Instead we do it the other way. If I leave the bath running with the baby in it, I will realize, as I bound up the stairs toward the bathroom, that if the baby has drowned I’ve done something awful, whereas if it has not I’ve merely been careless. Seems a bit odd.
Imagine two assassins each on an identical rooftop trying to snipe someone on the next building over.
Each takes careful aim, pulls the trigger, and the bullet flies toward the target. The first assassin successfully murders someone. The second assassin gets lucky (?) and a bird flies in the path of the bullet at the last second and takes the bullet. They both do the same thing. The first guy is a murderer and the other an attempted murderer. The prison sentence would be a lot different for each.
We are very results oriented when it comes to blame.
We could instead blame people according the expected value of what they do. If you force me to play Russian Roulette with one bullet and five empty chambers, the sentence should be 1/6th as bad as murder, regardless of the actual outcome. Ok, that’s oversimplified but you get the idea.
Considering the number of people who drink-drive and harm nobody, I’m not sure how I like the implications here for someone who drink-drives and kills a family of five. I agree moral luck is generally to be minimised, but I don’t think this flies.
I wouldn’t say it’s the backbone. I’d agree it’s a feature of the criminal justice system, don’t really see it as huge in social interactions (maybe a sidetrack?).
The association of justice with “blame”, i.e. a culpability-centered view of justice, is just as archaic as results-oriented justice. Free will is illusory and therefore there is no sense in which people are culpable for their actions. Justice should be centered around the deterrent effect of punishment and the removal of dangerous people from the community. Research very clearly shows that the deterrence of crime is related much more strongly to likelihood of being caught than to severity of punishment. For severity of punishment to have an effect on “Sklansky crimes” such as DUI where harm is done in aggregate, one would have to impose very strong penalties such as incarceration, which would create more severe social problems than the one you’re trying to solve. In short, measuring penalty by blame appeals to some abstract sense of justice but doesn’t actually do anything to make the community a more lawful place.
It’s already hard enough to prove crimes, let alone prove exactly how much Sklansky harm a crime did. The real-world effect of this would be to provide another loophole where rich people who can afford good lawyers are successfully able to argue that the Sklansky harm of their crimes was small and receive lighter sentences than poor people with worse lawyers.
Edit to add: (Quoting a post from within the post, this is getting very meta…)
The other function of a justice system is legitimacy in the eyes of the community which avoids social unrest such as vigilante justice, “tough on crime” fascist movements, etc etc. In an ideal world the penalty for DUI which resulted in someone dying would be loss of driving license for some period, same as for DUIs which cause no harm, but community conception of justice is such that this is impossible.
This is a huge non sequitur. It’s closer to correct to say that people do have free will despite determinism than to say that they lack free will in a way that undermines moral desert. People can still choose not to do evil things, because people’s choices are part of the material fabric of the universe. People’s choices are themselves caused, but that doesn’t make them illusory or insignificant. There’s a very subtle straw man here, which is the assumption that if choices are made for reasons, they aren’t really choices. In other words, the only form of free will that would matter is choices that were made for no reason. But that’s just randomness, which is also morally neutral. Indeed, even if physics was nondeterministic and people had immortal souls that guided their actions through the pineal gland, that wouldn’t rescue moral desert on your reading. Either you’ve got an evil soul or a good soul, and you can’t change it. Just luck of the draw, like being borne with a brain disease.
There’s even a case to be made that it’s only on determinism that punitive measures are rational. After all, if I’m just some libertarian will-o’-the-wisp haunting this chunk of flesh, I can always just choose to disregard incentives. No way to predict it!
What if posting on the internet is an artform and banning a poster from an internet forum is like rejecting someone from an art institute and that frustrated poster is a lot like a frustrated painter and becomes the next Hitler?
Any sort of expected value calculation is vastly oversimplified for real world usage. It works fine in a system like card games but cannot be used to accurately assess thing a like driving drunk or texting while driving because there are so many other variables that impact the drivers likelihood of hitting and killing someone
I don’t really want a huge derail but I think all compatibilism is sophistry and nonsense that jettisons the thing it is trying to describe in the name of explaining it. Missing from your post is any argument that moral desert can be justified given the definition of “choice” you’re trying to promote here. Consult the Origination Argument here and there’s an explanation that under determinism, compatibilists must reject this statement as untrue:
An agent acts with free will only if she is the originator (or ultimate source) of her actions.
So what you need to explain is how moral desert for one’s actions can be justified if one is not the originator or ultimate source of one’s actions. In what sense then is one culpable for them, if one’s capacity for choice is only ever counterfactual? (As a free will pessimist I also don’t think mere nondeterminism will rescue free will here, but the argument is simpler if we assume determinism, since you’re defending the existence of choice even under determinism).
No, the popular contention of free will is that choices are nonrandom but uncaused; people consider themselves prime movers, in which acts of will are like God declaring “Let there be light”, a first-cause from which consequences radiate out. (I’m aware this makes no sense).
No, because here you’re again rejecting the idea of acts of will as prime movers, since the idea of a “good soul” or “evil soul” is a constraint on the absolute freedom of choice this idea demands. If you want to argue that the conception of free will that I’m talking about is impossible even in principle, that’s fine; there’s no conflict with my argument that at any rate it doesn’t exist in this world.
Several people have made a similar point, something like:
Me: We should do X
You three: It would be very hard or impossible to do X
You three have changed the topic. My point is about what we should do. My point is that calculating blame according to what you DID instead of how things TURNED OUT is more just. Saying that it’s tough or impossible to do what I suggest is changing the topic.
So: two questions:
IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, do you agree that we should use expected value instead of results to calculate blame?
What objection do you have to using expected value in EASY to calculate cases? I used Russian Roulette for a reason. MOST cases are difficult to assess EV, but some are not.
Do you know to what degree things generally work like this or not? For example, a quick googling suggests that sentences for attempted murder are generally much more severe than sentences for involuntary homicide.
I think there are sometimes terrible laws that are very unjust and quite different than what cassette is suggesting, but generally intent is quite important and giving leeway to judges and juries generally protects the accidentally harmful people more than the intentionally bad people who didn’t do as much harm.
By the way this is not changing the topic at all. Which things we should do and how our society should work is of course influenced by whether such things are possible or practical. It is maybe not the way you want to look at your idea because it is more difficult to defend as a real world policy than some abstraction, but it is a completely fair response
In an abstract philosophical sense it’s definitely true that justice should take into account what could have happened instead of just what actually did, but even in this abstract philosophical sense my reasoning is different. My reasoning is that you can achieve the same deterrent effect while dividing the burden of punishment between more people. I reject this idea that a punishment commensurate with the crime committed is “more just”. The Russian Roulette example is a good one to demonstrate the difference. Regardless of whether there’s one or six bullets in the chamber when the offender makes you play Russian Roulette, in an ideal world my questions are all going to be about how I can best prevent people (both the offender and people in general) from doing this in the future. The idea that a murder necessarily requires more punishment than 1/6th of a murder is the conception of justice that I am rejecting.
