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JoshuaZ comments on Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions - Less Wrong
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Fun crazy ideas that come to mind:
1) Punishments get scaled by the judged likelihood of guilt, i.e. judge says there's a 65% chance Bill is the killer, Bill gets 65% of the punishment.
2) All punishments become monetary fines varying by judged negative utility, i.e. Judge says murdering Joe was worth x negative utilons, Bill is fined to outweigh damage done with good.
Potential problems/thoughts: Bankruptcy? Lower bound on fines/guilt likelihood? Diminishing percieved utility of money/punishment in large amounts? How to measure negative utility of crime, positive utility of fine? How much should fine weigh compared to crime? Some/all money to victims/government/charity? Problems reaching accurate judgments? Inequality of man measured in punishment cause some complex problem? Lack of appearance of justice? Other complex effects on society?
Add your own for upvotes.
Utility is too subjective and too easily an abused standard. Would you for example not punish almost at all if they kill an old homeless drunk with no friends if they do it painlessly enough? There seems to be an intuition that that's not the correct response.
People who believe in property rights will also be concerned. Will this make it ok if I steal from you if I can show that the overall utility is increased based on my theft? You can make an argument that we shouldn't do that because once that sort of attempt becomes common society will break down, so doing it repeatedly will result in negative utility overall. But in any given single instance this won't be a problem.
Such a utility-based consideration would also lead to serious, serious problems if applied at the civil level. Businesses would basically do whatever they felt like, then hire an economist and some good lawyers to convince a trier of fact that whatever they did increased utility "on the whole."