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chaosmage  11mo ago (text post)   2202 thread views

Should lifetime prisoners be incentivized to kill themselves?

The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.

I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?

It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?

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People keep accusing me of being "uncharitable" when I claim that utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing because in order to remain logically consistent it must inevitably devolve into either mindless wire-heading or a fucking death cult. And yet here we are with one of my "strawmen" made flesh asking do we really need to value life? Really? and why cant we just euthanize the people [user] doesn't like.

On the off chance you're just naive and ignorant rather than a troll, the answer to your question in the OP is; No, we shouldn't, because we've already established that this is a slippery slope, and at the bottom of this slope lies a mountain of skulls.

You as a utilitarian may see that as a fair trade for some nebulous benefit but I do not

Why does it have to remain logically consistent? I haven't seen a single alternative belief system that met that standard yet.

Because unlike many other beliefs systems they actually try to justify their positions on the basis of being "logical" and "correct"

You see, this might be because the problem is wider than utilitarianism. It's the whole of sufficiently deeply considered consequentialism, optimizing over global outcomes. Utilitarianism is an ethical decision theory; something like deontology is a set of heuristics.

Good point.

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