If a legislation to reduce quantities of a particular chemical in supermarket foods unintentionally makes them more poisonous by leading to demand for a worse substitute and thus ends up killing many people, was this legislation as wrong as deliberately wanting to kill those people would have been?
Bad example, here’s another one.
When a Communist country in the 1950s starts the collectivization of farms, sees a sudden drop in food production, and observes a long famine due to it - would we call it murder on the part of the authorities who imposed it?
Are public law concepts, like ‘murder’, even legitimate in terms of the natural law?
‘Murder’ is a crime requiring intention as part of its definition, otherwise the wrongful killing in question is classed as ‘culpable homicide’, or ‘manslaughter’, or something like that. Someone who is charged with ‘murder’ could be convicted of ‘culpable homicide’ instead if the definitional requirement of intention cannot be demonstrated by the prosecution. The United States is one country which has gone even further in its division of crimes, by specifying “degrees” of possible murder convictions depending on the degree of intention imputed onto the defendant’s actions.
This is largely irrelevant for the purposes of private law. You don’t sue someone in civil court for “murder” - you sue them for wrongfully causing someone’s death, whether by a positive commission or a negative omission in the presence of a duly established legal duty to act. It doesn’t really matter whether their actions were intentional or negligent. Civil law remedies are not meant to punish the perpetrator, nor rehabilitate him, nor satiate anyone’s thirst for revenge. They are meant to compensate the victim for the harm suffered. The defendant can’t mitigate the damages he’s ordered to pay by arguing that his actions were of a relatively lesser degree of wrongfulness - the purposes of damages are not to punish him, they are to compensate the victim for the harm caused. If the defendant can demonstrate that his actions were not at all wrongful - e.g. if he was acting reasonably in self-defense - then so be it, but there’s no awarding of greater or lesser damages in private matters depending on how wrongful an act was. It’s either wrongful or it isn’t, and if it is, then the defendant is liable for all damages that result.
That being said, with regards to Prateek’s second example, I will venture to say that if the communist state and its five-year agriculture plan vis-a-vis the population were replaced with a parent and their nutrition policy regarding their children, and the children were to die as a result of malnutrition in terms of the nutrition policy imposed upon them, well…
If someone is willing to accept that the couple in this instance were legitimately convicted of murder, they should be willing to accept that the state in Prateek’s second example could be convicted of the same.