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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.
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.
You've made an assertion. Not an argument.
If I had two sons, and one son got drunk and punched someone at a bar while another got drunk and was punched by someone at a bar. I would not want to live in a world where the former was killed and the latter killed their assaulter. I'd much rather live in the alternative world where no one died. Which would you rather live in?
Again, I am not a blind utilitarian calculator. It is a model.
This is black-and-white thinking. There are gradations here that you are ignoring, because they are inconvenient to you. Those gradations are central to my argument, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond here.
This argument proves too much. If most people had a son and their son tried to kill someone, they would prefer that the son not be killed in self-defense at all. If you're taking this argument seriously, it doesn't actually matter how high the chance of death from the lethal attack is, killing in self-defense is wrong, period.
Also, you should consider it from behind the veil of ignorance (not the actual version of veil of ignorance, the popular version): If A is lethally attacking B and you don't know whether A or B is your son, would you prefer that B be able to kill A in self-defense even if the lethality isn't too high? I would, and I think most people would.
I agree.
If Man A punched Man B and I knew one of them was my son but not which, I would pray to every god under the sun that B didn't shoot at A.
Why? Remember, we're assuming self-defense. If B shoots A and A is your son, your son is a murderer who was shot in self-defense. If B doesn't shoot A and B is your son, then your son is a murder victim, with some probability. Surely you'd be more concerned for your son's survival if he's innocent than if he's a murderer, so if you don't know whether he's A or B, you'd prefer the scenarion where B shoots.
Unless you're saying that you don't want B to shoot A because your only concern is reducing the chance of death, and it doesn't matter who started it. Then this proves too much and implies that you oppose lethal self-defense, period. Do you?
No? He was a drunkard who punched someone and was killed. Not a murderer.
"with some probability" is don't a lot of work there.
It matters, but not as much as my son stay alive.
It does matter, but not nearly as much imo as it does to you.
If a unhinged man is holding a dozen people hostage with a gun, take him out if you can. I'd support this even if there were a 1-in-13 chance the hostage-taker was my son. If a psychotic man has a knife and is charging you, and you can't get away, shoot him.
If one man sucker punches another in public, don't shoot. I'd support this even if there were a 1-in-2 chance the punched man was my son.
There are scenarios where there are degrees of uncertainty regarding the correct action - parameters that influence this include
who started it
how much effort was made to escape
how much each party escalated prior
discrepancies in overall strength of the parties
presence of peers
distance from security/police
etc
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