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If you're going for utilitarian points then yes, in the story to torture and save the child causes less overall damage. The problem is (as always with utilitari
by chillacy 11y ago
If you're going for utilitarian points then yes, in the story to torture and save the child causes less overall damage. The problem is (as always with utilitarian scenarios like these) that you can only know when to torture or not if you're omniscient. What happens if the guy is innocent? Or what happens if the kid is already dead or the car is too remote to reach in time no matter what you do to the criminal? (In both cases, not torturing is the more utilitarian solution, since the kid will be dead no matter what).
- chroma 11y agoIn this case, the police were all but certain they had the right man. There was video footage of him stealing the car. He had valuables from the car in his pockets. Likewise, the police were pretty sure the baby was still alive. It had only been 20 minutes since the car had been stolen. Based on these likelihoods, they thought beating information out of this man was worthwhile. I can't fault their judgement. We deal with the same sort of uncertainty when sending people to prison. We accept that at some point, the likelihood of guilt is high enough to warrant imprisonment. Set this threshold too high, many criminals go free. Set this threshold too low, many innocent people go to prison. Because determining guilt or innocence is noisy, you're always going to false positives and false negatives. It's a trade-off; you pick a threshold that does the most good.
- chillacy 11y agoThat's true. There's also the tricky business of picking what the formula for good is. In the US, false positives are heavily weighted and false negatives aren't as much. Something like Blackstone's Principle: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"