What Are You Doing Right Now? (149 Viewers)

GordoDeCentral

GordoDeCentral

Diez
Moderator
#329,053
Apr 14, 2005
70,836
#329,053
Ocelot said:
Thing is, there is overwhelming evidence that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent in real life. I mean, you are putting forward an interesting ethical thought experiment, but the fundamental parameters for this to work only exist within a fictive model. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to then make the mistake and transfer the conclusions we take from the model into reality, and base decisions made in real life on these conclusions.

Btw this one of my main points of criticism of neoliberal economics, its conclusions are not wrong in themselves, but they only work inside a very specific model, where things such as perfect market information or perfect competition exist. In reality, where these things do not exist, the results drawn from the model do not always lead to the intended results. I realise that the simplification of reality is a basic problem, or indeed the fundamental definition of models, but it really becomes worrysome when the differences between models and real life are so fundamental, that they lead to completely different results, but this is not fully realised or taken into account.

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I fully agree that we should strive for perfection even though it is unattainable. But the important thing is that we really have to take into account that perfection is unattainable, and include that in our concepts and systems.
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king Ale said:
Well, that only has to do with the level of uncertainty with each system. Even if 1 innocent person is executed wrongly the system responsible for it is infinite times worse than a system which does not execute criminals no matter how big x is, because we can never know for sure if +x number of people would not have been killed if we had implemented death penalty in the system and unfortunately we have no way of knowing that either. The second system is preferable because its mistakes are not entirely irreversible and because we do not have (and we cannot possibly be aware of) a causal relationship between putting that policy into effect and a reduction in crime). That said, I'm in no way against death penalty as a wrong action (I don't agree with "you shouldn't take a life no matter what"), my only concern is about its incapability of being altered when it's proven to have taken an innocent's life.



Will watch it at home :smile:

Speaking of Friedman, I was reading a relatively old article about maximization of profit and the author was saying "we will not consider altruistic firms because they are not rational" :p
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sorry i should have made it clear i wasnt arguing for the death penalty, but simply calling into question a possible counterargument to it. My stance on the matter is culture specific, just as it is with many other moral dilemmas.
 
Martin

Martin

Senior Member
#329,054
Dec 31, 2000
56,913
#329,054
X said:
sorry i should have made it clear i wasnt arguing for the death penalty, but simply calling into question a possible counterargument to it. My stance on the matter is culture specific, just as it is with many other moral dilemmas.
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what does culture specific mean?
 
Martin

Martin

Senior Member
#329,058
Dec 31, 2000
56,913
#329,058
X said:
we are on a boat, and the following of orders is imperative to the survival of all, death for mutiny seems to me an appropriate punishment
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that sounds very arbitrary. what kind of mutiny? what is the impact? what caused the mutiny? how many can you kill before you run out of people to steer the ship?
 
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