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The Hogman question.


Frustration

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It seems like people are still talking past each other. Some are saying "punishing an innocent is wrong", and therefore it's never right to do it. Others are saying "letting the guilty go free is wrong", and therefore it's never right to do it. Some are asserting specific future outcomes to justify their position, like "the killers will definitely kill again" or "the killers will definitely not kill again" or "criminals will suddenly learn that hiding their crimes is practical". Still others are inserting other details which directly contradict the point of the parable, like "maybe we'll get more information someday so we can make a right choice" or "the people will revolt unless all four are punished" or "a supernatural force will unerringly make the decision for me".

Re-endorsing the conclusions we already like doesn't usually make for a good discussion. There isn't going to be a perfect apportionment of good or bad with any decision that's made here, a situation which the parable is written specifically to create. I mean, we don't even know that the victim was murdered, really-- I'd bet we could contrive a scenario in which the three killers did the right thing, as long as we shoehorn the right details into the situation. Certainly we're not supposed to feel content with any solution we think of. But without expanding on why the principles we're championing are the right ones, or override the others, it's hard to discuss.

It seems to me that there are three major camps here so far:

1. It is morally wrong to knowingly punish an innocent person, it is never acceptable to do

2. It is an invalid use of social or civic power to knowingly punish an innocent person; in either case, it is never acceptable to do

3. The interests of the town require that the guilty not go unpunished, and no combination of moral claims from the innocent person can override that. In such a case, the innocent must always be punished

It's also the case that: there can be a difference between what a person thinks is the right thing to do in a situation and what they think they would do in that situation, and even if a decision is the "best" one available, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's good.

 

So in the spirit of moving discussion along (and obviously people are free to ignore me and this post :P), I propose this question:

Given the details which were provided to us, three of the hogmen are murderers because they knowingly killed an innocent man. Presumably they had some reason to do so (it wasn't a random killing conspiracy), but we don't have any cause to think that reason is a justification. In executing all four hogmen, the landlord has also knowingly killed an innocent person, and while the landlord has a reason it's not been established that that reason is a justification. By the same standard as the three guilty hogmen, the landlord is then also a murderer. And because they acted alone and in the open, there is no question of misplaced responsibility.

Would it, therefore, be the tidiest and most ethical solution for the landlord to be executed for the death of the innocent hogman and replaced by a landlord untainted by the hogman case?

 

43 minutes ago, Experience said:

Just wondering, do you see this kind of like difference between what is right and what needs to be done for the better of the whole? Or do you think it's 'right' to punish all four?

This has always struck me as a cheat. Saying it "needs to be done" seems like an overriding moral claim of its own. We need a guiding moral framework to determine what is right in the first place so that we can evaluate competing claims. In my experience, anything less in discussion is just a patchwork tyranny of whomever your talking to-- "I think I'd do this, therefore this is probably somehow the right thing to do".

Edited by Returned
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4 minutes ago, Returned said:

So in the spirit of moving discussion along (and obviously people are free to ignore me and this post :P), I propose this question:

Given the details which were provided to us, three of the hogmen are murderers because they knowingly killed an innocent man. Presumably they had some reason to do so (it wasn't a random killing conspiracy), but we don't have any cause to think that reason is a justification. In executing all four hogmen, the landlord has also knowingly killed an innocent person, and while the landlord has a reason it's not been established that that reason is a justification. By the same standard as the three guilty hogmen, the landlord is then also a murderer. And because they acted alone and in the open, there is no question of misplaced responsibility.

Would it, therefore, be the tidiest and most ethical solution for the landlord to be executed for the death of the innocent hogman and replaced by a landlord untainted by the hogman case?

I'm going to give you a no on that one as the innocent hogman is still being executed, but any lord who did execute all four men would need to be hanged as well.

Also thanks for moving this along, I tend to find these discussions turn out better when people like you moderate.

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15 minutes ago, Frustration said:

So if a murder is commited and you have no idea who did it you would punish the whole town just to ensure you punished the guilty?

That would make no sense whatsoever. My point is not that 'you must punish the guilty no matter the consequences'. My point is that when weighing three people who carried out premediated murder against one innocent, I believe that imprisoning the three guilty will do more good than the evil of imprisoning the one innocent. Punishing the entire town would obviously do more evil than good.

8 minutes ago, Returned said:

Given the details which were provided to us, three of the hogmen are murderers because they knowingly killed an innocent man. Presumably they had some reason to do so (it wasn't a random killing conspiracy), but we don't have any cause to think that reason is a justification. In executing all four hogmen, the landlord has also knowingly killed an innocent person, and while the landlord has a reason it's not been established that that reason is a justification. By the same standard as the three guilty hogmen, the landlord is then also a murderer. And because they acted alone and in the open, there is no question of misplaced responsibility.

Would it, therefore, be the tidiest and most ethical solution for the landlord to be executed for the death of the innocent hogman and replaced by a landlord untainted by the hogman case?

I'm going to say no, because the landlord does have a reason that mitigates guilt. A landlord's duty, in the context of Roshar, is to decide how best to protect and care for his people. If the landlord has decided that the best way to do that is to execute an innocent, I don't think that's a heinous enough crime to justify executing him in return. I'm not exactly sure what should be done to the landlord, though I do think that killing all four men is wrong, but I would be in favor of options such as removal of title, imprisonment, or no punishment, depending on the details of the execution and the landlord's reasons for doing so. (If those reasons happened to be 'I hate hogmen' and the hogmen were drawn and quartered, I would reconsider the execution thing)

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What kind of message does it send the people the lord is responsible for, knowing that they could be punished for merely being a suspect despite having done nothing wrong? 

Edit: I agree with Frustration, if the lord is willing to knowingly execute the innocent to punish the guilty, they should be willing to be executed themselves.

Edited by StanLemon
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1 hour ago, Nameless said:

That would make no sense whatsoever. My point is not that 'you must punish the guilty no matter the consequences'. My point is that when weighing three people who carried out premediated murder against one innocent, I believe that imprisoning the three guilty will do more good than the evil of imprisoning the one innocent. Punishing the entire town would obviously do more evil than good.

So what would you do if only two of the hogman had commited the murder?

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Just now, Frustration said:

So what would you do if only two of the hogman had commited the murder?

I mean, assuming that no one has a convincing alibi, I'd try imprisoning them all for a while to see if any new evidence pops up, and if it doesn't I'd probably eventually let them go on probation.

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5 hours ago, Rg2045 said:

Oh definitely, you have to inspire hope in a unfair situation. If you can make people feel safe they will trust you to make the next judgment as well.

I can respect that you feel this way. It’s a moral code that’s taught in schools and even universities with a certain bias. And wile I understand this, I have to put myself into this situation completely with a town or city thats depending upon me to make impossible  calls thats as fair as possible to the people and to the victim. I can’t let them go unpunished. And I don’t want to kill/punish the innocent. But I have to, for peace. 
 

p.s. it’s nice to have some people on/near my side of the debate. For a moment I thought that I had to play “devils advocate” to the popular opinion by myself 

 I can see the logic of of the holy lottery system. While I'll  Stand by the decision to let them all go.  If for some reason that was impossible this might be a good backup. Or at least better than the other options possessed in the books. 

Edited by bmcclure7
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@Experience I honestly don’t know what’s right. Maybe it’s right just to banish the people from the town. They live but not there, make it another town’s problem. Or maybe call an audience with whoever is above you to bring the discussion there.  the thing is letting them go is wrong and punishing everyone is wrong. So I can’t say what the right thing to do is. 
@Returned I don’t think that someone that has the authority to kill somebody can be charged with murder. Like soldiers or pilots that drop bombs. Also the lord of the land is making a decision to better the whole not persecute the people.

5 hours ago, Frustration said:That seems designed to keep you in power, rather than doing what is right.

If you feel this way that’s fine. But better me in power then the guy who can kill. And better me then the guy who just kills everyone. I’m sorta a compromise for the people.

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10 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

I don’t think that someone that has the authority to kill somebody can be charged with murder. Like soldiers or pilots that drop bombs. Also the lord of the land is making a decision to better the whole not persecute the people.

Of course they can, though there are a lot of scenarios that make that more or less likely. But this is a legal distinction, not a moral one.

Regardless, the whole point of the parable is to think about how the ruler's actions are moral or immoral, and what they achieve. Is it better for the people to imprison one innocent and three guilty, even though the innocent is oppressed and the people know innocence is no protection from punishment, or is it better to let three guilty go to avoid persecuting an innocent and let the people know that the state will only act against people with a minimum amount of certainty? The ancillary effects are the ones at issue; no one would complain about only the three murderers being punished.

The intent to better the whole is both not assumed in the problem and not necessarily relevant. Even if it were, "I want to do the right thing" isn't the standard for judging whether or not that person did the right thing.

The question here is more on the order of "what can the person do that will most benefit the whole?", or possibly "is it right to arbitrarily sacrifice one for many in this way?". They are hard questions for sure. But they're unavoidable if you're trying to determine what the morally right action is, and the reasoning behind an answer is how we would evaluate whether or not it's right (or at least acceptable). It's usually much easier to assert that a given conclusion is right than it is to lay out why it's right.

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@Returned then what’s your stance on banishment? Banish the 4 men from your lands. Arguably the best option for the town and the people who are being judged. By no means limiting truly punishing the innocent and at the same time getting the 3 murders away from your town. Only problem I could see would be revenge killings from the victims family 

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43 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

@Returned then what’s your stance on banishment? Banish the 4 men from your lands. Arguably the best option for the town and the people who are being judged. By no means limiting truly punishing the innocent and at the same time getting the 3 murders away from your town. Only problem I could see would be revenge killings from the victims family 

My broader issue is that the nature of the punishment is not much of a factor for the moral character of punishing at all. The problem with banishment is similar to the problem with execution-- the innocent doesn't deserve any punishment at all, and has no way to defend themselves. Whether or not banishment is a suitable punishment for the guilty is a totally separate matter, though it has been only lightly explored so far in this thread. We can talk about whether or not it's acceptable to deem someone too dangerous to live near us, but shunt them off towards other people with no warning (or maybe a Shash glyph?). Banishment is probably less severe than execution, and depending on the context can be more or less substantial-- does it condemn them to living in the wilderness, can they move to another town and live there, are they likely to become bandits, etc. But in any case it's way too severe to justify imposing on someone who didn't do anything wrong at all; any punishment is unjust.

Any punishment which we view as suitable for the crime of murder is going to be too severe to apply to a totally innocent person. Any punishment we feel is light enough to be OK with assigning to an innocent is probably going to be too lenient to promote society or serve justice when inflicted on a murderer. This is the most substantial issue with an approach in which the value we want to uphold is maximum punishment of the guilty. We can bargain over how much punishment we're going to live with, and therefore exactly what the maximum degree of punishment is, but it's never going to be easy to justify imposing it on an innocent person who gets swept up in our effort to make sure no guilty avoid consequences.

We will almost certainly never have the ability to perfectly discriminate between the guilty and the innocent, but the nature of society and collective power mean that our authorities will arbitrarily exercise the power to harm people even though our knowledge is imperfect. Efforts to make sure that every guilty person is punished will tend to increase the number of innocent people who are punished as well. An innocent person really can't do much to protect themselves from, or in any way avoid, this arbitrary exercise of power, as is exemplified in the circumstances of the hogmen parable.

So my view is that the operative problem is the arbitrary exercise of power against those who have no ability to resist or protect themselves in any way-- not that people will sometimes commit crimes and will leave varying amounts of evidence behind. We seem to agree so far (you and I, and Taravangian and Dalinar too) that a core function of government is to protect its people. The government cannot "fix" murder by imprisoning, banishing, or executing people, guilty or not. A totally innocent person who is not safe from arbitrary harm at the hands of their government is, by definition, a person that that government is not protecting well.

I think that the only ethical approach to this is that the government needs to restrain itself from using its power to harm its innocent people, and in this context that means that we cannot try to uphold the value of maximum punishment of the guilty. Trying to do so leaves us with the harms done to the innocent by murderers as well as the harm done to the innocent by the government, and self-satisfying efforts to explain why the harms we've done are really acceptable after all. And in writing off harms to the innocent inherent to casting the broadest possible net to catch the guilty, we leave ourselves unable to clearly forbid things that can do a lot of harm to the innocent in service of some pretty abstract benefits. The better value is minimum harm to the innocent, working specifically to keep the number of innocent people directly damaged by the government's arbitrary power as low as we can manage (and, like above, what we can manage is going to be based on the other things the government needs to do).

It is unsatisfying and distasteful to think of people we know to be guilty going unpunished. I know that I don't like it. But the alternative isn't obviously better to me (again, we don't solve crime by maximizing punishment, we only create victims of government power in addition to victims of individual criminals). So my position is that we can't work from a position of harming the guilty as much as we can, while also being comfortable in inflicting that same harm on someone we know to be innocent, which is at the heart of choosing banishment over other punishments. When we are in the rare case of having no information on guilt or innocence, justice is best served by focusing on doing as little harm to the innocent as possible, which in this case means not immediately punishing anyone.

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@Returned I do apologize but I feel like you’re mind is to bent on saving the individual. While each life is priceless it starts to get tricky when you try to weigh judgment on criminals. 
without contradicting morals let’s run a small simulation. 
criminal A kills citizen A 

so that would be infinite minus infinite that by simple deduction equals 0 meaning that killing the murderer would be fair right? Expect that’s not how infinite works infinite is endless so that means no matter what a person does (if their life is priceless that is) it is drastically unfair to ever punish anyone

 

 So instead let’s calculate lives by a constant where a person has value of 1 

criminal A kills citizen A 

1-1=0 so the value of criminal A is now zero therefore making it “just” to kill Criminal A or at the vary least not a negative. 

now let’s do the situation 

criminal A,B,C kills Citizen A and we don’t know who Criminal ABC is because we know the suspects as 1,2,3,4. 
so an acceptable equation I suspect would be 

((3-1)/3) = value of the lives of the conspirators. 
1= the value of the innocent. 
X= punishment 

2/3+2/3 +2/3 +1=  Of course 3 that means as a group they have a value of 3 so you cannot kill them but punishment can be dealt that’s acceptable about 1/4 of the death penalty. So maybe by being enslaved. Maybe by banishment. Maybe being hung in the high storm. Maybe imprisonment. maybe a huge debt that’s placed on the men to payback the family of the deceased. We don’t know cuz we haven’t placed a value on punishment except execution.   
 

but that’s one way of thinking. Let’s say that the problem is that innocent doesn’t deserve the punishment, as you said is truly the issue. 
Well the punishment of killing is death. And nobody except taravangian has said to kill all of them. And we know that would be unfair because the innocent doesn’t deserve death. Even tho the other men do. So the ruler in the parable imprisoned all 4 that of course is unfair because the innocent doesn’t deserve it, but it is more fair then death because of hope. So you keep moving the dial until you can live with the injustice that you are inflicting upon the innocent man. If you are unable to inflict any punishment then you’ll be wise to relinquish your position to someone that understands that the person doesn’t deserve death but the criminals don’t deserve freedom. 

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2 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

If you are unable to inflict any punishment then you’ll be wise to relinquish your position to someone that understands that the person doesn’t deserve death but the criminals don’t deserve freedom. 

Such an individual would be wise to maintain their position as they are one of the few individuals that can be trusted with power.

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16 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

I do apologize but I feel like you’re mind is to bent on saving the individual. While each life is priceless it starts to get tricky when you try to weigh judgment on criminals. 

No need to apologize, we simply disagree. My mind is not bent on "saving the individual", and the reasoning I laid out allows for innocents to be harmed. My primary concern, however, is to not harm innocents with the arbitrary power of the state where it can be avoided, and that this is the primary concern we should maximize. It has nothing to do with a life being priceless, and applies equally if we're talking about a theft or some other crime. You said previously that you would not find the imprisonment of an innocent right if you yourself were the innocent punished. That's something to think about: the rightness of the outcome should not depend on your identity in the scenario.

 

16 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

without contradicting morals let’s run a small simulation. 
criminal A kills citizen A 

I reject all of this. It's not necessarily an invalid approach, but working this way requires a huge amount of work to justify the values you are picking, and that the issues at play can be reduced to numeric values at all. That's not something I will demand here, nor is a forum a great place for such a discussion. But I do not accept the values or operations you present here.

 

16 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

but that’s one way of thinking. Let’s say that the problem is that innocent doesn’t deserve the punishment, as you said is truly the issue. 
Well the punishment of killing is death. And nobody except taravangian has said to kill all of them. And we know that would be unfair because the innocent doesn’t deserve death. Even tho the other men do. So the ruler in the parable imprisoned all 4 that of course is unfair because the innocent doesn’t deserve it, but it is more fair then death because of hope. So you keep moving the dial until you can live with the injustice that you are inflicting upon the innocent man. If you are unable to inflict any punishment then you’ll be wise to relinquish your position to someone that understands that the person doesn’t deserve death but the criminals don’t deserve freedom. 

I think we're getting closer to agreement on the terms (I suspect we aren't going to agree on the conclusion). We seem to agree that inflicting a punishment on the innocent is morally wrong, regardless of whether or not it can be avoided. We also have limited ability to avoid it. We can "move the dial", as you put it, until we get a result we feel comfortable with. I say that your personal comfort is not a relevant factor in something being right or wrong-- becoming comfortable with inflicting injustice does not make you just or moral; it makes you amoral, no longer concerned with how right or wrong your actions are. We move the dial to do the best we can do, given the limitations we are faced with. The best we can do is not necessarily good, however. A ruler who declines to imprison three guilty and one innocent is not "unable to inflict any punishment"; they are a ruler who declines to punish without evidence indicating guilt. It's not a free-for-all, Purge-style environment they are creating. It's a non-police state.

As I said above in my (admittedly very long) post, I do not believe that maximizing punishment of the guilty is so compelling a value as to justify any cost to achieve it. Nor is pursuing a different value a straight line to anarchy. You haven't presented an argument (that I've been able to draw out, at any rate) for why it is so compelling, or why society is destroyed when an innocent person is executed/imprisoned/banished/punished arbitrarily specifically because of a lack of evidence.

 

12 minutes ago, Rg2045 said:

A weak king is a bad king 

A bad king is a bad king, strong or weak.

 

Quote

A king who refuses to protect his people is not a good king

A king who imprisons his innocent subjects arbitrarily is not protecting those subjects.

Edited by Returned
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Just now, Frustration said:

A king who recognises that the largest threat to his people is himself is the best king a people could hope for.

In this case, the largest threat to his people is actually the three murderers whom he just let loose to go kill again. If a single citizen dies when they wouldn't have if he had imprisoned all the hogmen, then he made the wrong choice. I believe the likelihood of one or more innocents dying is enough to justify the (possibly temporary) imprisonment of one innocent.

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1 minute ago, Nameless said:

In this case, the largest threat to his people is actually the three murderers whom he just let loose to go kill again. If a single citizen dies when they wouldn't have if he had imprisoned all the hogmen, then he made the wrong choice. I believe the likelihood of one or more innocents dying is enough to justify the (possibly temporary) imprisonment of one innocent.

Who is more dangerous to a kingdom, three men who will be heavily watched and distrusted by everyone, or a tyrant?

Three men can be stopped should they try to murder again with comparetivly little effort. A tyrant cannot be stopped without increadible sacrifice.

If a single man suffers unjustly the lord has made the wrong choice and has lost his right to rule.

If a man cannot be proven to be guilty he cannot be punished by the lord. And as not a single man can be proven none of them can be punished.

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1 minute ago, Frustration said:

Who is more dangerous to a kingdom, three men who will be heavily watched and distrusted by everyone, or a tyrant?

Three men can be stopped should they try to murder again with comparetivly little effort. A tyrant cannot be stopped without increadible sacrifice.

If a single man suffers unjustly the lord has made the wrong choice and has lost his right to rule.

If a man cannot be proven to be guilty he cannot be punished by the lord. And as not a single man can be proven none of them can be punished.

See, now we're getting into actual long-term solutions. Like I said, releasing the suspects on probation is something that would potentially be viable. The first priority of a lord is to prevent further murders, but preventing the unjust punishment of an innocent should be the second priority. Now, my opinions on this say nothing about my opinions as to the viability of a feudal system of rulership. One person should probably not be making this decision in the first place, and if they are, they definitely need some kind of oversight to ensure they continue to prioritize the safety of the people over all else and do not turn into a tyrant.

As for 'If a single man suffers unjustly the lord has made the wrong choice and has lost his right to rule', well, if that's the case, then I can guarantee that no ruler in history has ever held the right to rule. (not for very long after the beginning of their rule, at least).

Finally, no one can be 'proved' guilty. If you hold that one who is not proved guilty cannot be punished, then you cannot punish anyone. It is up to the makers of the justice system to decide how many innocents they are willing to wrongfully punish in exchange for punishing the wrongdoers. Where do you draw the line? One in ten? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? That's the question. My line is at the point that I am harming the least innocents in exchange for preventing the most harm to them.

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2 minutes ago, Nameless said:

See, now we're getting into actual long-term solutions. Like I said, releasing the suspects on probation is something that would potentially be viable. The first priority of a lord is to prevent further murders, but preventing the unjust punishment of an innocent should be the second priority. Now, my opinions on this say nothing about my opinions as to the viability of a feudal system of rulership. One person should probably not be making this decision in the first place, and if they are, they definitely need some kind of oversight to ensure they continue to prioritize the safety of the people over all else and do not turn into a tyrant.

I have to disagree, the first priority should be to not overstep their boundaries. In this case that would be to not punish the innocent, and then to prosecute the guilty.

4 minutes ago, Nameless said:

As for 'If a single man suffers unjustly the lord has made the wrong choice and has lost his right to rule', well, if that's the case, then I can guarantee that no ruler in history has ever held the right to rule. (not for very long after the beginning of their rule, at least).

Now you see why I'm cynical of government.

4 minutes ago, Nameless said:

Finally, no one can be 'proved' guilty. If you hold that one who is not proved guilty cannot be punished, then you cannot punish anyone.

People can be proven guilty, confession, DNA eidence, eye-witness testimony, etc. It's hard, but it has to be.

6 minutes ago, Nameless said:

It is up to the makers of the justice system to decide how many innocents they are willing to wrongfully punish in exchange for punishing the wrongdoers. Where do you draw the line? One in ten? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? That's the question.

I firmly belive that if you start framing a justice system by asking yourself "How many innocents are we willing to punish to ensure we punish wrongdoers?" You've already failed. If you absolutly must have a question like that ask "How many criminals are we willing to let go to ensure that no innocent is unjustly punished?"

7 minutes ago, Nameless said:

My line is at the point that I am harming the least innocents in exchange for preventing the most harm to them.

So would you be in favor of government surveillance?

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1 minute ago, Frustration said:

I have to disagree, the first priority should be to not overstep their boundaries. In this case that would be to not punish the innocent, and then to prosecute the guilty.

I disagree. The justice system is made to protect people. So protecting the people should be their primary concern. That does include protecting the people from the justice system itself.

3 minutes ago, Frustration said:

People can be proven guilty, confession, DNA eidence, eye-witness testimony, etc. It's hard, but it has to be.

That's not proven. Innocents can lie. Confessions can be false, or forced. DNA evidence can be faked, or simply wrong. You can never be 100% certain that someone is guilty.

4 minutes ago, Frustration said:

I firmly belive that if you start framing a justice system by asking yourself "How many innocents are we willing to punish to ensure we punish wrongdoers?" You've already failed. If you absolutly must have a question like that ask "How many criminals are we willing to let go to ensure that no innocent is unjustly punished?"

Oh, definitely. The first question should be 'how can we minimize the amount of suffering'. I was just pointing out that in punishing those you believe to be evil, you have to accept that you will punish good by accident, and decide how certain you have to be that someone is evil before you punish them. In America, we decided 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt', but 'beyond reasonable doubt' isn't really defined. Is it 99%? 99.99999999%? That's up to the jury to decide.

8 minutes ago, Frustration said:

So would you be in favor of government surveillance?

I'm going to say no* because the risk of that sort of power getting into the wrong hands would be catastrophic.

*Depends on the scale of the surveillance.

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4 minutes ago, Nameless said:

That's not proven. Innocents can lie. Confessions can be false, or forced. DNA evidence can be faked, or simply wrong. You can never be 100% certain that someone is guilty.

What if we caught them on camera, had DNA evidence that it wasn’t a lookalike, and knew that they didn’t have a twin?

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1 minute ago, Nameless said:

I disagree. The justice system is made to protect people. So protecting the people should be their primary concern. That does include protecting the people from the justice system itself.

I agree that it should be made to protect people. However I would say that the justice system itself presents the most immediate and potent danger at any given time.

4 minutes ago, Nameless said:

That's not proven. Innocents can lie. Confessions can be false, or forced. DNA evidence can be faked, or simply wrong. You can never be 100% certain that someone is guilty.

By that logic you can't prove anything.

5 minutes ago, Nameless said:

Oh, definitely. The first question should be 'how can we minimize the amount of suffering'.

I wouldn't even say suffering, as in my experience most suffering is self inflicted.

10 minutes ago, Nameless said:

I'm going to say no* because the risk of that sort of power getting into the wrong hands would be catastrophic.

*Depends on the scale of the surveillance.

That asteriks there intrests me, what is the boundary line ther, would you say?

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