luck inherently should play a factor because x, y, or z. 
  
  Also, run by the argument on why scenarios A, B, C, and D are not all morally equivalent in your mind.
  
  Assuming the hypothetical constrains the only variable to be luck, they are all the same. If the driver in C or D wouldn't have hit a person who was in the same location as the stop sign or would've hit them differently then there would be a moral difference, of course, since the actions would be different. >
  
  But then this is a bad hypothetical example.  I would argue that the impact velocity of the car has a very correlation with the victim's well being.  And OP conveniently omitted this from the hypothetical by making it seem like the conditions were exactly the same.  But most likely, the dead person was hit by a much faster moving car while the uninjured person was hit by a much slower moving car.  That is physics 101.  So these two scenarios are not likely the same in practice. >
  
  But I'm asking you what you would say if the scenarios are the same from the driver's perspective. >
  
  The scenarios are not the same because they are intertwined with the driver behaviors which are never the same.  There are different actions that the driver could do while trying to avoid (or not avoid) the accidents.  And these correlate with the amount of damage done to the victim.  It is up to you to tease out all these different factors and to dole out appropriate level of punishments based on the speed of the car, deceleration of the car near impact, the change in the direction of the vehicle near impact, etc, which makes effectively each one of these accidents non-identical.  It is not up to me because this is not the type of change in the law that I support. >
  
  I already gave you a very simple hypothetical in which the driver behaviors are exactly the same. I'll repeat it. 
  
  In two cases, a person runs a red light while driving drunk and runs directly into a school bus with windows that the driver couldn't see into. The accident is identical identical in both cases except in case A the bus was empty except for a powerful bodybuilder driver, who survived with minor injuries, and in case B the bus was full of 30 children who all died.
  
  Do you think that the driver in scenario A is morally different or deserves different punishment than the driver in B? >
  
  I think you are actually saying criminals should be punished for the act they do irrespective of outcome. As others have pointed out, outcomes are part of what changes the “crime charged” as you put it. 
  In that case, you would charge/punish a person who gets drunk, drives, and speeds the same as you would
  Someone who gets drunk, drives, crashes into a mini van and kills a family of four.  The “act” the defendant did was drive drunk in both situations.  
  That would be a system I’d not advocate for. But if you think that’s justice, cool.  The “logic” is that the criminal justice system doesn’t just focus on the defendant. It looks at the victim and society as a whole.