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License plates are the primary enforcement mechanism for traffic laws. Traffic laws (red lights, speed limits, etc.) provably save lives, and surveys have shown

by whakim 4y ago

License plates are the primary enforcement mechanism for traffic laws. Traffic laws (red lights, speed limits, etc.) provably save lives, and surveys have shown that people's likelihood of obeying such laws correlates with their perceived likelihood of being caught. I think your argument about tracking down people who didn't actually do any harm misses the point - you might not intend to cause harm but the behavior you exhibit may simply lead to more harm if everyone did it. Should drinking and driving be legal as long as you don't hurt anyone? I have made the same point with regard to a tradeoff betweening traffic laws and encryption (intentionally, since that's the point of my post - everything is a tradeoff). But I think license plates enable a system beyond "man in police car" which provably saves many lives. Even if you disagree (and I think you'd almost certainly be in the minority if you conducted a poll), the fact that we're even discussing it proves the GGP wrong - privacy tradeoffs aren't necessarily harmful ipso facto.

int_19h 4y ago
And yet people don't like red light cameras. Case in point: many municipalities in US ban them outright, in most cases due to popular demand from their constituents.
- ghaff 4y ago
  A lot of people favor traffic enforcement of, especially, significant violations in general without favoring the automation of every relatively minor traffic violation. Automated systems could of course be setup to mostly just catch gross violators but for lots of reasons they won't be.
pdonis 4y ago
> the behavior you exhibit may simply lead to more harm if everyone did it. This the same justification that is given for all nanny state laws. And I don't find it any more convincing than the justification that is given for encryption backdoors. The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. Not if they do something which you or the government thinks might cause harm if enough people did it. Actual events trump guesses. > Traffic laws (red lights, speed limits, etc.) provably save lives Compared to what? Compared to a society where we didn't punish anyone even when they did actually cause harm, probably yes. Compared to a society where we did punish people who actually caused harm, but didn't interfere with people who hadn't? I don't think so. The problem with punishing people who haven't actually caused harm is that they know they didn't actually cause harm but you punished them anyway. That weakens people's respect for the law in general. They start to view the law as a game, where the government tries to catch you breaking an arbitrary rule and you try to avoid being caught. That is how speeding laws, for example, are treated by virtually everyone. Nobody counts the costs of that when judging laws. But we should. And if we did, I think we would end up just where I am advocating: we would only use the law to punish people who actually caused harm. Sure, put a sign on the road that says "maximum recommended speed 55 mph", as long as it's only a recommendation--if a cop can't randomly pull me over for exceeding the limit just because he happened to spot me, or because it's end of the month quota time and the municipality needs some more income. If I actually cause an accident, and I get penalized more because I exceeded the recommended limit, that's fine; that's what the law is for. But not until I actually cause harm.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. Not if they do something which you or the government thinks might cause harm if enough people did it. Actual events trump guesses. Sooo let me get it straight, you're saying that someone should be allowed to drive in wrong lane or drive in middle of road and only get punished when they actually crash into someone? Because that's what you're saying. > If I actually cause an accident, and I get penalized more because I exceeded the recommended limit, that's fine; that's what the law is for. But not until I actually cause harm. Can't punish a corpse, can't resurrect whoever you killed.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    >* you're saying that someone should be allowed to drive in wrong lane or drive in middle of road and only get punished when they actually crash into someone?* I'm saying that the law should not be able to punish them if they haven't caused actual harm. If they do cause actual harm, I have no problem at all with these things being treated as aggravating factors that increase the punishment. > Can't punish a corpse, can't resurrect whoever you killed. That's just as true under our current system as it would be under the kind of system I have been describing. But under our current system, as I have pointed out, people lose respect for the law in general when the law punishes them when they haven't caused actual harm. That doesn't seem to me like a good thing. Nor does it seem like a way to reduce the amount of actual harm people cause. Loss of respect for the law in general means people are less likely to pay attention even to laws that do relate to actual harms.
- whakim 4y ago
  > This the same justification that is given for all nanny state laws. If you don't find compelling the proposition that laws disincentivize behavior, then we won't really be able to come to much agreement on anything. > The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. This presupposes that causing harm is entirely within your control. If you drive home drunk, you might kill someone simply because they happen to be there, not because you did anything differently - you may not even have seen them! (Thomas Nagel writes about this exact scenario in his 1979 paper, Moral Luck). Similarly, if you're driving 100mph and get into an accident, you're more likely to kill someone than if you were driving at 70mph and got into the exact same accident. To take a step back, you've advanced a legal framework based on a consequentialist view of morality. Consequentialism can be problematic along a number of axes which is why our legal systems don't work that way. > The problem with punishing people who haven't actually caused harm is that they know they didn't actually cause harm but you punished them anyway. That weakens people's respect for the law in general. They start to view the law as a game, where the government tries to catch you breaking an arbitrary rule and you try to avoid being caught. That is how speeding laws, for example, are treated by virtually everyone. Not if they understand that a particular behavior leads to harm and thus ought to be disincentivized, e.g. drink driving. Your comment on speeding laws is incorrect, because it assumes that speed limits have no bearing on driver behavior. In fact, setting speed limits either too low or too high is problematic. When you set the speed limit too low, you create a potentially dangerous speed differential between those trying to abide by the speed limit, and those ignoring it. Past a certain point, however, most drivers will cluster around the given speed limit which means you're simply artificially increasing the fatality rate of accidents (since they will occur at higher speeds).
throw_pm23 4y ago
Your point is well-argued and I mostly agree. But this: > Should drinking and driving be legal as long as you don't hurt anyone? to some extent is the case in parts of Europe. In some countries 1-2 beers (or equivalent) are allowed and police cannot proactively control it. Yet if you get into an accident it can be an aggravating condition. I don't mention the concrete countries and laws to avoid people starting to nitpick and dissect minor details.

by whakim 4y ago

int_19h 4y ago

And yet people don't like red light cameras. Case in point: many municipalities in US ban them outright, in most cases due to popular demand from their constituents.

ghaff 4y ago
A lot of people favor traffic enforcement of, especially, significant violations in general without favoring the automation of every relatively minor traffic violation. Automated systems could of course be setup to mostly just catch gross violators but for lots of reasons they won't be.

pdonis 4y ago

> the behavior you exhibit may simply lead to more harm if everyone did it. This the same justification that is given for all nanny state laws. And I don't find it any more convincing than the justification that is given for encryption backdoors. The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. Not if they do something which you or the government thinks might cause harm if enough people did it. Actual events trump guesses. > Traffic laws (red lights, speed limits, etc.) provably save lives Compared to what? Compared to a society where we didn't punish anyone even when they did actually cause harm, probably yes. Compared to a society where we did punish people who actually caused harm, but didn't interfere with people who hadn't? I don't think so. The problem with punishing people who haven't actually caused harm is that they know they didn't actually cause harm but you punished them anyway. That weakens people's respect for the law in general. They start to view the law as a game, where the government tries to catch you breaking an arbitrary rule and you try to avoid being caught. That is how speeding laws, for example, are treated by virtually everyone. Nobody counts the costs of that when judging laws. But we should. And if we did, I think we would end up just where I am advocating: we would only use the law to punish people who actually caused harm. Sure, put a sign on the road that says "maximum recommended speed 55 mph", as long as it's only a recommendation--if a cop can't randomly pull me over for exceeding the limit just because he happened to spot me, or because it's end of the month quota time and the municipality needs some more income. If I actually cause an accident, and I get penalized more because I exceeded the recommended limit, that's fine; that's what the law is for. But not until I actually cause harm.

ilyt 4y ago
> The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. Not if they do something which you or the government thinks might cause harm if enough people did it. Actual events trump guesses. Sooo let me get it straight, you're saying that someone should be allowed to drive in wrong lane or drive in middle of road and only get punished when they actually crash into someone? Because that's what you're saying. > If I actually cause an accident, and I get penalized more because I exceeded the recommended limit, that's fine; that's what the law is for. But not until I actually cause harm. Can't punish a corpse, can't resurrect whoever you killed.
- pdonis 4y ago
  >* you're saying that someone should be allowed to drive in wrong lane or drive in middle of road and only get punished when they actually crash into someone?* I'm saying that the law should not be able to punish them if they haven't caused actual harm. If they do cause actual harm, I have no problem at all with these things being treated as aggravating factors that increase the punishment. > Can't punish a corpse, can't resurrect whoever you killed. That's just as true under our current system as it would be under the kind of system I have been describing. But under our current system, as I have pointed out, people lose respect for the law in general when the law punishes them when they haven't caused actual harm. That doesn't seem to me like a good thing. Nor does it seem like a way to reduce the amount of actual harm people cause. Loss of respect for the law in general means people are less likely to pay attention even to laws that do relate to actual harms.
whakim 4y ago
> This the same justification that is given for all nanny state laws. If you don't find compelling the proposition that laws disincentivize behavior, then we won't really be able to come to much agreement on anything. > The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. This presupposes that causing harm is entirely within your control. If you drive home drunk, you might kill someone simply because they happen to be there, not because you did anything differently - you may not even have seen them! (Thomas Nagel writes about this exact scenario in his 1979 paper, Moral Luck). Similarly, if you're driving 100mph and get into an accident, you're more likely to kill someone than if you were driving at 70mph and got into the exact same accident. To take a step back, you've advanced a legal framework based on a consequentialist view of morality. Consequentialism can be problematic along a number of axes which is why our legal systems don't work that way. > The problem with punishing people who haven't actually caused harm is that they know they didn't actually cause harm but you punished them anyway. That weakens people's respect for the law in general. They start to view the law as a game, where the government tries to catch you breaking an arbitrary rule and you try to avoid being caught. That is how speeding laws, for example, are treated by virtually everyone. Not if they understand that a particular behavior leads to harm and thus ought to be disincentivized, e.g. drink driving. Your comment on speeding laws is incorrect, because it assumes that speed limits have no bearing on driver behavior. In fact, setting speed limits either too low or too high is problematic. When you set the speed limit too low, you create a potentially dangerous speed differential between those trying to abide by the speed limit, and those ignoring it. Past a certain point, however, most drivers will cluster around the given speed limit which means you're simply artificially increasing the fatality rate of accidents (since they will occur at higher speeds).

throw_pm23 4y ago

Your point is well-argued and I mostly agree. But this: > Should drinking and driving be legal as long as you don't hurt anyone? to some extent is the case in parts of Europe. In some countries 1-2 beers (or equivalent) are allowed and police cannot proactively control it. Yet if you get into an accident it can be an aggravating condition. I don't mention the concrete countries and laws to avoid people starting to nitpick and dissect minor details.