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Matt_Simpson comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
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Once you factor in the dangers of giving humans that sort of power, I think that "problem" goes away for the most part.
So if there existed a hypothetical institution with the power to mete out preventive imprisonment, and which would reliably base its decisions on mathematically sound consequentialist arguments, would you be OK with it? I'm really curious how many consequentialists here would bite that bullet. (It's also an interesting question whether, and to what extent, some elements of the modern criminal justice system already operate that way in practice.)
[EDIT: To clarify a possible misunderstanding: I don't have in mind an institution that would make accurate predictions about the future behavior of individuals, but an institution that would preventively imprison large groups of people, including many who are by no means guaranteed to be future offenders, according to criteria that are accurate only statistically. (But we assume that they are accurate statistically, so that its aggregate effect is still evaluated as positive by your favored consequentialist calculus.)]
This seems to be the largest lapse of logic in the (otherwise very good) above post. Only a few paragraphs above an argument involving the reversal test, the author apparently fails to apply it in a situation where it's strikingly applicable.
If this institution is totally honest, and extremely accurate in making predictions, so that obeying the laws it enforces is like one-boxing in Newcomb's problem, and somehow an institution with this predictive power has no better option than imprisonment, then yes I would be OK with it.
I don't trust any human institution to satisfy the first two criteria (honesty and accuracy), and I expect anything that does satisfy the first two would not satisfy the third (not better option).
The topic of preemptive imprisonment was not under discussion, so it seems strange to consider it an error not to apply a reversal test to it.
Please see the edit I just added to the post; it seems like my wording wasn't precise enough. I had in mind statistical treatment of large groups, not prediction of behavior on an individual basis (which I assume is the point of your analogy with Newcomb's problem).
I agree that it's not critical to the main point of the post, but I would say that it's a question that deserves at least a passing mention in any discussion of a consequentialist model of blame, even a tangential one.
I would also be ok with this... however by your own definition it would never happen in practice, except for extreme cases like cults or a rage virus that only infects redheads.
How much of a statistical correlation would you require? Anything over 50%? 90%? 99%? I'd still have a problem with this. "It is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." - Ben Franklin
Enough to justify imprisoning everyone. It depends on how long they'd stay in jail, the magnitude of the crime, etc.
I really don't care what Ben Franklin thinks.
Sorry, not arguing from authority, the quote is a declaration of my values (or maybe just a heuristic :-), I just wanted to attribute it accurately.
My problem may just be lack of imagination. How could this work in reality? If we are talking about groups that are statistically more likely to commit crimes, we already have those. How is what is proposed above different from imprisoning these groups? Is it just a matter of doing a cost-benefit analysis?
It's not different. Vladmir is arguing that if you agree with the article, you should also support preemptive imprisonment.
An article by SteveLandsburg on a similar quote.
And a historical overview of related quotes.
Yes, this is obviously (to me) the right thing to do if possible. For example, we put down rabid dogs before they bite anyone (as far as I know). I can't think of any real-world human-applicable examples off the top of my head, though - although some groups are statistically more liable to crime than others, the utility saved would be far more than outweighed by the disutility of the mass imprisonment.
My only reservation is that I might actually intrinsically value "innocent until proven guilty." Drawing the line between intrinsic values and extremely useful but only instrumental values is a difficult problem when faced with the sort of value uncertainty that we [humans] have.
So assuming that this isn't an intrinsic value, sure, I'll bite that bullet. If it is, would still bite the bullet assuming that the gains from preemptive imprisonment outweigh the losses associated with preemptive imprisonment being an intrinsic bad.
Why would this institution necessarily imprison them? Why not just require the different risk classes to buy liability insurance for future damages they'll cause, with the riskier ones paying higher rates? Then they'd only have to imprison the ones that can't pay for their risk. (And prohibition of something for which the person can't bear the risk cost is actually pretty common today; it's just not applied to mere existence in society, at least in your own country.)
I'll bite that bullet. I already have in the case of insane people and arguably the case terrorists who belong to a terrorist cell and are hatching terrorist plots but haven't committed any attacks yet.
But it would have to be pretty darned accurate, and there would have to be a very low margin of error.
Sexual offender have a high rate of recidivism. Some states keep them locked up indefinitely, past the end of their sentences. Any of the various state laws which allow for involuntary commitment as an inpatient like Florida's Baker Act also match your description.
Correction: Sexual offenders have an unusually low rate of recidivism (about 7% IIRC); There is certainly a strong false perception that they have a high rate of recidivism, though.
Citation, please?
See my reply to Savageorange where I gave the statistics and citations here. Savage is correct although the phenomenon isn't as strong as Savage makes it out to be.
Correct, the recidivism rate for sexual offenses is generally lower than for the general criminal population in the United States, although the rate calculated varies a lot based on the metric and type of offense. See here . Quoting from that page:
"Marshall and Barbaree (1990) found in their review of studies that the recidivism rate for specific types of offenders varied:
This is in contrast to base rates for reoffense in the US for general crimes which ranges from around 40% to 60% depending on the metric see here.
This isn't the only example where recidivism rates for specific types of people have been poorly described. There's been a large deal made by certain political groups that about 20% of people released from Gitmo went on to fight the US.
Note also that in Western Europe recividism for the general criminal population is lower. I believe that the recidivism rate for sexual offenses does not seem to correspondingly drop, but I don't have a citation for that.
Edit: Last claim may be wrong, this article suggests that at least in the UK recidivism rates are close to those in the US for the general criminal population.
You might still be mostly correct about Western Europe - the UK could be an outlier relative to the rest of Western Europe.
I bite this bullet as well, given JGWeissman's caveat about the probity and reliability of the institution, and Matt Simpson's caveat about taking into account the extra anguish humans feel when suffering for something.
It seems that one way society tries to avoid the issue of 'preemptive imprisonment' is by making correlated behaviors crimes. For example, a major reason marijuana was made illegal was to give authorities an excuse to check the immigration status of laborers.
I think a lot of you are missing that (a version of) this is already happening, and the connotations of the words "jail" and "imprison" may be misleading you.
Typically, jail is a place that sucks to be in. But would your opinion change if someone were preventatively "imprisoned" in a place that's actually nice to live in, with great amenities, like a gated community? What if the gated community were, say, the size of a country?
And there, you see the similarity. Everybody is, in a relevant sense, "imprisoned" in their own country (or international union, etc.). To go to another country, you typically must be vetted for whether you would be dangerous to the others, and if you're regarded as a danger, you're left in your own country. With respect to the rest of the world, then, you have been preventatively imprisoned in your own country, on the possibility (until proven otherwise) that you will not be a danger to the rest of the world.
(A common reason given for this general restriction on immigration. though not stated in these terms, is that fully-open borders would induce a memetic overload on the good countries, destroying that that makes them worthy targets of immigration. So indeed, a utilitarian justification is given for such preventative imprisonment.)
Again, the problem is recognizing what counts as a "prison" and what connotations you attach to the term.
This is an interesting way of thinking about citizenship and immigration, one which I think is useful. I don't think I've ever thought about the way other countries' immigration rules regard me. Thanks for the new thought.
I'd call that aribtrage. I don't see what memetics has got to do with it.
The relevant metaphor here is "killing the goose that lays the golden eggs". A country with pro-prosperity policies is a goose. Filling it with people who haven't assimilated the memes of the people who pass such policies will arguably lead to the end of this wealth production so sought after by immigrants.
Arbitrarge doesn't kill metaphorical geese like that: it simply allows people to get existing gold eggs more efficiently. It might destroy one particular seller's source of profit, but does not destroy wealth-production ability that an immigrant-based memetic overload would.