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Seems like most people in this thread are representing utilitarianism as some kind of Benthamite equation. Newsflash, a lot of thought has been put into it since, and there are far better ways to make it a more accurate descriptive (and normative) system. J.S Mill's Archangels, introducing the concept of Maslowe's hierarchy and diminishing marginal utility, or the approach that I personally favour, which is that humans are not perfect utility calculators. We should aspire to bring about the best possible consequences, but because we are imperfect beings and can't see the outcome of our actions perfectly, we create heuristics, or rules, that we believe will act as a general rule of thumb. Someone correctly pointed out that there are four main goals of the justice system. Deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and retribution. Deterrence has been shown to generally not work. What deters people generally is how likely it is they feel they will be caught, with a smaller modifier on the severity of the punishment. In other words, the severity of the punishment is generally not as effective as high quality, high coverage policing. Lots of expense on the death penalty could be spent elsewhere on improving the deterrence effect. Incapacitation is pretty obvious. It's to stop further crime from being committed. Rehabilitation. Believe it or not, this method is generally significantly more successful than deterrence in that it does reduce recidivism rates. No, rehabilitation is not 'indoctrination' most of the time, where someone can't be effectively rehabilitated, they ought to be in prison solely for the purpose of incapacitation. An example of a successful prison rehabilitation program would be the 'prison puppies', where inmates are given puppies to raise (who will then go on to become dogs for veterans). Recidivism dropped amongst this population a staggering 90%. This approach often conflicts with the final goal, retribution, which is what hakimashou is talking about. Society has urges to punish wrongdoers, and it is itself wrong to deny them that. The problem I have with this argument is that it comes at a cost. If I told you that this approach caused more crime, relative to a rehabilitative approach, would you say sating those urges is still worth it? If you killed my loved ones infront of me, yes, I would want to put a knife through your throat. But that urge is not justice, it's revenge. On balance, if the cost of satisfying that bloodlust is that more people get hurt (not just the criminal, but others through a system that does not combat recidivism and instead satisfied retributivists), then it's probably not worth it. ...and that isn't even taking into account false positives/cost to the state arguments that other people have ably made.
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Mar 14, 2017 10:33
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quote:I've always thought this was an odd argument, because it applies equally to any application of deadly force by the state in pursuit of its objectives. The argument only works if you don't think imposing criminal sanctions is a legitimate purpose of government. That is not justice, it's revenge. TheImmigrant posted:What is your distinction between revenge and retribution? And, divorced from deterrence, what societal good does retribution advance? If you think retribution in itself is a valid policy goal, where and how do you draw a line between lethal injection and burning at the stake? In fairness there are plenty of theories that do infact argue retribution is a valid and societally useful facet of the justice system. Because humans are bastards and can't abstract emotions well, retributive justice is there so we can effectively get the emotional high of seeing someone who has done wrong by us punished. The societal benefit to the state enacting that is that people have faith that the justice system will allow them to experience this emotional high by enacting retributive punishment. The consequences of not doing this are that people might lose faith in the idea that the justice system is there to serve them, and will start enacting vigilante 'justice' to get that same emotional high. a neurotic ai fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 08:44
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