"Baby, don't hurt me / Don't hurt me / No more." Haddaway, "What Is Love" (1993)

The Safety Machine

Harm Without Fault

Seth C. Oranburg

What is law for? Strip away the academic vocabulary and you find the same structure as a 1993 Eurodance chorus: Baby, don't hurt me. Law exists to prevent harm. This book argues that harm prevention has become law's only definition — and that we have forgotten law's second purpose: cultivating the judgment, character, and practical wisdom that make civilization possible.

Explore the Argument →

Three Experiences

Each interactive maps to a part of the book's argument. Play them in order or start anywhere.

The Paradigm Case

The Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. The compliance documentation was immaculate. The aircraft was perfectly legal and fundamentally lethal. The institution was judgment-proof in both senses.

Boeing designed an aircraft that did not require pilot judgment in the relevant flight regime. The pilots never practiced compensating for the pitch characteristics. They never developed the embodied, habituated skill — what Aristotle would have called hexis — that would have made manual recovery possible. The automation was not incidental. It was the architecture.

Read how we got here →