> If you hire a hitman to kill your spouse, both you and the hitman are guilty of murder.

That's generally because of laws which explicitly make procuring, soliciting, etc., a crime that is actually committed an offense for which the perpetrator can be punished as a principal of the solicited, procured, etc., offense; that is, the law recognizes that the acts involved is meaningfully distinct, but assigns the same culpability to those distinct acts.

So, the analogy to law sort of undermines the idea posited upthread that it doesn't make sense to distinguish the act of authorizing from the act of performing what has been authorized.

The law isn't an intelligent being that makes its own choices. It is an artifact created by humans, who have a reason for making it such. Humans have considered, in the US, that hiring a hitman to kill a target is murder, so they have ensured the law reflects such. Since an entire rewrite of the law isn't possible for every change, it sometimes means that the law will have to have less than perfect patches applied. But to suggest that the way it is reasoned about in law is the way it is meant to be makes as much sense as looking as a kludge and saying that the kludge is what was wanted, ignoring all the factors that lead to the genesis of a kludge.