Tiiba, there’s a nice paper on the subject by the philosopher David Lewis. Called something like “The punishment lottery”. His basic idea is that you can think of our system not as punishing those criminals who get caught doing X for doing X, but as punishing those who act in way X in a way that varies somewhat at random according to the probability distributions of outcomes of X. So as soon as you attack someone you’re implicitly “sentenced” to a random outcome that might be escaping unpunished, or might be conviction for murder and execution or imprisonment for life. And the severity of the eventual punishment varies to some extent with the seriousness of the crime—the more brutally you attack someone, the more likely you are to end up with a conviction for murder rather than for actual bodily harm.
It’s not clear how far this can go towards justifying the systems we currently have (and Lewis says as much), but it’s pretty ingenious.
And yes, this does seem to be related to the well known “hindsight bias” whereby we tend to think actual outcomes much more predictable-in-principle from the prior evidence than they actually were. (Unless we predicted something different, of course.)
Tiiba, there’s a nice paper on the subject by the philosopher David Lewis. Called something like “The punishment lottery”. His basic idea is that you can think of our system not as punishing those criminals who get caught doing X for doing X, but as punishing those who act in way X in a way that varies somewhat at random according to the probability distributions of outcomes of X. So as soon as you attack someone you’re implicitly “sentenced” to a random outcome that might be escaping unpunished, or might be conviction for murder and execution or imprisonment for life. And the severity of the eventual punishment varies to some extent with the seriousness of the crime—the more brutally you attack someone, the more likely you are to end up with a conviction for murder rather than for actual bodily harm.
It’s not clear how far this can go towards justifying the systems we currently have (and Lewis says as much), but it’s pretty ingenious.
And yes, this does seem to be related to the well known “hindsight bias” whereby we tend to think actual outcomes much more predictable-in-principle from the prior evidence than they actually were. (Unless we predicted something different, of course.)