An ice cream today will give you a smile. Tomorrow you will have a higher frame of reference and be disappointed with a lack of sweets. The total joy from ice cream is zero on average.
The studies which are usually cited in support of this effect show nowhere near this level of hedonic treadmill. I suggest you read them (you can probably ask Claude for the recs here).
If we can’t help them or don’t have resources to make helping them cost effective and they can’t work enough to give us a profit, kill them. Dragging it out is just a mild cruelty in most cases. I only want to keep them alive if they can pay for themselves.
One of the most common counterarguments to this from those opposed to the death penalty (see here for an illustration) is that capital penalties are irreversible and permanent, while imprisonment can be reversed. This poses serious trouble when you recognize the criminal justice system is imperfect and miscarriages of justice can occur, running the risk of killing innocents with regularity.
Estimates of the percentage of US citizens convicted and sentenced to the death penalty who were actually innocent and would have been exonerated eventually if their sentence had been commuted to life in prison are around 4%.
The problem with making someone work against their will is that it often results in a sloppy work and I suspect that it is usually unprofitable (if you included the salaries of the guards to the total cost). Just consider that some people outside the jail have a problem to find a job, and they have more possibilities and motivation.
This topic is not very important to me, I just try to point out what I see as obvious problems. I haven’t studied this topic deeply.
I don’t think the fake punishments would work. As you said, if they are credible, then the people who protest against real punishments would protest against (credible) fake ones, too. And sooner or later the secret would leak, especially in a democratic society with free speech, and checks and balances.
I’m a firm believer that anyone can be helped
Okay, this is a point where we disagree. Some people are psychopaths, so you can’t try to make them feel more empathy towards the victims. Some people are too stupid or impulsive, so you can’t effectively reason by consequences; either they won’ get it, or they will agree but then do it anyway. Some people are insane; they will do crimes because a “voice of God” told them so, or because their paranoia made them think the other person wanted to hurt them so they acted in a supposed self-defense.
Sometimes the only solution is to lock the person and throw away the key (or the cheaper version: kill them).
the ideal is to intervene before people consider crime an option. To get them mentally healthy and to find them a productive place in society
I agree. Of course, actually doing this is complicated for various reasons. One of the reasons is that some people profit from achieving the opposite, e.g. drug dealers make money by ruining other people’s health, or entrepreneurs save money when more people are unemployed. So you would meet all kinds of opposition.
A sense of vengeance drives much of the criminal justice system, but revenge has no place in my moral framework. [...] I believe this is no more than leftover evolutionary thinking that is functional in a tribal society and doesn’t help the world we live in.
Consider game theory. A criminal chooses between two victims, who are equivalent from the perspective of the criminal. One of the victims, or their family, is known to be vengeful. Other victim, and their family, are known to religiously believe in forgiving all who have wronged them, no matter what. Which one will the criminal choose?
The studies which are usually cited in support of this effect show nowhere near this level of hedonic treadmill. I suggest you read them (you can probably ask Claude for the recs here).
One of the most common counterarguments to this from those opposed to the death penalty (see here for an illustration) is that capital penalties are irreversible and permanent, while imprisonment can be reversed. This poses serious trouble when you recognize the criminal justice system is imperfect and miscarriages of justice can occur, running the risk of killing innocents with regularity.
Estimates of the percentage of US citizens convicted and sentenced to the death penalty who were actually innocent and would have been exonerated eventually if their sentence had been commuted to life in prison are around 4%.
The problem with making someone work against their will is that it often results in a sloppy work and I suspect that it is usually unprofitable (if you included the salaries of the guards to the total cost). Just consider that some people outside the jail have a problem to find a job, and they have more possibilities and motivation.
This topic is not very important to me, I just try to point out what I see as obvious problems. I haven’t studied this topic deeply.
I don’t think the fake punishments would work. As you said, if they are credible, then the people who protest against real punishments would protest against (credible) fake ones, too. And sooner or later the secret would leak, especially in a democratic society with free speech, and checks and balances.
Okay, this is a point where we disagree. Some people are psychopaths, so you can’t try to make them feel more empathy towards the victims. Some people are too stupid or impulsive, so you can’t effectively reason by consequences; either they won’ get it, or they will agree but then do it anyway. Some people are insane; they will do crimes because a “voice of God” told them so, or because their paranoia made them think the other person wanted to hurt them so they acted in a supposed self-defense.
Sometimes the only solution is to lock the person and throw away the key (or the cheaper version: kill them).
I agree. Of course, actually doing this is complicated for various reasons. One of the reasons is that some people profit from achieving the opposite, e.g. drug dealers make money by ruining other people’s health, or entrepreneurs save money when more people are unemployed. So you would meet all kinds of opposition.
Consider game theory. A criminal chooses between two victims, who are equivalent from the perspective of the criminal. One of the victims, or their family, is known to be vengeful. Other victim, and their family, are known to religiously believe in forgiving all who have wronged them, no matter what. Which one will the criminal choose?