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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I consider myself a generalist. More specifically, I try to find patterns in one part of reality which are replicated elsewhere, in order to understand reality better. I filed “criminal law” under “science” in my mind when I recognized the epistemological similarities between falsification in science and “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal laws.

My belief in “beyond a reasonable doubt” was somewhat shaken by having watched the TV series “Bull”. However, I was fairly confident that American law, by and large, gets it right. Until today, when I ran across this article on LessWrong. Basically, there are so many confounders in most experiments that actually learning something new is unlikely if the experiment is made to test one variable.

If criminal law and science are twin methods of knowing, both based on eliminating all reasonable doubt, I no longer have faith in the death penalty except in the most absolutely obvious and clear-cut of non-cherrypicked cases.

I don't understand this complaint about the death penalty specifically. The alternative to the death penalty in most cases is life imprisonment which barely seems better. Why are false positives with life imprisonment ok, but the false death penalties not?

Moreover, life imprisonment lets us pretend that we'll fix the false positives later on, even though I see little evidence we actually will.

Overall this argument seems like an isolated demand for rigor.

Moreover, life imprisonment lets us pretend that we'll fix the false positives later on, even though I see little evidence we actually will.

Basically for this reason. You can let an innocent out of prison, you can't bring them back to life.

Again - will we actually do it? I'm asking about probability and gambling odds, not theoretical possibility of a comforting story.

You can let an innocent out of prison in X% of the cases, where X is not 100%, because sometimes the innocent dies in prison before their innocence is discovered.

You also can't give them back the term of their life they've already spent in prison. Sure, under the "time is money" theory, you can try to make up for it that way, but I don't know. I'm imagining an eighteen-year-old, wrongfully sentenced to life in prison, being exonerated after seventy years and set free. Hooray! Justice has been done at last; he has his life back now!

What's left of it.

Strictly speaking, everything is irreversible. How should we take this, as modus ponens or modus tollens? I'm certainly conflicted, but it does seem important.

This does happen on occasion, but IMO "life in prison is cheaper because we save on legal appeals" (which is a common argument, but not one you specifically are making here) is wrong because life in prison probably deserves the same standard of confidence the death penalty does. I don't think someone innocent dying of old age in prison is morally much better than dying by execution.

I agree with this. It seems to me that a lot of the argument for the superior morality of long prison sentences weighs on the importance of being able to apologize to someone after unjustly imprisoning them. This leads to the intuition that it's much more tragic for someone to die one day before being released from unjust imprisonment than one day after, but I've never really found this very persuasive. It seems transparently self-serving for authority to believe in the morally transformative power of declaring "Sorry, I fucked up!"

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