5 ms·

If you pay the ransom you’ve doomed future children to be kidnapped as well.

by chrischen 5y ago

lethoso 5y ago
Future kids aren't your kid though. It is human to be self-interested.
- chrischen 5y ago
  If we can agree the act is in self-interest, and we can agree that society has a role to play in disincentivizing certain self-interested actions that harm the greater good, then we can agree that society should apply those disincentives to ransoms.
gambiting 5y ago
The problem with this logic is that not paying the ransom doesn't guarantee future children not being kidnapped, but it nearly guarantees your own child being killed. So if the choice is presented as "do I not pay the ransom to reduce the chance of further kidnappings by some completely undefined %, or have my child harmed with nearly 99% certainty", who could ever chose not to pay it? What sort of mind gymnastics would you go through to justify not paying it in that case?
- chrischen 5y ago
  My logic is most people would put themselves first at the cost of the greater good. So if it is well established logically that the greater good is for everyone to cooperate and not pay ransoms then it needs to be enforced for everyone. It’s like pollution or recycling. Why spend the effort and cost to do it if the benefit is only to future generations or society as a whole (ignoring the few who do it for their own sense of self-satisfaction)? That’s why we have things like penalties for pollution and carbon credits. These people are externalizing the cost of their actions. At the very least we shouldn’t allow ransom payers to externalize the real cost of the ransoms to future generations and society as a whole.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Yes, but like I said right at the beginning it works fantastically well as a sort of armchair theory. Same way we can sit here and say that drugs should be super illegal and the penalty should be death, voila, no more drugs, right? We know this doesn't work. Making ransom payments super illegal wouldn't stop them from being made. People(parents in particular) would absolutely try to find a way to pay the ransom anyway to save their children, no matter the consequences. Like I said in another comment - what kind of punishment would stop the parent of a child in danger from paying the ransom? Years in prison? Most parents would gladly make that trade to make sure their kid goes home. There isn't a punishment here that you can establish to absolutely eliminate ransom payments, and as I'm sure you can see - as long as *any" are paid, criminals will keep using them as a tool. So imho, any effort(and therefore money) spent on fighting the ransom payers is completely wasted time and money. Not paying a ransom does not reduce the chance of further kidnappings significantly enough to make it worth it, and I'm nearly certain you can't come up with a punishment harsh enough to scare people away from making the payments.
    - chrischen 5y ago
      > no more drugs, right? We know this doesn't work. You can read what I wrote here about teh great firewall. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27103646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27103646 "No more drugs" is not the goal, neither is "no more ransoms." The goal is to reduce the reward for ransoms so that it is disincentivized to some degree. If our disagreement is on how to stop X to an absolute degree, then I would agree with you for all Xs that it would be impossible, whether X be ransoms or logical fallacies.
young_unixer 5y ago
Under a consequentialist point of view, yes. But, in my honest opinion, consequentialism is a completely flawed and unfair way to judge actions.
- meowface 5y ago
  I totally disagree. I consider myself a consequentialist, and I absolutely think the net positive utility would come from paying the ransom and rescuing your child. The problem isn't consequentialism but merely an insufficiently nuanced analysis of potential actions one could take and their potential consequences.
- chrischen 5y ago
  Judging actions is like saying dooming children is good, or bad.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
meowface 5y ago
So you need to sacrifice your own child's life for being so stupid as to get abducted and kidnapped in order to hypothetically decrease the probability that hypothetical future kids may be kidnapped? Come on. You would really make that decision if your child were kidnapped?
- chrischen 5y ago
  I wouldn’t make that decision. No one would. Which is why it must be made for them… kind of like car insurance.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    It would work about as well as banning abortion - of course it would still happen, just outside of the view of the law. Like, come on. If the life of your child was on the line, you wouldn't figure out a way to pay the ransom even if there was a potential for prosecution later? Also I'm not sure how the fine would even be decided to be effective? 3 years in prison? Would absolutely gladly trade it for the life of my child. Probably any amount of time in prison would be spent gladly in order to save your child. And once we start throwing ideas like life imprisonment(because really, can't go much higher than that) it would be struck down as not proportionate to the crime.
    - chrischen 5y ago
      > It would work about as well as banning abortion - of course it would still happen, just outside of the view of the law. Like, come on. If the life of your child was on the line, you wouldn't figure out a way to pay the ransom even if there was a potential for prosecution later? By this logic the Great Firewall of China is a massive failure because some guy, somewhere, was able to access illegal content from China. But that's not the case. It works quite well to control public opinion and it doesn't have to be 100% effective at blocking content to do so. The same applies to disincentives to ransoms. Of course some people will still pay ransoms. But why let criminals have a monopoly on the market? The total ransom someone can pay is fixed by the market (basically how much your child is worth to you and how much money you even have, otherwise there'd be no ceiling on ransoms). Since the government is in on the action, the revenue from ransoms is split between fines/jail time/criminals. If the government's actions are decided ahead of time, and cannot be changed based on any single ransom attempt, then kidnappers will know that their potential income from ransoms will be severely cut, thereby disincentivizing ransoms by some degree. The degree to which it is disincentivized depends on how good of a competitor the government is in the market (enforcement/detection of ransom paying events). > Also I'm not sure how the fine would even be decided to be effective? 3 years in prison? Would absolutely gladly trade it for the life of my child. Probably any amount of time in prison would be spent gladly in order to save your child. And once we start throwing ideas like life imprisonment(because really, can't go much higher than that) it would be struck down as not proportionate to the crime. These are implementation details. If there is no ceiling to what you will pay/rob/steal/do then don't let the kidnappers out there know! But also, you'd be a massive liability to society assuming other people don't care about your kid as much as you do, since criminals can leverage you to a 100% degree. If they know this about you, they don't even have to estimate your net worth. They can get you to go rob a bank instead!
Silhouette 5y ago
And what if your child, who you save at that time, goes on to be an elite police officer specialising in child kidnappings and saves dozens of later children's lives without paying ransoms? These situations involve complicated moral dilemmas, but thought experiments never take into account all possibilities, and at some point idealistic principles about the general problem have to give way to pragmatism about the immediate problem. To give an extreme example, if someone had a button they could push that would end the world as we know it, and they demanded you pay them $1B or they'd push it, are you really going to argue that paying that billion dollars is the incorrect response because it would encourage future people with the ability to end the world as we know it to demand ransoms?
- chrischen 5y ago
  > And what if your child, who you save at that time, goes on to be an elite police officer specializing in child kidnappings and saves dozens of later children's lives without paying ransoms? Well he wouldn't have been kidnapped in the first place if we disincentivized ransoms! > To give an extreme example, if someone had a button they could push that would end the world as we know it, and they demanded you pay them $1B or they'd push it, are you really going to argue that paying that billion dollars is the incorrect response because it would encourage future people with the ability to end the world as we know it to demand ransoms? Your example is indeed extreme. It posits a game with 2 players, the world, and the entity trying to end the world. In a 2-player scenario where you lose if you don't do some requested action then you would have no choice but to do it. However, in an n-player scenario where n > 2 and player "x" being the one wanting to win by ending the world, and assuming all other players can win by cooperating, then yes the world government should indeed forbid all players from paying the $1B ransom. It's a well established fact that if ransom demanders know that ransom payers are subject to significant fines and penalties, their power to demand ransoms drastically diminishes.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    Well he wouldn't have been kidnapped in the first place if we disincentivized ransoms! This is a bizarre and emotive discussion, so I'm not sure how much more it's worth saying, but I will leave you with one final question. What law could you possibly make and what "severe criminal penalty" could you possibly impose that would be greater than the natural law that parents would do almost anything to protect their children and what a parent would suffer if they lost a child? I don't believe anyone could ever implement the policy you've been advocating effectively, and at that point, the entire deterrent argument collapses anyway.

If you pay the ransom you’ve doomed future children to be kidnapped as well.

lethoso 5y ago

Future kids aren't your kid though. It is human to be self-interested.

chrischen 5y ago
If we can agree the act is in self-interest, and we can agree that society has a role to play in disincentivizing certain self-interested actions that harm the greater good, then we can agree that society should apply those disincentives to ransoms.

gambiting 5y ago

The problem with this logic is that not paying the ransom doesn't guarantee future children not being kidnapped, but it nearly guarantees your own child being killed. So if the choice is presented as "do I not pay the ransom to reduce the chance of further kidnappings by some completely undefined %, or have my child harmed with nearly 99% certainty", who could ever chose not to pay it? What sort of mind gymnastics would you go through to justify not paying it in that case?

chrischen 5y ago
My logic is most people would put themselves first at the cost of the greater good. So if it is well established logically that the greater good is for everyone to cooperate and not pay ransoms then it needs to be enforced for everyone. It’s like pollution or recycling. Why spend the effort and cost to do it if the benefit is only to future generations or society as a whole (ignoring the few who do it for their own sense of self-satisfaction)? That’s why we have things like penalties for pollution and carbon credits. These people are externalizing the cost of their actions. At the very least we shouldn’t allow ransom payers to externalize the real cost of the ransoms to future generations and society as a whole.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Yes, but like I said right at the beginning it works fantastically well as a sort of armchair theory. Same way we can sit here and say that drugs should be super illegal and the penalty should be death, voila, no more drugs, right? We know this doesn't work. Making ransom payments super illegal wouldn't stop them from being made. People(parents in particular) would absolutely try to find a way to pay the ransom anyway to save their children, no matter the consequences. Like I said in another comment - what kind of punishment would stop the parent of a child in danger from paying the ransom? Years in prison? Most parents would gladly make that trade to make sure their kid goes home. There isn't a punishment here that you can establish to absolutely eliminate ransom payments, and as I'm sure you can see - as long as *any" are paid, criminals will keep using them as a tool. So imho, any effort(and therefore money) spent on fighting the ransom payers is completely wasted time and money. Not paying a ransom does not reduce the chance of further kidnappings significantly enough to make it worth it, and I'm nearly certain you can't come up with a punishment harsh enough to scare people away from making the payments.
  - chrischen 5y ago
    > no more drugs, right? We know this doesn't work. You can read what I wrote here about teh great firewall. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27103646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27103646 "No more drugs" is not the goal, neither is "no more ransoms." The goal is to reduce the reward for ransoms so that it is disincentivized to some degree. If our disagreement is on how to stop X to an absolute degree, then I would agree with you for all Xs that it would be impossible, whether X be ransoms or logical fallacies.

young_unixer 5y ago

Under a consequentialist point of view, yes. But, in my honest opinion, consequentialism is a completely flawed and unfair way to judge actions.

meowface 5y ago
I totally disagree. I consider myself a consequentialist, and I absolutely think the net positive utility would come from paying the ransom and rescuing your child. The problem isn't consequentialism but merely an insufficiently nuanced analysis of potential actions one could take and their potential consequences.
chrischen 5y ago
Judging actions is like saying dooming children is good, or bad.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

meowface 5y ago

So you need to sacrifice your own child's life for being so stupid as to get abducted and kidnapped in order to hypothetically decrease the probability that hypothetical future kids may be kidnapped? Come on. You would really make that decision if your child were kidnapped?

chrischen 5y ago
I wouldn’t make that decision. No one would. Which is why it must be made for them… kind of like car insurance.
- gambiting 5y ago
  It would work about as well as banning abortion - of course it would still happen, just outside of the view of the law. Like, come on. If the life of your child was on the line, you wouldn't figure out a way to pay the ransom even if there was a potential for prosecution later? Also I'm not sure how the fine would even be decided to be effective? 3 years in prison? Would absolutely gladly trade it for the life of my child. Probably any amount of time in prison would be spent gladly in order to save your child. And once we start throwing ideas like life imprisonment(because really, can't go much higher than that) it would be struck down as not proportionate to the crime.
  - chrischen 5y ago
    > It would work about as well as banning abortion - of course it would still happen, just outside of the view of the law. Like, come on. If the life of your child was on the line, you wouldn't figure out a way to pay the ransom even if there was a potential for prosecution later? By this logic the Great Firewall of China is a massive failure because some guy, somewhere, was able to access illegal content from China. But that's not the case. It works quite well to control public opinion and it doesn't have to be 100% effective at blocking content to do so. The same applies to disincentives to ransoms. Of course some people will still pay ransoms. But why let criminals have a monopoly on the market? The total ransom someone can pay is fixed by the market (basically how much your child is worth to you and how much money you even have, otherwise there'd be no ceiling on ransoms). Since the government is in on the action, the revenue from ransoms is split between fines/jail time/criminals. If the government's actions are decided ahead of time, and cannot be changed based on any single ransom attempt, then kidnappers will know that their potential income from ransoms will be severely cut, thereby disincentivizing ransoms by some degree. The degree to which it is disincentivized depends on how good of a competitor the government is in the market (enforcement/detection of ransom paying events). > Also I'm not sure how the fine would even be decided to be effective? 3 years in prison? Would absolutely gladly trade it for the life of my child. Probably any amount of time in prison would be spent gladly in order to save your child. And once we start throwing ideas like life imprisonment(because really, can't go much higher than that) it would be struck down as not proportionate to the crime. These are implementation details. If there is no ceiling to what you will pay/rob/steal/do then don't let the kidnappers out there know! But also, you'd be a massive liability to society assuming other people don't care about your kid as much as you do, since criminals can leverage you to a 100% degree. If they know this about you, they don't even have to estimate your net worth. They can get you to go rob a bank instead!

Silhouette 5y ago

And what if your child, who you save at that time, goes on to be an elite police officer specialising in child kidnappings and saves dozens of later children's lives without paying ransoms? These situations involve complicated moral dilemmas, but thought experiments never take into account all possibilities, and at some point idealistic principles about the general problem have to give way to pragmatism about the immediate problem. To give an extreme example, if someone had a button they could push that would end the world as we know it, and they demanded you pay them $1B or they'd push it, are you really going to argue that paying that billion dollars is the incorrect response because it would encourage future people with the ability to end the world as we know it to demand ransoms?

chrischen 5y ago
> And what if your child, who you save at that time, goes on to be an elite police officer specializing in child kidnappings and saves dozens of later children's lives without paying ransoms? Well he wouldn't have been kidnapped in the first place if we disincentivized ransoms! > To give an extreme example, if someone had a button they could push that would end the world as we know it, and they demanded you pay them $1B or they'd push it, are you really going to argue that paying that billion dollars is the incorrect response because it would encourage future people with the ability to end the world as we know it to demand ransoms? Your example is indeed extreme. It posits a game with 2 players, the world, and the entity trying to end the world. In a 2-player scenario where you lose if you don't do some requested action then you would have no choice but to do it. However, in an n-player scenario where n > 2 and player "x" being the one wanting to win by ending the world, and assuming all other players can win by cooperating, then yes the world government should indeed forbid all players from paying the $1B ransom. It's a well established fact that if ransom demanders know that ransom payers are subject to significant fines and penalties, their power to demand ransoms drastically diminishes.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Well he wouldn't have been kidnapped in the first place if we disincentivized ransoms! This is a bizarre and emotive discussion, so I'm not sure how much more it's worth saying, but I will leave you with one final question. What law could you possibly make and what "severe criminal penalty" could you possibly impose that would be greater than the natural law that parents would do almost anything to protect their children and what a parent would suffer if they lost a child? I don't believe anyone could ever implement the policy you've been advocating effectively, and at that point, the entire deterrent argument collapses anyway.