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What's the acceptable rate of systemic murder?
For me it's 0 so I don't think any case can be dismissed as anecdote.
If we're allowed to use the "any system can fail and that's okay" I ask then what your position is on capital punishment and collateral damage in the pursuit of legitimate military targets.
With most things, there are trade-offs. Like Scott, I stand beside the snakes and traders.
Cops have a non-zero systemic murder rate. This tells us fuck-all if they are net positive or not. Perhaps they are basically a criminal gang running a protection racket and kill everyone who does not pay up. Or perhaps they are mostly good once per 50 years two crooked cops will use their uniform to cover up a 2nd degree murder committed by one of them by planting a gun on the victim.
Or consider organizations with regard to systemic child abuse. Any organization whose members will have contact with kids will have a nonzero systemic child abuse rate, because you can sink any amount of resources into reducing the risk and organizations generally run on finite resources. However, there is a vast difference between "we should have considered the fact that the kid was waving at their teacher as evidence that they were in an abusive relationship and started an investigation" and "once we got too many complaints about the priest touching kids, we simply transferred them to another church".
Likewise with collateral damage. Either claiming that no civilian casualties are acceptable or that any are okay is foolish. Killing one civilian for every 50 killed enemies would in most wars be a conduct noble beyond belief, while killing 50 civilians per killed enemy would be excessively brutal.
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That just reduces the question to an argument about the meaning of the word "systemic". The acceptable rate of men killing their wives is clearly greater than zero, given that it's a sizeable chunk of the overall murder rate and we don't spend a lot of resources trying to prevent it. It isn't obvious why this changes if the men are talking their wives into in appropriate MAID.
I think the argument is worth having.
I don't want the state killing people. I don't care if people suffer or even die to make sure that power is very securely under control. Because I've seen what happens when it is not.
I'm willing to eat some murders happening because we don't execute murderers even though they deserve it. All because it should be a Big Deal when institutions take a life. I don't see how this is any different.
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There's a rationalist shibboleth that I am very fond of: "The optimal amount of X is not zero"
This isn't a call for nihilism or a license for carelessness. It's a recognition that we live in a universe of trade-offs, and that clinging to a perfect "zero" in one narrow domain can inadvertently cause immense harm in others.
For some very high stakes activities, it really ought to be extremely zero over human timescales. For example, if there is an automated system that is responsible for initiating a response to a nuclear strike, I sincerely hope that the failure rate is 0.0... per annum, for several zeroes. Stanislav Petrov was responsible for preventing an accidental nuclear war because he correctly diagnosed that the Soviet early-warning system was malfunctioning.
The lower the stakes, the more the leeway for failure or unpleasant outcomes. If you truly wanted a government that never "systematically" murders someone (and we're assuming that murder is definitionally objectionable), then your best bet is to get rid of government altogether. I suspect that doing so will just lead to an increase in the number of murders overall.
Consider medicine, my home turf? What is the acceptable rate of iatrogenic death, i.e patients killed by the treatment meant to save them? We know for a fact that surgery has a non-zero mortality rate. Anesthesia can kill. Drugs have unexpected, fatal side effects. We could reduce iatrogenic deaths to absolute zero tomorrow by simply banning all surgery, all anesthesia, and all prescription medication. The number of people who would then die from otherwise treatable conditions would be rather large. We accept a small, managed risk of systemic medical error because the alternative is a certainty of systemic medical neglect. That is the only sensible way of going about such things without, as I've said before, literally infinite money/resources.
(This is why deontology is insane. The Pope might not want any orphans to starve in Africa, but he doesn't pawn off the Pope Mobile to pay for it. At least adopt something more sensible like Rule Utilitarianism/Consequential ism or even Virtue Ethics. It is easy to say that the optimal number of starving orphans is zero, far harder to make it happen without sacrificing more important concerns)
Even the legal system, in your own example, abides by Blackstone's ratio. A certain number of the innocent will accompany the guilty, be it to the gallows, a short stint in prison, or in paying fines. To reduce the rate of wrongful conviction to literal zero would be to dispense with a legal system. Guess what that does to crime statistics?
If I had to put a number on the "acceptable" rate of systematic murder, the most obvious way to peg it is by calculating the number of non-systematic murders that would occur. I think I can slightly bias the conversion ratio, but in both directions. I am quite unlike to be either systematically or unsystematically murdered myself, but I guess I'd prefer the latter for the sake of fairness, should Rawls drape a veil over me.
That's still deontology. How did you decide who gets to do the "managing"? You think that's based on raw numbers of successes and failures, or assetions of authority deciding to crush your supposedly beloved principle of autonomy under it's boot? If the system worked the way you describe, we'd be living in ancap insurance-ocracy, not what we have today.
I didn't decide to do anything at all. I'm talking about an existing system, which was created over decades by people with far more degrees and alphabets after their name. Give me ten years, maybe 20,before I get there.
It is obvious to me that even attempting to frame the system-as-it-exists as exclusively deontological or utilitarian/consequentialist is at least partially a category error. There are a lot of sticky fingers in that pie.
What I am advocating for is a better system overall. I think the existing system is okay. Not great, not terrible. Hence the critique.
Would it surprise you to find out that I would actually prefer to live there? One of the many reasons I dream of moving State-side is because it's the closest any country has ever come to embodying those aspirations.
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