Our legal system does many things that, when examined too closely, make little sense but serve as decent approximations in practice, and sometimes the conditions that made them good approximations change decades or millennia later. Then it’s up to the legal system to catch up, which is always difficult and painful.
I thought this was a philosophical rather than legal discussion. The best available philosophical understanding is, or should be, what the legal system relies on as the ideal towards which its approximations point.
