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Yeah. I'd say so. Thank you for including that article. Given what was presented in the article by the prosecution, there is no reason to feel that juries are systematically stanning for Black victims or defendants. That was his headline case, it's shit, I can dismiss the whole argument. To say nothing of his misuse of the word Systemic, if the Right starts redefining words the same way the Left does, we're fucked.
In general the law frowns on jumping from fists to guns as proportional escalation. Getting punched does not entitle you to shoot. This is actually a fairly old-fashioned remnant of an era of masculinity, today violence is treated as an on/off switch, and in that environment it seems totally rational to chickenhawks to say "Well getting punched by a Black man is like, totally super scary and he felt threatened!" When the rational response there, given that he was not restrained from retreating in any way, was to walk away and call the cops.
The "gang sign" and "he said he was from California" bit is also pretty hilarious. Are gang hand signs even a real thing?
To say nothing of carrying concealed in a bar being, on net, a bad idea for this exact reason.
Getting punched by anyone large enough to knock you down (outside a controlled environment) is legitimately, non-sarcastically, a totally super scary thing, and if you don't feel threatened when it happens to you then the outside view says that's probably just because head trauma can negatively impact your ability to assess threats. Homicides with "personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc)" typically outnumber homicides with rifles 2-to-1 in the USA. A handful of those each year are deaths from a single punch. Gunshots are much more lethal, but "much more" is still only a 22% fatality rate from handgun gunshots.
This is legally correct (though I'd walk backwards and not take my eyes off the assailant...), if the premise is true. "He's currently punching me" can be justification for lethal force (ref: George Zimmerman); "he hit me 26 seconds ago and now I'm pissed" not so much.
Is it morally correct, too? Someone commits battery and risks committing murder, but because they haven't (yet?) escalated to a higher probability of death I should be upset that their victim does so first? The outcome was still a tragedy, but I'm not sure "always trust that a violent assailant is going to carefully calibrate their violence level" is a Schelling point that doesn't lead to greater tragedy in the long term.
Per your same link, "total firearm" homicides outnumber "personal weapons" homicides 14-to-1. You also have to consider denominators. How many times more fistfights happen per year relative to gun fights? That is to say, all things considered, gun fights are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more lethal than fist fights. Let's not minimize this obvious point.
When you say
If your mode of moral reasoning can justify escalating from ~0.1% fatality risk to a 22% fatality risk under this situation, why not a also accept self-defense escalation to guns if the original fatality risk is 0.01%? 0.001%? If 2-3 orders of magnitude don't convince you, I'm not convinced 4-5 orders of magnitude would convince you, at which point I have to wonder if fatality risk escalation is really the model underlying your beliefs as opposed to, say, honor, fairness, etc.
I guess it is about "honor, fairness", in a sense; you're right. I'd be fine with "old-fashioned" "masculinity", challenging someone to 'take this outside' and holding a fist fight where everybody knows what's going to happen. A sucker punch isn't that. The fact that the risk of fatality is avoidable and isn't consensual seems to be as big a deal as its magnitude. A highly-lethal response to an innocent less-lethal threat is almost tautologically a utilitarian mistake, but for discouraging murder via a more effective means of self-defense I'm fine with at least a couple orders of magnitude of "more effective", because "don't risk committing murder" is a great way to unilaterally avoid the risk of getting killed by your potential murder victim and so I don't see a pressing moral need to provide a "well I guess you should be able to safely risk maybe becoming a murderer" alternative.
We are both just quibbling about numbers at this point, right? If an attacker fires a handgun, and the defender only has a rifle or shotgun available, are they just out of luck because the former are less lethal (I'm seeing as low as 11% from other sources) than the latter (above 30%)? How about if the attacker just has a bat, or a rock? What if you're having trouble figuring out what the attacker has because you just got concussed by a sucker punch? At what point does "if you don't want to face potentially-lethal force, don't start potentially-lethal force" become a more sensible rule than "just shake off the concussion and calculate probabilities", to you? I'm not entirely on board with 0.1% ("not sure" in my original comment wasn't just rhetorical), and I get even less sure with 0.01% and less still with 0.001%, but at some point in the other direction "whoa, this kind of assault regularly murders someone" is a very bad thing that is good to point out and good to discourage, don't you think?
But, this is an important sticking point. The only way allowing people to escalate from fists to guns reduces overall murder is if the 2-3 OOM increase in lethality is paired with a 2-3 OOM decrease in fist fights. This seems implausible. So, the only plausible conclusion is that a norm of escalating fist fights to gun fights causes a large increase in dead bodies. To me that is a steep price to pay for honor and fairness.
I don't think when numbers are OOM that you can fairly describe it a "quibbling".
Definitely not when the expected loss of life is a decade (e.g. 50 years * 22% = 11) versus ~a week (2-3 OOM less). I don't think one man's honor and sense of fairness at a bar one night are worth an expected value loss of a decade of human life. Do you? Do you honestly think the deterrence effect is anything other than a rounding error next to a decade of human life lost in expectation?
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults. A world with fewer fist fights sounds nice to me, but to each their own. A world with fewer unprovoked assaults, though, is one I'd really like to live in, even if that means I never get to blindside someone myself. Wouldn't you agree? Wouldn't "I can never safely give someone a black eye out of the blue" be a price so small that it's worth paying for even a slightly reduced risk of being punched and possibly even killed out of the blue? Maybe not when we're thinking about 22 year olds, I guess? It's a real shame that men often become old enough to murder people with fists before they become old enough to realize they should avoid any risk of murdering people with fists.
Everything I'm reading about this case makes it sound like it moved from "unprovoked assault" to (albeit unfair) "fist fight", from which point Cranston did escalate to manslaughter if not murder ... but I wouldn't dare swear to any of that before seeing the video, nor generalize it to other cases. Would you? I've seen enough cases where the initial descriptions and the eventually published videos turned out to be tangentially related at best.
You're also ignoring the distinction between different dead bodies. Why? If someone invents the "murder a little child" button, a magic device which can only be used once and has a fifty-fifty chance of working, would you kill them if that was the only way to stop them from pressing it? 1 expected death for 1/2 would be an increase in dead bodies, which in this arithmetic we're treating as interchangeable, so that seems like a no, but maybe that ratio is fairly described as quibbling. What if it only had a 0.1% chance of working? We're now talking about multiple orders of magnitude, right? So at this point it's too steep a price to pay, and little Suzie might need to risk biting it so the guy who gets a kick out of her risk doesn't have to? Except ... couldn't he just not press the button, if he's aware of our position and his life has value to him? If the answer is "yes", then we've solved the problem! 0.001 deaths would have been worse than than 0 deaths. If the answer is "no", then his life is so grossly different from his likely victims that even comparing 0.001 deaths to 1 death seems to be comparing apples and oranges ... and so perhaps we've still solved the problem.
So, must we still treat attackers equally to victims? If so, do we need to worry about the QALYs of jail, too? Just glancing at my local laws, giving someone a black eye out of nowhere looks like it can earn up to a year in jail. I vastly prefer published sentencing guidelines and fair trials over even heat-of-the-moment vigilante "justice", but if we're only comparing punishment magnitudes, at a QA ratio of .5 for jail time that year is already 1.5 OOM worse than an expected risk of "~a week". Is that still too harsh, except in the unlikely case every jailing manages to deter dozens of potential assaults? Or is 0.5:0.02 now a reasonable punishment ratio, nothing like that crazy 11:0.02?
I would happily accept even a certainty of being killed if I ever punched someone hard enough to knock them off their feet or concuss them, for even a slight deterrence of the possibility of being a sudden battery victim at that level myself. If it was made a clear societal expectation, I would expect this to generalize to others too, at least anyone who's a moral agent capable of being deterred. The probability you're not multiplying in here is "what are the odds that I might innocently do this awful thing by accident", which is itself orders of magnitude below 1 or should be. Knowing that you might die for doing something that might murder someone is a worthwhile deterrence effect, because a decade of the life of a human who can't be dissuaded from risking others' lives so easily is not necessarily even a positive! Violence tends to escalate, especially from someone who doesn't consider its consequences. Escalating an argument to battery that might murder an innocent person is quite bad, and most of the badness is an externality, so unless much of that badness is internalized, the distribution of consequences does not generally give the perpetrator the right incentives. You might still value the life of a battery perpetrator and their victim on exactly the same scale ... but clearly the perpetrator does not.
(The "clear societal expectation" here is as important as the "guidelines and fair trials" bit above; the less/more clear a consequence is, the less/more you can conclude about the future danger of a person who risks it. That 22yo is currently likely to have grown up watching action movies where the hero gets their head bashed in every ten minutes and walks it off. That shooter should have known he'd be jailed unless he could show it was self-defense and not retribution, and in the latter case I'll be happy he's not on the street still either.)
I'm still waiting on some outstanding questions from earlier. Can we escalate from handguns to long arms? From bludgeoning weapons to guns? What is your risk level at which the "on switch" goes on, if it's so clearly off at 0.1% and so clearly on by 11%? How does the victim know his attacker is unarmed, rather than merely stunning him before losing the element of surprise by drawing a weapon? How can it be reasonable to expect the victim of a sudden attack to the head to rapidly yet carefully predict all the possible outcomes of fighting back or not? Why is the attacker, who hasn't been similarly impaired and has had all the time he wanted to think ahead, not to be held equally if not more responsible for predicting the risk of the outcome that he initiated and was entirely capable of avoiding?
Consider my previous comment as applying entirely to unprovoked assaults as well.
Please don't imply I prefer a world with more fist fights, when I obviously don't.
Sure? Though obviously the cost of achieving that world is important to consider.
Sure? Alas, that's not what we're considering.
Good on you for being open minded. I personally don't really care about the specifics of a random particular case.
Because when we're weighing pros and cons and you discussion partner ignores a 2-3 OOM factor, perseverating on a dramatically less important factor is not helpful.
To answer your question, I'm unsure if I would kill the button-pushing sociopath, but note that advocating killing him merely means accept a 2x decreased value of his life. Still far and away from the 2-3 OOM factor I've been harping on.
Moreover, in the minds of most people, there's an enormous difference between someone pushing a button with a specific probability of killing someone purely for the thrill of killing someone with a magic button and a drunkard throwing a punch at someone he views as disrespecting him. So even if you believe our button-pushing sociopath's life has 0 value, I don't know why you would infer the punch-throwing drunkard's life has no value. That's an enormous jump so, no, we have not "solved the problem" with your thought experiment - you've simply replaced the hard problem (is it acceptable to shoot drunks who punch people) with an easy problem (is it acceptable to shoot sociopaths who push magic buttons that kill people), all while refusing to actually grapple with the fact that you advocate cutting 10 years of life from someone in expectation because of one dumb drunk decision at a bar.
No? You seem to think I am a blind utilitarian calculator. I'm not. But when utilitarianism says the costs outweigh the benefits by 10ish QALYs to ~0 QALYs and the benefit is a sense of fairness/justice in a brawl in a bar some random night... well, that seems like a pretty easy question for me to answer.
It seems silly to discount someone's life by 100x merely because the threw an unprovoked fist some night. It seems silly to think such a policy change would reduce fist fights by 2-3 OOM. It seems silly that fairness in a bar fight weighs more than 10 years of human life.
What's so obvious about this? You're arguing for a world with less deterrence for unprovoked physical assault and starting fist-fights. You want to make this activity less risky and less dangerous, and the obvious conclusion from that is that you actually do want a world with more fist-fights. What exactly is your position if you're not arguing for a world with more fist fights and unprovoked assaults as opposed to a world with less of these but more self-defence killings? That's a position that one can agree or disagree with, but "I want to make it easier to assault people and start fist fights and reduce the negative consequences of doing so, but I don't want more fist-fights to happen" really isn't.
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I didn't intend to imply you did; I apologize if it came off that way.
That was the response I expected, which is why I continued with:
So before you complain about the mote in my eye:
Undelete that and all the other outstanding questions; there's a beam in yours.
My position is that there's a level of unjustified lethal force, perhaps on the order of p=1-in-1000 risk, such that a victim reducing even similarly minimal subsequent risk is worth perhaps a q=1-in-10 risk of lethality against the aggressor. I agree that 2OOM is a high ratio. I admit it might be morally too high, or (see the split thread) it might be factually too low to apply to a beating vs a gun, or perhaps both. But I think "some ratio exists, it might even be as high as 100, and the more avoidable the aggression is the higher the ratio should be" is a more philosophically defensible position than deleting attempts to clarify a position. Fists kill people; the idea that a gun is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different is just philosophy-via-rounding-error.
Yup, there's the rounding error: (x-xtrue)/xtrue = 100%. Even the FP8 people manage to keep some operations under 10%.
So, how high a percentage of the time would such attacks have to kill people before you'd stop rounding to zero? Or conversely, how low a percentage of the time would the response have to be lethal before you started? Do brass knuckles count? That bike-lock-swinging guy from protest season? A protruding car key? Maybe it's all doomed to degenerate into hunches and culture clashes, but "don't suddenly attack people" seems so much easier to turn into a bright line rule than "you can attack them, a little lethally, and they can attack you, but nobody start doing it too too lethally, if you get me".
This is a good point. I hinted at "22 year olds are just dumb" as a reason to be wary of excessively punishing their mistakes; there but for the grace of God and all that. "Drunk people are just dumb" might not be quite as strong a reason, since here I suspect "if you're going to be violently dumb when drunk, teetotal" is the dead-body-minimizing solution, but maybe "drunk and 22" brings that solution out of reach.
Doesn't nearly everybody? Suppose the killer in this case had been pissed off enough to brandish and aim his gun before even being provoked by an attack? It would be self-defense to kill him first, no? Would we want to forbid that because it would be cutting off his life from one dumb drunk decision? And there are thousands of drunk drivers (and thousands of their victims) who die each year in the US; not individually so high in expectation but boy do the numbers add up fast. The laws of physics themselves frequently apply the death penalty to people who make one dumb drunk decision at a bar, and we don't even bother to try to suspend the sentence with breathalyzer tests at the bar parking lot exits.
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Whether the death happens to a victim or a perpetrator is not "less important". It's more important than just about everything else relevant to the situation.
Only if utilitarianism doesn't distinguish between QALYs for a perpetrator and a victim. Also, using QALYs here at all produces bizarre results because it becomes much less bad to kill an older perpetrator than a younger one.
Tossing a punch at someone is an attempt to kill, or a reckless act that may kill, and should be treated as such.
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