(Under the Politics is the Mindkiller test post. Incoming WALL of an argument.)

The typical view of capital punishment by the American right wing voter is correct. I'm speaking of the view that "we damn well know s/he's guilty so don't bother putting them in jail just give 'em a bullet to the head." I will argue that this is the correct course of action for running a justice system under uncertainty.

I'll be crystal clear. I am advocating execution of convicted persons without the special protections traditionally afforded to death penalty cases and without mandatory appeals which reach state supreme courts. I am not advocating for the current system of death penalty, which I consider worse than having no death penalty. "We know they're guilty so lets just kill 'em" can be considered an accurate description of my viewpoint. Also, getting this out of the way, the death penalty does nothing to deter crime more than threat of life imprisonment, and this argument does not rely on any special deterrence properties from capital punishment.

((Lets define some facts so we're working with mutual data. Since 1973, 1267 convicts have been executed, 140 death row inmates have been pardoned or otherwise exonerated. About ~140,000 inmates are currently serving life in prison. For ballpark averages, the cost to house an average inmate is ~$35,000 a year, the cost to house an inmate over 50 years old is ~$100,000 per year, the cost to house a death row inmate ~$125,000 per year (though interestingly this study linked to from the ACLU's case against the death penalty claims death row incarceration costs were practically identical to non-deathrow inmates convicted of similar crimes). The actual execution costs are trivial; one Texas paper was complaining that the cost of injection drugs jumped over 2000%... from about ~$80 to ~$1800. The primary cost increase (approx 85%) of death penalty cases is due to the trial process: death penalty dual trials, mandatory appeals, and increased likelyhood of appeals being granted and the level of those appeals.))

First, I hold that life in prison without parole is not an efficient use of resources. In Efficient Charity, Yvain talks about how money, being fungible, can be used to save 1 painting or 110 children via medicine or 1,100 children via nets. You may argue about the merits of saving lives vs eyeglasses vs paintings, but whichever charity you choose, there is one which does the job best. If the ACLU is to be trusted, we're spending $125,000 per year for death row inmate or LWOP. We value keeping someone locked up in Azkaban for a year more than we care about saving 250 African lives per year, or hiring 2 teachers full time, or funding x-risk charities, or covering 4000 people for cryonics so they'll live forever in case they die that year. If we want to save lives, keeping people in prison is the wrong choice. Hell, for the price of one year of incarceration, we could kill them and freeze them cryonically, hire a teacher for a year, save 20 African lives, AND have $30,000 to give to x-risk research. And that's just one year's savings, we get even more value each year thereafter.

((Yes, I'm aware that if we just pumped funds into malarial nets it would quickly lose low-hanging fruit to target (in fact, by being givewell's top charity it already passed the marginal point into 2nd place, and IIRC is now hovering around $2000 per life saved but I'm not certain on that so I'll stick with Yvain's numbers), and you couldn't just directly trade lives saved. But it's psychologically easier to compare lives with lives, than lives with money. If you don't like African lives, trade some other unit of terminal value. Anyhow I digress.))

Wouldn't we be killing innocent people? Yes. We will get it wrong and kill some innocent person. They won't deserve it and that will be sad. People like Amanda Knox will die just because we want to save money. However, just like the FDA prevents 5,000 casualties per year but causes at least 20,000-120,000 casualties by delaying approval of beneficial medications, our justice system is trading fewer visible, blamable deaths for more deaths that are harder to see.

Wait, doesn't the death penalty costs more because of trials? It does, and that's why I suggest dropping death penalty trials to the same standard as LWOP trials. I hold that extra-stringent trials are not an efficient use of resources to save innocent lives. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, non-death penalty murder trials average $1.1 million, while death penalty trials cost $3 million before appeals. That means we're spending $1.9 million to maybe save one life from wrongful execution (instead of false imprisonment for life). Vaniver's value of information has an illuminating insight (which Elizier also wrote about in Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence): When Bayesian evidence is good enough, requiring legal evidence can be costly. In this case, it's ~3,800 Africans costly. I sincerely doubt this information really has a value more than 3.8 thousand African lives, or sending a couple of doctors through medical school who otherwise couldn't pay for it, or funding 3 Singularity Institutes for a year. LWOP trials are already decently accurate, and death penalty trials aren't significantly more accurate to justify the expense. At some point we have to say that the evidence is "good enough" and make our decision, and I hold that the existing trial cost for LWOP is, if not optimal, a good schelling point.

I'd also like to note that this is essentially paying for a dust spec removal program, and all it costs is some torture (well, execution). In a way, I consider it a repugnant conclusion of the dust spec line of thought, except this one's actually correct (though I'm not prepared to prove that at this moment).

So the question is, are we justified in making life or death choices based on Bayesian evidence instead of legal evidence? I posit that we already do. Supporters of SIAI give over $500,000 each year because we think it's more worthwhile than 1,000 Africans. After the matching drive finishes, we'll have 'killed' more people than there have been capital punishment executions since 1976 when the constitutionality of it was affirmed. There are people who would be alive if we donated one way instead of another, and yet we do it because our reasoning told us that the greater good weighed on the side of SIAI. And yes, SIAI is the right choice. We made a decision under uncertainty that costs lives. We're rationalists; decision making under uncertainty is what we do; our uncertain decision making has mortal consequences whether we recognize it or not. The death penalty is no different.

There are many counterarguments. Some would argue that a guilty LWOP person's life is still worth living even in prison, and I'm neglecting the value that I'm destroying there. Hanson might argue that execution to free up funds would lead to inevitable unintended consequences. Eliezer would probably counter with something regarding Ethical Injuctions, which is a great mini-sequence. Or even "for the good of the tribe, do not execute people even for the good of the tribe". Yet I still find these objections unsatisfying. If I randomly found a Death Note binder that would only work on people convicted of murderer (Is that how it works anyway? I haven't actually seen that anime)... I would start writing down names and hoping our government used the savings to spend more on teachers, R&D, and health care. And even though I'd be sad about each potential innocent I'd killed, I'd keep doing it because it balances out to the right thing.

The right wing ideal of Capital Punishment is correct. "We know they're guilty well enough so lets just kill them" is the correct action for a justice system to take until we reach the singularity and can afford better options.

(NB: You should note, this logic has a flip side. Why not set them free? The answer is that we should iff the expected damage they do is less than the expected cost of enforcement (taking into account non-enforcement encouraging more law breaking). Murderers cost more than this value but a lot of crimes are under this value. Since we're not following politics is the mindkiller here, I'll just flat out state that I think this line of logic explicitly requires legalization of drugs and certain other offenses. However, this thread seems best for political arguments that people find offensive and not for those which everyone, I suspect, agrees with)