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Is it better to have the atrocities committed upon a person by a stranger, or by their government, which is charged to protect them? Getting arrested, tried, a

by Zikes 11y ago

Is it better to have the atrocities committed upon a person by a stranger, or by their government, which is charged to protect them? Getting arrested, tried, and imprisoned can be a brutal process all on its own. Losing years or even the entirety of the remainder of one's life to imprisonment is (for me, at least) an extremely scary thought. The sort of treatment you can expect in prison is absolutely dehumanizing. You aren't a name anymore, you are a number. You have no more freedoms, no choices, and unless you have someone on the outside financing your entertainment, you're at the mercy of a very limited library of options for which the prison has absolutely no incentive to improve upon. I have a father and a brother both in prison right now, and it is absolutely not an experience I would want to wish on any innocent person, even at the risk of criminals going free.

whack 11y ago
Is it better to have the atrocities committed upon a person by a stranger, or by their government, which is charged to protect them? Let's put this to a test. Would you rather have 2 family members get killed in a drive-by shooting? Or would you rather have 1 family member get executed by the state? And I don't mean this as a hypothetical. Picture your mom/dad/siblings, imagine them getting killed, and can you honestly say that it's preferable for 1 additional family member to get killed as long as the government isn't involved?
- cornholio 11y ago
  >Would you rather have 2 family members get killed in a drive-by shooting? Or would you rather have 1 family member get executed by the state? I think your test is quite misleading since you are moving the goal posts to "It's better for criminals to kill two people than to wrongfully execute an innocent man" which is an entirely different statement from "It's better to free two criminals than to execute an innocent man". Sentencing all those suspected of a murder will not reduce the murder rate by an equal amount, in fact you will end up with a larger total of wrongfully killed men. From the utilitarian perspective you seem to favor, you would want to minimize the number of dead people, so the correct N ratio depends on the psychological response to risk/reward of the average criminal. For a majority of would be criminals, even a 10% chance of being killed in retaliation is a strong disincentive, so you would get a strong crime reduction response for relatively a large N. As you continue to decrease N, you will encounter hardened criminals, willing to gamble with their life, and eventually those irrational types you mentioned that do not respond to any threat of punishment. But as you go to lower Ns, your own victim count increases, as you kill more and more innocent men in the hopes of dissuading killers from doing the same. So there is a sweet spot, significantly higher than N=1 where the total number of victims is minimized. We can reason the same about the punishment itself, and find a spot (N, punishment) for each crime that maximizes the societal welfare.
- emmelaich 11y ago
  Your hypothetical isn't useful; you'll have to give a probabilities instead of certainties.

by Zikes 11y ago

whack 11y ago

Is it better to have the atrocities committed upon a person by a stranger, or by their government, which is charged to protect them? Let's put this to a test. Would you rather have 2 family members get killed in a drive-by shooting? Or would you rather have 1 family member get executed by the state? And I don't mean this as a hypothetical. Picture your mom/dad/siblings, imagine them getting killed, and can you honestly say that it's preferable for 1 additional family member to get killed as long as the government isn't involved?

cornholio 11y ago
>Would you rather have 2 family members get killed in a drive-by shooting? Or would you rather have 1 family member get executed by the state? I think your test is quite misleading since you are moving the goal posts to "It's better for criminals to kill two people than to wrongfully execute an innocent man" which is an entirely different statement from "It's better to free two criminals than to execute an innocent man". Sentencing all those suspected of a murder will not reduce the murder rate by an equal amount, in fact you will end up with a larger total of wrongfully killed men. From the utilitarian perspective you seem to favor, you would want to minimize the number of dead people, so the correct N ratio depends on the psychological response to risk/reward of the average criminal. For a majority of would be criminals, even a 10% chance of being killed in retaliation is a strong disincentive, so you would get a strong crime reduction response for relatively a large N. As you continue to decrease N, you will encounter hardened criminals, willing to gamble with their life, and eventually those irrational types you mentioned that do not respond to any threat of punishment. But as you go to lower Ns, your own victim count increases, as you kill more and more innocent men in the hopes of dissuading killers from doing the same. So there is a sweet spot, significantly higher than N=1 where the total number of victims is minimized. We can reason the same about the punishment itself, and find a spot (N, punishment) for each crime that maximizes the societal welfare.
emmelaich 11y ago
Your hypothetical isn't useful; you'll have to give a probabilities instead of certainties.