Nornagest comments on Open thread, November 2011 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 02 November 2011 06:19PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 09 November 2011 12:28:13AM *  1 point [-]

Only insofar as it discourages similar future behavior in the same person, I'd say. If we're discounting future consequences entirely I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about punishment, or even about good and bad in the abstract. But I'm a consequentialist, and I think you'll find that the deontological or virtue-ethical answers to the same question are quite different.

Comment author: dlthomas 09 November 2011 12:36:31AM 0 points [-]

Only insofar as it discourages similar future behavior in the same person, I'd say.

I'm not sure that I agree. It may be necessary to punish more to keep a precommitment to punish credible. That precommitment may be preventing others from doing harm.

Comment author: Nornagest 09 November 2011 12:46:29AM *  1 point [-]

Fair enough. I'd lumped the effects of that sort of precommitment under "discouraging others from acting similarly", and accordingly discarded it.

Comment author: dlthomas 09 November 2011 01:07:24AM 0 points [-]

Ah, I read it as a contrast. My bad.

Comment author: ahartell 09 November 2011 12:31:34AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks, could you respond to my reply to dlthomas, as well?

That's the conclusion I keep coming to, but I have trouble justifying this to others. It's just such an obvious built-in response that bad people deserve to be unhappy. I guess the inferential difference is too high.

Follow Up: What is your opinion of prisons? How unpleasant should they be?

Is the answer to the second question something like "the unpleasantness with the best [unpleasantness] to [efficacy in discouraging antisocial behavior] ratio, while favoring ratios with low unpleasantness and high discouragement"? (Feel free to tell me that the above sentence in unintelligible).

Comment author: Nornagest 09 November 2011 12:43:54AM *  2 points [-]

Yeah, I saw the comment. I wasn't going to reply to it, but I might as well unpack my reasons why: the ethics of imprisonment are fairly complicated, and depend not only on deterrent effects and the suffering of prisoners but also on a number of secondary effects with their own positive or negative consequences. Resource use, employability effects, social effects on non-prisoners, products of prison labor, et cetera. I don't feel qualified to evaluate all that without quite a lot of research that I currently have little reason to pursue, so I'm going to reserve judgment on the question for now.

Comment author: ahartell 09 November 2011 12:48:53AM 0 points [-]

Sorry, and thank you.

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