Jiro comments on The Least Convenient Possible World - Less Wrong

165 Post author: Yvain 14 March 2009 02:11AM

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Comment author: Jiro 10 February 2015 10:37:54PM *  2 points [-]

We have two such systems today, except

  1. We call it "taxes".
  2. People die on an overall statistical basis (because people who are poorer die sooner, and paying taxes makes them poorer) rather than by loss of organs so it is hard to point to an individual death caused by taking things from one person to give them to someone who is more needy.

For the second system,

  1. We call it "a justice system".
  2. The harm to innocent people is again statistical--because all justice systems are imperfect, they will convict X innocent people, and we've decided that harming X innocent people is an acceptable price to pay to convict more guilty people and protect the populace from criminals.