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AspiringRationalist comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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Without having a date on the quote, it's hard to know exactly which three decades he's referring to, but we certainly seem to be in a better position regarding crime, housing and race relations than three decades ago. Education, probably not so much. This sounds to me like just a meta-contrarian longing for a return to the imagined "good old days".
He published that in 1993, which was about at the historic peak of violent crime in the US since 1960. The situation has improved a lot since then, but through the decades of 1960-1990, things looked pretty grim.
Good to know. Updated.
In the US at least the murder rates today are comparable to those of the 1960s only because of advances in trauma medicine.
Another important reason is that Americans have in the meantime embraced a lifestyle that would have struck earlier generations as incredibly paranoid siege mentality. (But which is completely understandable given the realities of the crime wave in the second half of the 20th century.)
Yet another reason is, of course, the draconian toughening of law enforcement and criminal penalties.
To clarify I was commenting on murder rates specifically in light of how trauma medicine has reduced the fraction of violent assaults that cause death. The factors you describe seem more along the lines of avoiding violent assault in the first place.
Controlling for improvements in trauma medicine, today's murder rate would be three times that of the 1960s, but the numbers would be better than the controlled for medicine 1990s numbers, which where five times 1960s levels.
In other words yes in the past 20 years Americans seem to be getting assaulted less and I think all of what you describe played a role. There is also the unfortunate problem of police sometimes having nasty incentives to misclassify crimes so some of the drop might be fictional.
Which would, nevertheless, be considered absurdly lenient by the standards of any pre-20th century society.
I wouldn't call the present U.S. system "absurdly lenient." The system is bungling, inefficient, and operating under numerous absurd rules and perverse incentives imposed by ideology and politics. At the same time, it tries to compensate for this, wherever possible, by ever harsher and more pitiless severity. It also increasingly operates with the mentality and tactics of an armed force subduing a hostile population, severed from all normal human social relations.
The end result is a dysfunctional system, unable to reduce crime to a reasonable level and unable to ensure a tolerable level of public safety -- but if you're unlucky enough to attract its attention, guilty or innocent, "absurd leniency" is most definitely not what awaits you.
Interesting. Where did you find this fact? Are there others like it there?
Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault 1960-1999
To be clear there are other possible explanations for why violent assault as recorded has become less lethal, I just think this one is by far the most plausible.
I always think it's weird on cop shows and the like where an assaulter is in custody, the victim is in the hospital, and someone says "If he dies, you're in big trouble!". The criminal has already done whatever he did, and now somehow the severity of that doing rests with the competence of doctors.
Indeed, this seems to be an area where the legal system opts for a consequentialist approach; no surprise, then, that you would find it weird.
Um, I thought consequentialism was about evaluating the goodness of a course of action based on its probable consequences. If all it amounts to is hindsight then it's not much use for making ethical decisions about future actions. But I think that would be a straw man.
If you apply that crazy approach to consequentialism then I should be allowed to stand on a roof heaving bricks out into the street, and I'm not doing anything wrong unless and until one of them actually hits somebody.
Consequentialism is about deriving the ethical value of actions from their consequences. If someone thinks that the badness of an action is not determined until the consequences are known (like the police in Alicorn's example, or more to the pont the legal system they represent), then, necessarily, they are applying consequentialist moral intuitions, and not deontological moral intuitions.
No one said anything about "all it amounts to" being "hindsight". Your second paragraph is a straw man. While it is true that if someone believes that, they must be a consequentialist, it does not follow that a consequentialist must necessarily believe that.
I did say that it would be a straw man version of consequentialism. But I think I misunderstood what you were saying, or at least where your emphasis was, so I was kind of talking past you there :(
Thankfully in other areas the law is not concerned only with the contingent consequences of actions in general. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime. Attempted murder is a crime. Blackmail is a crime even if the victim refuses to be bullied and the blackmailer doesn't follow through on their threat. Kidnapping isn't considered to be babysitting if the victim is released unharmed.
So yeah. I think anyone could find it a little weird with or without calling it consequentialist.
Perhaps, but my point was that, since it does presuppose consequentialism, non-consequentialists such as Alicorn would be particularly disposed to find it weird (whether or not some consequentialists would also have a similar reaction).
It makes sense as an interrogation tactic, at any rate. If you're going for a confession and the person is distraught (either by what they did or by getting caught doing what they did) then it's a variation on "confess now or you'll get a worse sentence" with the added bonus that the timeline on the "confess" is both out of the interrogator's hands and it doesn't seem artifiical to the suspect.
Well, I suppose it's easier to prove that the victim could have died from the violence inflicted, if they do actually die.... but yeah, on the whole I agree.
If we're relying on doctor competence anyway here, we could see about getting official professional opinions on to what extent the injuries could have been lethal. Like retroactive triage.
I can see the logic of treating the severity of the crime as contingent on the actions (and perhaps intentions) of the criminal rather than the actual results, such that the fact that someone dies as a consequence of my battering them doesn't make it an act of murder.
But that also applies to shorter-window consequences, like when I shoot someone and they dodge to the left and the bullet hits them in the shoulder vs. I shoot someone, they dodge to the right, and the bullet hits them in the throat.
Treating the severity of the crime as contingent on consequences in the firing-a-gun case and contingent on actions in the battering-someone case would seem equally weird to me.
I've no idea of the data's provenance, but this table claims aggravated assault rates of 86/100,000 in 1960, 440/100,000 in 1993, and 252/100,000 in 2010 if I've got my math right. Murder rates are 5.08/100,000, 9.51/100,000, and 4.77/100,000 respectively. So the decline in murder since 1993 has outpaced the decline in assault (it also rose less steeply between '60 and '93), and trauma medicine's a plausible cause, but both declines are quite real: I wouldn't say the comparison to the 1960s is valid only because of medical improvements.
In any case, 1960 was more like fifty years ago. The per-100,000 aggravated assault rate in 1980 was just under 300 -- substantially over the 2010 numbers.