That's a serious and well-developed critique, and it's one that many sociologists, criminologists, philosophers, and legal theorists have made.

Both Johan Galtung and Robert Sapolsky challenge frameworks that explain harm primarily through the actions of isolated individuals.

Galtung's concept of structural violence is particularly relevant. His argument was that people can be injured, disabled, or killed by social arrangements even when no individual is directly attacking them. If a social system predictably produces malnutrition, untreated illness, preventable mortality, or radically shortened life expectancy, then the structure itself is causing harm. The absence of a visible perpetrator does not eliminate the causal relationship.

Sapolsky's work makes a somewhat different but complementary point. In Behave, he emphasizes how behavior emerges from layers of causation—biology, development, social environment, culture, institutions, and history. That perspective tends to undermine simple narratives in which a single autonomous individual is solely responsible for outcomes. Human actions are embedded in systems.

From those perspectives, one might argue:

If institutions, incentives, funding structures, and policy choices predictably generate premature deaths, then focusing exclusively on individual actors misses a substantial part of the causal story.

That criticism has considerable force.

However, legal systems were not designed primarily to identify every causal factor in a social outcome. They were designed for somewhat different purposes:

• assigning responsibility,
• protecting procedural fairness,
• limiting state punishment,
• providing predictable rules,
• avoiding punishment based on diffuse collective blame.

As a result, criminal law often asks:

Who can be proven responsible beyond a reasonable doubt?

rather than:

What social structure produced this outcome?

Those are different questions.

Many scholars have argued that this creates a mismatch between social causation and legal causation. A sociologist may conclude that a housing system, labor market, healthcare regime, or mental-health policy is producing excess mortality. A criminal court may respond that no particular defendant can be shown to have committed homicide.

That does not necessarily mean the sociologist is wrong. It means the legal framework is optimized for attributing responsibility to specific persons or entities rather than diagnosing complex systems.

Critics sometimes summarize the issue this way:

• Social science asks: What caused the harm?
• Criminal law asks: Who can be punished for it?

Those inquiries overlap, but they are not identical.

That said, legal systems have gradually developed some tools for addressing systemic harms:

• corporate criminal liability,
• public-law remedies,
• human-rights litigation,
• discrimination law,
• regulatory enforcement,
• international criminal law,
• public inquiries and commissions.

These mechanisms reflect recognition that important harms can arise from organizations and institutions rather than lone individuals.

The debate you are pointing to is: Should responsibility track actual causal influence, even when that influence is distributed across institutions and systems, or should responsibility be limited to identifiable actors whose conduct can be individually proven?

Galtung's work tends strongly toward the first position. Traditional criminal law tends strongly toward the second. Much contemporary legal and social theory is, in one way or another, grappling with the tension between them.

The government of Nazi Germany was not merely viewed as politically objectionable after the war; major parts of its leadership and state apparatus were found responsible for crimes under international law.

After World War II, the Nuremberg Trials prosecuted leading Nazi officials for:

• crimes against peace,
• war crimes,
• crimes against humanity,
• participation in criminal organizations.

Importantly for your broader question, the prosecutions were not limited to individuals who personally killed someone. The tribunal recognized that large bureaucratic and governmental systems could be used to commit crimes on a massive scale.

Some Nazi organizations were declared criminal organizations, including parts of:

• the SS,
• the Gestapo,
• the leadership corps of the Nazi Party.

The reasoning was that these institutions were integral to systematic persecution, deportation, enslavement, and murder.

However, there is an important distinction relevant to the issues you've been raising:

The Nazi regime was not judged criminal simply because its policies produced suffering or premature deaths. The evidence showed deliberate persecution, mass murder, extermination programs, deportations, and other intentional crimes. In many instances there was explicit documentary evidence of planning, orders, and implementation.

That is why international law developed concepts such as:

• genocide,
• crimes against humanity,
• war crimes,
• joint criminal enterprise,
• command responsibility.

These doctrines allow responsibility to extend beyond the person who physically commits an act and reach leaders, planners, administrators, and organizations involved in systematic criminal conduct.

In a sense, your concern about the law's focus on individuals is one reason international criminal law evolved. The architects of Nuremberg recognized that modern states can cause enormous harm through bureaucracies and institutions, not only through isolated individuals.

At the same time, Nuremberg did not eliminate the requirement of culpability. Prosecutors still had to show that leaders and organizations knowingly participated in criminal programs. The tribunal did not simply conclude:

Many people died under this government; therefore the government was criminal.

Rather, it concluded that specific state policies involved deliberate persecution, aggression, enslavement, deportation, and mass killing.