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> That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect. this terrifies me

> That’s right, I think that inflicting suffering on vicious wrong-doers is morally praiseworthy even in the absence of any deterrent effect. this terrifies me. i can look at just about anyone -- myself included -- and tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops, and point out that their current path is likely to facilitate more vicious deeds. "you work for a company which has sold technology to a foreign government that used it to murder journalists and suppress the public", or even just "you paid taxes to a government and funded the use of weaponry associated with widespread casualties in a foreign war which most viewed as unjust by the time it ended". if i adopted author's point of view i would be compelled to murder one in three people i meet everyday. the consequentialist view, in contrast, makes it easy to convince myself that doing so is the wrong course of action because it has no "deterrent effect" (or it deters the target from as much good deeds as bad deeds): that retribution against every wrongdoer isn't likely to bring about a world of greater moral worth.

hef19898 3y ago
We onow exactly what such a world looks like, the approach the "author" advocates for was already tried multiple times. In fact, it is currently being tried in multiple places. Ans besides causing suffering upon suffering, it doesn't do anything. If that's what consequentionalists believe, they are very far down the rabbit hole that accepts destroying lives and killing people for some greater goal. A very dangerous way of thinking indeed...
- pyrale 3y ago
  > If that's what consequentionalists believe The author's article essentially builds a strawman, calls that consequentialist logic, and proceeds to happily burn that strawman to sell an alternative horror. Also there's a Godwin point because why not. You'll find no significant evidence of consequentialists advocating for family punishment ; even if the author's claim that it's effective was supported by more than his word.
- samus 3y ago
  The author is explicitly not trying to sell family punishment. They are merely pointing out that it can be very effective. Making evildoers themselves suffer maximally for the crimes they commit is just another extreme.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Both, family punishment and excessive suffering as a form of punishment, are simple cruelty. Neither do the prevent crime, nor are they effective, history has shown us that. Seems to be yet another example of totalitarian and proto-fascist ideology taking hold.
- alphazard 3y ago
  Consequentialism refers to a set of theories that optimize some metric in the long run, and everything is judged against that end. You still have to specify the metric. Contrast that with bottom up theories, where good actions are composed of things that are categorically good. If the measure is defined as low crime, or progress towards some ideological goal, then I think the argument has some weight. But descriptively, people are individual consequentialists. They care about the consequences to their part of the world. How am I doing, how is my family doing, how are my friends doing? If the article's policy for justice makes any of those things worse, then an individual consequentialist isn't in favor of it.
kstenerud 3y ago
This is why it's never a good idea to live by a philosophical code. Every "-ism" is a human attempt to model a phenomenon within a complex system. And any model you come up with is not going to match up 100% with reality. The more rigidly you follow your creed, the less moral you become.
- notRobot 3y ago
  Nah, you just need a rational philosophical code that accounts for people and society. Everyone should develop their own.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  If you expect a model to match up with 100% of anything then then why even attempt anything at all? Mostly correct, most of the time, is good enough for many use cases. Wait until you find out how the code that runs your car works...
gampleman 3y ago
I think the part you're missing here is that the punishment must be proportionate to the crime (it's an eye for an eye, not your whole head for an eye). Also it requires the punisher to have some form of legitimacy. These two conditions make it unlikely that you would be compelled "to murder one in three people I meet everyday".
- colinsane 3y ago
  > I think the part you're missing here is that the punishment must be proportionate to the crime. i'm going more for the "death by a thousand cuts" angle, because that's just the nature of most large-scale interpersonal harm among otherwise well-off nations. i drive an automobile, knowing full well that the impacts on air quality from my actions causes illness and premature death. Caplan's an economist, so let's say my portion of that pollution accounts for 0.1 premature deaths, or 2 life-years (made up numbers). i'm complicit in this act, i have knowingly and willingly harmed other beings: looking at this act in isolation it's surely a moral failing. "eye for eye" retributive justice says "i cut a life short by 2 years, so throw me in prison for 2 years". most people who consider retributive justice make _some_ sort of carveout here: "this is ridiculous: the infrastructure in my country is such that i can't live a reasonable life without burning fuel, 2 years jail won't change that!" but author explicitly goes out of their way to suggest punishments like these actually are merited "even in the absence of any deterrent effect". i threw out "one in three people" pretty casually. add up all these individually small harms i've willingly inflicted: maybe "one in ten" is more reasonable. either way it's too large to ignore if you take seriously that every wrong-doing is to be punished without regard to deterrence or broader circumstance.
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    I think the author did not try to justify retributivist's view in this article, but, rather, suggest consequentialists cannot make better argument.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      The argument misses differences assumes that individual power and agency are infinite - which is something economists like to do, because it's a bedrock misdirection that capitalism requires to function. In reality most people have limited agency, and failing to live according to the terms and conditions set by those with more power can have serious negative consequences. Obviously (to me at least) the people ultimately responsible for resulting horrors and atrocities are those with the most power and agency. Individually, there's a line to be drawn between enthusiastic compliance and reluctant compliance. There's also a line between healthy self-responsible functioning and diminished responsibility because of mental illness and/or breakdown. Even so - ultimately when someone else sets the terms, they're responsible for what happens. This culture is set up to hide that reality. The more power and agency you have the less you're personally responsible for the consequences of your actions. Fictions like limited liability companies, corporate personhood, "markets", the invisible hand, and the rest all exist to absolve the rich and powerful from personal consequences. Very occasionally people go to jail for fraud - usually for inconveniencing the wrong class of people. But more extreme transgressions - promoting tobacco and alcohol addictions, abusing workers (sometimes to death), pushing destructive drugs through official channels, destroying public education, using healthcare to exploit not to heal, knowingly using media channels to distribute lies, poisoning the ecosystem - are either not punished at all or punished with inconvenient fines.
boredhedgehog 3y ago
> tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops, and point out that their current path is likely to facilitate more vicious deeds. Which would be irrelevant to a non-consequentialist. You're morally responsible for the actions you commit, judged by the kind of actions they are, not their consequences.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- colinsane 3y ago
  yeah but Caplan explicitly references Hitler: notable not for killing anyone with his own hand but rather via this same "3 hops removed" type of causal chain. if he was considering only the action -- and none of this larger chain -- then he would have rather assigned moral responsibility to the soldiers in the trenches: right?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Hitler killed Hitler. At some level of consequentialism, that makes him heroic.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Most people would agree working for a company that makes weapons that kill people doesn't make you a murderer. But it's much more of a gray area when you order someone to murder and they do it. A lot of people don't distinguish between those two things.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      It might not make someone a murderer but it does mean they've been supporting what the company is doing. They'd at the very least be responsible for their own part in allowing those actions to take place. Charles Manson didn't even order anyone to kill people but he was still found guilty of murder. There's a massive amount of grey area.
bambax 3y ago
> If you can end World War II a year early by giving Hitler amnesty for his crimes, you should. Though once you’ve ended the war and got Hitler in chains, the morally best approach is to make him maximally suffer - and claim he died of a heart attack. The reputational harm will be trivial - and his millions of victims deserve no less. Whoever wrote this, economics professor or not, is a psychopath who also has no word, which in my book places them lower than Tony Montana. We're not in charge of avenging the victims of anyone. It may be somewhat understandable to avenge one's next of kin; but avenging strangers is just a pretext for cruelty. (The quote is also legally and logically incoherent, because once Hitler has been given amnesty, on what basis would one have him "in chains"??)
- notahacker 3y ago
  If wanting to hurt Hitler makes people psychopathic, there aren't many people in the world who aren't psychopaths...
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    Hitler had it all though. He killed his family, that's family punishment. He killed himself too, that's personal death sentence. 7000000 Germans died too, that's kin punishment. What evil can be invented to exceed this?
- dsego 3y ago
  Why imprison anyone who commits crimes if they promise not to do it again? Isn't that a cruel punishment?
  - Attrecomet 3y ago
    Why would we put any weight to that promise in general? Or is the philosophical premise that humans never lie?
- pyrale 3y ago
  [flagged]
pc86 3y ago
Talking about Hitler is boring but maybe it makes sense in this context. Inflicting suffering on Hitler would have absolutely no deterrent effect, but I think the vast majority of people would do it given whatever confluence of magic and time travel made it a possibility. Someone on the level of Hitler or Stalin or Mao deserve the suffering regardless of any deterrent effect it may or may not cause, simply because of the raw amount of suffering they caused. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that at that level of 99-100/100 evil that can be true, but even just a few steps back and it's not so clear-cut anymore.
- itishappy 3y ago
  > Inflicting suffering on Hitler would have absolutely no deterrent effect, but I think the vast majority of people would do it given whatever confluence of magic and time travel made it a possibility. "Kill him painfully" polled at 14.4%. Makes me doubt the vast majority agree with you. I have a feeling being personally responsible for inflicting said suffering may affect the outcome a bit. I struggle to envision any world I'd be willing to torture anyone. Even Hitler.
- hnbad 3y ago
  > Someone on the level of Hitler or Stalin or Mao deserve the suffering I think that's the crux here though. You're talking about retribution. Causing them to suffer makes you feel good. It doesn't prevent any further suffering from being caused, it doesn't create a deterrent (not that those work all that well anyway) and it doesn't change their behavior. It just satisfies you by providing sadistic joy as an outlet for your anger at them. This is easier to imagine if you believe in such a thing as "evil people". Personally I don't think framing people as "evil" is useful or even meaningful. It offers no explanatory power and it provides no mechanism to prevent future harm. Germany treated the Nazis as uniquely evil and ended up enacting very narrow bans on that specific kind of evil without addressing the underlying mentalities, systems and relations that enabled or even encouraged it. For a fictional example (to move away from Godwin for a moment) consider Harry Potter: the stories reveal various horrifying details about the wizarding world from the casual attitude to chattel slavery of an entire species, to the existence and employment of the Dementors that literally suck all life and joy out of you, to a horrifying prison system, to rampant bigotry against mixed-lineage "mudbloods" and not to mention the entire extended canon surrounding the oppression of goblins; and yet once the Big Evil is defeated, none of these things are challenged and the protagonist decides to become a public servant, helping uphold the system unchanged. Even though The One Who Shall Not Be Named is established to be inherently and undeniably evil, to any careful reader it should be obvious that the entire system is flawed at best and directly harmful at worst yet the hyperfixation on "evilness" as a sliding scale attribute rather than an emergent property denies any challenge to the status quo.
alphazard 3y ago
Why do people create entire moral theories around single human instincts? We have an instinct to punish bad people, that was acquired through throughout our evolutionary history living in social groups. Why? because it lead to good consequences for the genes that expressed it. The result is that retribution is now a good on its own because it feels good. Leaning into that as a single guiding moral principal is just another kind of narrow hedonism. A moral theory needs to account for the balance of all kinds of positive and negative experiences. I'm a sugar-fat-and-salt-ist, I like consuming those 3 things together, and it has become my guiding moral framework. I believe that consuming those things myself is morally praiseworthy.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> i can look at just about anyone -- myself included -- and tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops You're not distinguishing between remote and proximate cooperation with evil, or material and formal cooperation. No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime. If that was the standard, then forget 3 hops. Everyone would be saddled with an unbelievable amount of guilt, and trying to avoid it would make life unlivable. But more to the point, you aren't actually guilty according to the principle of double effect. We do not have in life the luxury of avoiding all evil, so we can only do what is best, and that often means allowing evil side effects, within bounds. I do have problems with the author's views, of course, and I think Ed Feser's article "Justice or Revenge?" can explain at least one of them [0]. But I am not opposed to retributive justice. It is part and parcel of justice. Mercy presupposes the legitimacy of retribution as well as just deserts; it would be a meaningless idea otherwise. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/09/justice-or-revenge.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/09/justice-or-revenge....
- aftoprokrustes 3y ago
  > No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime If you are a German company, yes, the law makes you guilty. This goes by the sweet name of Lieferkettensorgfaltsplichtengesetz (also known as LkSG), and makes it a duty (Pflicht) for companies to pay diligence (Sorgfalt) to the absence of crime at any point in their supply chain (Lieferkette). I do not know exactly what the criteria are to decide whether you did your search with enough diligence, should a crime be found in your supply chain, but I just wanted to point that this concept definitely exists in some jurisdictions.

hef19898 3y ago

We onow exactly what such a world looks like, the approach the "author" advocates for was already tried multiple times. In fact, it is currently being tried in multiple places. Ans besides causing suffering upon suffering, it doesn't do anything. If that's what consequentionalists believe, they are very far down the rabbit hole that accepts destroying lives and killing people for some greater goal. A very dangerous way of thinking indeed...

pyrale 3y ago
> If that's what consequentionalists believe The author's article essentially builds a strawman, calls that consequentialist logic, and proceeds to happily burn that strawman to sell an alternative horror. Also there's a Godwin point because why not. You'll find no significant evidence of consequentialists advocating for family punishment ; even if the author's claim that it's effective was supported by more than his word.
samus 3y ago
The author is explicitly not trying to sell family punishment. They are merely pointing out that it can be very effective. Making evildoers themselves suffer maximally for the crimes they commit is just another extreme.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Both, family punishment and excessive suffering as a form of punishment, are simple cruelty. Neither do the prevent crime, nor are they effective, history has shown us that. Seems to be yet another example of totalitarian and proto-fascist ideology taking hold.
alphazard 3y ago
Consequentialism refers to a set of theories that optimize some metric in the long run, and everything is judged against that end. You still have to specify the metric. Contrast that with bottom up theories, where good actions are composed of things that are categorically good. If the measure is defined as low crime, or progress towards some ideological goal, then I think the argument has some weight. But descriptively, people are individual consequentialists. They care about the consequences to their part of the world. How am I doing, how is my family doing, how are my friends doing? If the article's policy for justice makes any of those things worse, then an individual consequentialist isn't in favor of it.

kstenerud 3y ago

This is why it's never a good idea to live by a philosophical code. Every "-ism" is a human attempt to model a phenomenon within a complex system. And any model you come up with is not going to match up 100% with reality. The more rigidly you follow your creed, the less moral you become.

notRobot 3y ago
Nah, you just need a rational philosophical code that accounts for people and society. Everyone should develop their own.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
If you expect a model to match up with 100% of anything then then why even attempt anything at all? Mostly correct, most of the time, is good enough for many use cases. Wait until you find out how the code that runs your car works...

gampleman 3y ago

I think the part you're missing here is that the punishment must be proportionate to the crime (it's an eye for an eye, not your whole head for an eye). Also it requires the punisher to have some form of legitimacy. These two conditions make it unlikely that you would be compelled "to murder one in three people I meet everyday".

colinsane 3y ago
> I think the part you're missing here is that the punishment must be proportionate to the crime. i'm going more for the "death by a thousand cuts" angle, because that's just the nature of most large-scale interpersonal harm among otherwise well-off nations. i drive an automobile, knowing full well that the impacts on air quality from my actions causes illness and premature death. Caplan's an economist, so let's say my portion of that pollution accounts for 0.1 premature deaths, or 2 life-years (made up numbers). i'm complicit in this act, i have knowingly and willingly harmed other beings: looking at this act in isolation it's surely a moral failing. "eye for eye" retributive justice says "i cut a life short by 2 years, so throw me in prison for 2 years". most people who consider retributive justice make _some_ sort of carveout here: "this is ridiculous: the infrastructure in my country is such that i can't live a reasonable life without burning fuel, 2 years jail won't change that!" but author explicitly goes out of their way to suggest punishments like these actually are merited "even in the absence of any deterrent effect". i threw out "one in three people" pretty casually. add up all these individually small harms i've willingly inflicted: maybe "one in ten" is more reasonable. either way it's too large to ignore if you take seriously that every wrong-doing is to be punished without regard to deterrence or broader circumstance.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  I think the author did not try to justify retributivist's view in this article, but, rather, suggest consequentialists cannot make better argument.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    The argument misses differences assumes that individual power and agency are infinite - which is something economists like to do, because it's a bedrock misdirection that capitalism requires to function. In reality most people have limited agency, and failing to live according to the terms and conditions set by those with more power can have serious negative consequences. Obviously (to me at least) the people ultimately responsible for resulting horrors and atrocities are those with the most power and agency. Individually, there's a line to be drawn between enthusiastic compliance and reluctant compliance. There's also a line between healthy self-responsible functioning and diminished responsibility because of mental illness and/or breakdown. Even so - ultimately when someone else sets the terms, they're responsible for what happens. This culture is set up to hide that reality. The more power and agency you have the less you're personally responsible for the consequences of your actions. Fictions like limited liability companies, corporate personhood, "markets", the invisible hand, and the rest all exist to absolve the rich and powerful from personal consequences. Very occasionally people go to jail for fraud - usually for inconveniencing the wrong class of people. But more extreme transgressions - promoting tobacco and alcohol addictions, abusing workers (sometimes to death), pushing destructive drugs through official channels, destroying public education, using healthcare to exploit not to heal, knowingly using media channels to distribute lies, poisoning the ecosystem - are either not punished at all or punished with inconvenient fines.

boredhedgehog 3y ago

> tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops, and point out that their current path is likely to facilitate more vicious deeds. Which would be irrelevant to a non-consequentialist. You're morally responsible for the actions you commit, judged by the kind of actions they are, not their consequences.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
colinsane 3y ago
yeah but Caplan explicitly references Hitler: notable not for killing anyone with his own hand but rather via this same "3 hops removed" type of causal chain. if he was considering only the action -- and none of this larger chain -- then he would have rather assigned moral responsibility to the soldiers in the trenches: right?
- bombcar 3y ago
  Hitler killed Hitler. At some level of consequentialism, that makes him heroic.
- pc86 3y ago
  Most people would agree working for a company that makes weapons that kill people doesn't make you a murderer. But it's much more of a gray area when you order someone to murder and they do it. A lot of people don't distinguish between those two things.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    It might not make someone a murderer but it does mean they've been supporting what the company is doing. They'd at the very least be responsible for their own part in allowing those actions to take place. Charles Manson didn't even order anyone to kill people but he was still found guilty of murder. There's a massive amount of grey area.

bambax 3y ago

> If you can end World War II a year early by giving Hitler amnesty for his crimes, you should. Though once you’ve ended the war and got Hitler in chains, the morally best approach is to make him maximally suffer - and claim he died of a heart attack. The reputational harm will be trivial - and his millions of victims deserve no less. Whoever wrote this, economics professor or not, is a psychopath who also has no word, which in my book places them lower than Tony Montana. We're not in charge of avenging the victims of anyone. It may be somewhat understandable to avenge one's next of kin; but avenging strangers is just a pretext for cruelty. (The quote is also legally and logically incoherent, because once Hitler has been given amnesty, on what basis would one have him "in chains"??)

notahacker 3y ago
If wanting to hurt Hitler makes people psychopathic, there aren't many people in the world who aren't psychopaths...
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  Hitler had it all though. He killed his family, that's family punishment. He killed himself too, that's personal death sentence. 7000000 Germans died too, that's kin punishment. What evil can be invented to exceed this?
dsego 3y ago
Why imprison anyone who commits crimes if they promise not to do it again? Isn't that a cruel punishment?
- Attrecomet 3y ago
  Why would we put any weight to that promise in general? Or is the philosophical premise that humans never lie?
pyrale 3y ago
[flagged]

pc86 3y ago

Talking about Hitler is boring but maybe it makes sense in this context. Inflicting suffering on Hitler would have absolutely no deterrent effect, but I think the vast majority of people would do it given whatever confluence of magic and time travel made it a possibility. Someone on the level of Hitler or Stalin or Mao deserve the suffering regardless of any deterrent effect it may or may not cause, simply because of the raw amount of suffering they caused. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that at that level of 99-100/100 evil that can be true, but even just a few steps back and it's not so clear-cut anymore.

itishappy 3y ago
> Inflicting suffering on Hitler would have absolutely no deterrent effect, but I think the vast majority of people would do it given whatever confluence of magic and time travel made it a possibility. "Kill him painfully" polled at 14.4%. Makes me doubt the vast majority agree with you. I have a feeling being personally responsible for inflicting said suffering may affect the outcome a bit. I struggle to envision any world I'd be willing to torture anyone. Even Hitler.
hnbad 3y ago
> Someone on the level of Hitler or Stalin or Mao deserve the suffering I think that's the crux here though. You're talking about retribution. Causing them to suffer makes you feel good. It doesn't prevent any further suffering from being caused, it doesn't create a deterrent (not that those work all that well anyway) and it doesn't change their behavior. It just satisfies you by providing sadistic joy as an outlet for your anger at them. This is easier to imagine if you believe in such a thing as "evil people". Personally I don't think framing people as "evil" is useful or even meaningful. It offers no explanatory power and it provides no mechanism to prevent future harm. Germany treated the Nazis as uniquely evil and ended up enacting very narrow bans on that specific kind of evil without addressing the underlying mentalities, systems and relations that enabled or even encouraged it. For a fictional example (to move away from Godwin for a moment) consider Harry Potter: the stories reveal various horrifying details about the wizarding world from the casual attitude to chattel slavery of an entire species, to the existence and employment of the Dementors that literally suck all life and joy out of you, to a horrifying prison system, to rampant bigotry against mixed-lineage "mudbloods" and not to mention the entire extended canon surrounding the oppression of goblins; and yet once the Big Evil is defeated, none of these things are challenged and the protagonist decides to become a public servant, helping uphold the system unchanged. Even though The One Who Shall Not Be Named is established to be inherently and undeniably evil, to any careful reader it should be obvious that the entire system is flawed at best and directly harmful at worst yet the hyperfixation on "evilness" as a sliding scale attribute rather than an emergent property denies any challenge to the status quo.

alphazard 3y ago

Why do people create entire moral theories around single human instincts? We have an instinct to punish bad people, that was acquired through throughout our evolutionary history living in social groups. Why? because it lead to good consequences for the genes that expressed it. The result is that retribution is now a good on its own because it feels good. Leaning into that as a single guiding moral principal is just another kind of narrow hedonism. A moral theory needs to account for the balance of all kinds of positive and negative experiences. I'm a sugar-fat-and-salt-ist, I like consuming those 3 things together, and it has become my guiding moral framework. I believe that consuming those things myself is morally praiseworthy.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

> i can look at just about anyone -- myself included -- and tie them to a vicious deed in 3 hops You're not distinguishing between remote and proximate cooperation with evil, or material and formal cooperation. No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime. If that was the standard, then forget 3 hops. Everyone would be saddled with an unbelievable amount of guilt, and trying to avoid it would make life unlivable. But more to the point, you aren't actually guilty according to the principle of double effect. We do not have in life the luxury of avoiding all evil, so we can only do what is best, and that often means allowing evil side effects, within bounds. I do have problems with the author's views, of course, and I think Ed Feser's article "Justice or Revenge?" can explain at least one of them [0]. But I am not opposed to retributive justice. It is part and parcel of justice. Mercy presupposes the legitimacy of retribution as well as just deserts; it would be a meaningless idea otherwise. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/09/justice-or-revenge.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/09/justice-or-revenge....

aftoprokrustes 3y ago
> No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime If you are a German company, yes, the law makes you guilty. This goes by the sweet name of Lieferkettensorgfaltsplichtengesetz (also known as LkSG), and makes it a duty (Pflicht) for companies to pay diligence (Sorgfalt) to the absence of crime at any point in their supply chain (Lieferkette). I do not know exactly what the criteria are to decide whether you did your search with enough diligence, should a crime be found in your supply chain, but I just wanted to point that this concept definitely exists in some jurisdictions.