this thread really makes me facepalm.

if we lock up people for mere propensity our jails would easily be overfilled. the line is also extremely difficult to draw.

No, the line right now seems very easy to draw. At current level of science, other than expressed intent there is realistically no way to predict with reasonable certainty what an individual will do. Thus noone should be currently jailed for it. Does not mean that the concept is principally unacceptable.

A "mere propensity"? OP's hypothetical implies >95% guarantee that the individuals are going to commit murder. How can you feel fine about letting over 5000 random people get murdered, just because "our jails would easily be overfilled" and "the line is extremely difficult to draw"?

how can you feel fine putting someone in jail who has done nothing wrong?

Yeah, and I was talking about the exact same coin.

What if half of the clones committed crimes in the first day and the others haven't after a week?

The only thing we have rock solid evidence of is that half of the clones seem to be criminals and half don't.

Ought we leave the criminal clones in peace because we know half of the copies are NOT criminal and therefore all must be NOT criminal?

This thread is tilting me so much with the inability of posters to read the details of the op. So I'm going to re phrase the question to make it clearer.

A man clones his body, and uploads his concious/brain state into the body. The next day the clone goes and shoots up a school. Ignore all other variables that can change the mind state of the person. I.E The clone does not know he is a clone.

Should the original man be persecuted? Yes/maybe, as they are the same person, just kind of divided and multiplied like a cell. A virus kills 50 people, blame the whole virus or just the cells that actually did the damage? You see these clones will be a strand of a societal pathogen, if not given time to mutate or change then they are pretty much the same individual in several bodies.

A baby is cloned at birth and at the age 50 goes and shoots up a school

should the original be persecuted? No, most certainly not.

I hope this shows why certain people are beingd dumb in reading the question and going into righteousnessness , and why the original example was a bad one as it caused such confusion. Anyway /thread for me

That is not an appropriate analogy. Heads and tails are equal, but "committing murder" is an infinitely more specific event than "not committing murder".

The correct analogy would be something like this. You have 10001 identical coins, and you flip each of them say 100 times. 5000 of them land on the side at least once within this 100 times, while 5001 don't. Can we conclude that the 5001 will also extremely likely land on the side at least once if we keep flipping them thousands of times?

And I even said what you have in mind:
So yes, if we gain new evidence that gives a reason to believe that the 5001 are not likely to commit crime, then we need to reassess our position. But at the point of OP hypothetical, evidence highly suggests that the remaining 5001 are very likely to commit murder.

Because it is beyond reasonable doubt that he is going to commit atrocities. The justice system should try to avoid future atrocities, not enact revenge for past events with disregard of the future. What you have done only matters because it is indication of what you are going to do in the future. As a corollary, obviously I would also release murderers if I could be reasonably certain that they are somehow no more likely to commit a new crime than a typical person.

(OK, there is actually a game theory element here, in that the knowledge of wether they are going to get punished influences the likelihood that they will commit a crime, but I think vast majority of crime and most certainly murder is inability to be affected by the risk of punishment even if it is enormous, so it's not very relevant to the prevention of crime. Maybe with stuff like environmental damage and compliance with business regulation it is actually the other way round, that we want to focus on punishment because we know that all parties will rationally take it into account and it serves as prevention, but with murder, we should really be focusing on which person is dysfuncitonal and dangerous and which one isn't, not which one has done what. What people have done is here only used as an indication of what they're going to do. Of course in reality people are just collectively satisfying their stone age urges, but let's imagine the hypothetical that we actually had morality and justice system that was based in reason.)

A person who commits murder, has done nothing wrong up to the point of commiting murder. Should we not take action against him if he merely expresses intent to commit murder? Should we not take action against him if he is pointing a gun at someone and saying he is going to kill him? Because before the moment that he actually pulls the trigger, he has done nothing wrong.

Vantek you should start a thread (if one doesn't already exist) about your rational view of how the justice system should be.

I'm with you on the view that our current system is very irrational and is more concerned with punishing people (based on irrational primal human urges) than actually taking preventative measures to make society as good as possible.

I read some popular science article (on the topic of neuroscience) that brought up this issue and talked about how advances in neuroscience is changing our moral views about responsibility (and free will) and eventually we will have to start altering the goal of the justice system (to make it less of punishment and more about preventing crimes and reforming criminals). If I can dig up the link I'll post it.

Tom and I don't play nicely together in the sandbox which is why he wrote that. He is probably aware of the implied "IMO"...I'll give him credit for that much.

We could solve prison overcrowding by building more prisons.

I suspect the reason we don't lock people up who have a statistical prepensity is because we are fearful that either currently or sometime in the future there would come cause to deem us to have a statistical prepensity to commit a felony. That and it opens the door to lots of abuse by the state. It is simply in our individual self interest of tolerate a certain amount of risk of being victimized by people we suspect might victimize us because one day we might become the suspect/target.

Post your political opinions in the politics forum. Not SMP please.

Unless I am missing something from between the lines, that was a super odd comment Ryan.

Well truth is the only reason I am posting so much here right now is that past few days I have had diarrhea and total lack of focus I hope I'll stop posting ASAP.

I think the change you talk about is already happening. I think especially in Europe, which seems to have a lot more pragmatic approach to justice than say US. I don't think it's so much to do with advances in neuroscience, but advances in the way a typical person thinks of the world. Still miles away from proper critical thinking, but nevertheless improving.

Don't ever post a serious argument in Politics forum. It really isn't worth it. You will not learn anything worthwhile about the topics you are interested in. You might as well just tell your political views to your cat.

Ryanb9,

This forum has and always has been a catch-all forum. And Stu has always been the perfect troll for SMP.

Remember, these topics are precedent-setting, and we don't exactly want nation-state political crap (especially lul0sec American crap) cluttering this up.

Cheers.

But there is a line.


Does not make it acceptable either. Your talking about locking someone up because they are a likely threat. How likely a threat do they have to be?
If a person is 90% likely to commit murder lock them up? What about if they have bomb making capabilities maybe we should knock it down to 5% in there case? Sorry it just seems like your placing zero value on innocence.

But you, on the other hand, are saying, that even if a person is 99% likely to commit murder, no action should be taken? That we should just watch him murder a human being and say sucks for that guy but our hands are tied?

Obviously this is a very difficult decision. But that it is difficult, does not mean that we should cop out.

I have stated before that morality and the justice system is grossly inconsistent and irrational, and because of that it seems totally out of place to suggest any rational decisionmaking within the justice system. But if we imagined that the justice system was be based on rationality, I really do not see how you could just stand by and watch someone commit murder.

We are not apprehending the guy to "punish" him for the murder he is going to commit. We are apprehending him to prevent the murder from taking place. If there was any possibility of ridding him of his murderous urges, we should obviously do that and let him loose again. If it was impossible though, it's just mind-blowing to me that anyone could simply stand by, fully knowing that the guy is going to commit murder.

If there is only a slight threat, then the guy should be placed under some sort of surveilance. Right now the justice system is completely absurd. You commit a crime, you get x years, then you sit those x years and are completely free again to commit the next one. Instead, the sane system would be to evaluate how likely the guy is to commit new crimes, and react accordingly. Small risk --> small surveilance, medium risk --> strong surveilance, high risk --> confinement. What you have done only matters because it is an indication of how likely you are to commit new crimes. Obviously I can see that this system would never be acceptable to most people because people do still have their irrational stone age urges, but it would be more rational and helpful to mankind.

Well your specifically talking about safety and that its a rational "urge". I would argue freedom is also a rational urge that your ignoring. All I am saying is there is a line and that its a balancing act between the two. People die for freedom would you argue that's irrational? If not how can you argue that we should not "risk it" with certain higher risk individuals I don't think its really that irrational.

Like I said balancing act. So no, I say 99% tips the scale.

I think I would also argue that these so called irrational urges are necessary. For instance I will feel bad for locking up a man if there was a lets say 5% chance he was innocent(taking x amount of freedom). On the other hand were gaining x amount of safety. How do we make these decisions? I mean you can argue we could make them rationally, but really how can you rationally weigh freedom vs safety? So I think when people look, at the atrocity committed they get the urge for vengeance (they want justice! someone's head on a platter). Making the hard decisions we can't come to rationally. You may not rank freedom as highly as me but what kind of world would we live in without it I would argue freedom is a very important consideration in what is best for mankind. If obesity is a problem I don't think we should enact a max calorie law. Or neuter people in a over populated area.

Of course. I never suggested otherwise. Situation in OP seems >90% to me, that's why I have been using it as an implicit assumption.

You could of course argue that situation in OP isn't >90% at all, and I am not completely certain at all that that's not a distinct possibility, but that's a different argument, a deep statistical problem.

They are necessary in the sense that in the absence of rational thinking (which was the case during majority of the evolution), they are the only way to regulate behaviour. They are not necessary in the sense that once you DO have rational thinking, from the perspective of rationality they are often incredibly flawed and inconsistent.

I obviously think that it is sane to have a need for safety and for freedom, and there is a balancing act between the two. However, the urges are wired in a very flawed and inconsistent manner. In many situations our urges cause us to strongly favour one option to the other, even though from a rational perspective they are the same. Our urges might say that there is an enormous difference between wether someone has commited murder, or hasn't yet but we are 99% sure that he is going to. Whereas from a rational perspective, I see minimal difference between the two. That's what I'm talking about when I say our sense of morality and justice is inconsistent and irrational.

Yes I think what is does not imply what should be. However, the urges are all wired to rational thinking. We also have an urge to use rationality to weigh the other urges against each other. Thing is, if you follow that urge more, you will also reach different conclulsions. Is does not imply what should be, but given that we have certain basic drives of what should be, what is does matter enourmously how these drives play out. People have an urge that says that there should be some rationality to their moral decisions. They have an urge that says when they have extremely different reaction to two possibilities, that there must typically be also a rational difference between them. And often when you demonstrate there isn't, their urges will rearrange. I am speaking from firsthand experience, and I also see it in other people. Rationality has meaning in moral arguments.

Couldn't agree more, each and every thread i open from him


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Baseless accusations like this are underhanded. There is simply nothing here for me to defend. Perhaps you could cite some example of my "trolling" so that I may answer your charges.

However if you refuse or can't do so then let me suggest then that this is actually evidence that it is you who are the trolls. Your post there added nothing to the discussion, they were completely off topic, and had the sole purpose of provoking anger in a particular reader. Classic trolling by any commonly accepted definition of the word.

yeah i dont mind his thread topics. i dont care for his arguments etc, but he makes topics that sometimes provoke interesting discussions from others

I have been a member of this forum for more than 10 years. I am sure if they look really hard, scour the archives, they can find some evidence of me trolling....I certainly haven't been the perfect poster. But really what it amounts to is people call me a troll because they don't like what I have to say.....for whatever reason. Nevertheless, I say to those people who call me a troll....its time to put up or shut up. If your going to call me a troll, fine, just provide some evidence so I may either defend it or apologize for it.

well ad hominims have never been good arguments.

I don't even...

No.

This is insane.

You don't lock people up for having a "propensity to commit crime" because YOU CAN'T MEASURE THAT and our nation already has an absurd incarceration rate.

If this forum did not have rules regarding what can be said in posts, I'd have much meaner things to say about this thread. Jesus.

The fact that there are lengthy, serious replies to this thread really is a depressing statement for the human race.