everlastingtongue

I don’t recall seeing the claim that the death penalty is fearsome, otherwise, as you say, it would be a deterrent – which it is certainly not. A penalty can be severe, yet not fearsome as another can be fearsome, though not severe. Public whipping or caning, for example are in my opinion fearsome, though hardly severe compared to a life prison sentence. Additionally, there is quite a difference between fearsome and immoral. It would be immoral, in my opinion, to force someone to go to church every Sunday for the rest of their lives as a punishment for a crime, and yet this punishment is not fearsome at all compared with prison time.

Incidentally, I’ve been thinking a lot about these quotes:

Alonzo Fyfe:
NHGH:
If these statements are true, then why aren’t we seeing mass suicide, or appeals for assisted suicide in our prison systems for prisoners serving long, or life sentences?

Why do 7 of 8 death row inmates decide to continue with their appeals?

If many years in prison were truly worse than death, than why do overwhelming majority of prisoners choose to live?

This shows me that the will to live is incredibly strong, even for prisoners – widening the gap, in my mind, between the severity of a long or indefinite prison sentence and death.

Alonzo Fyfe

Are you calling me a liar?

(just kidding)

The fact that 1 in 8 prefer X over Y does not imply that 8 in 8 either does or should prefer X over Y, and the fact that 7 in 8 still go for Y over X should not come as a surprise.

I explicitly stated in my own post that one cannot infer from my preferences what others do or should prefer.

The reason for bringing up these cases is not to say (falsely): everybody is like this but to illustrate the point that capital punishment over other types of punishment is not a difference in kind but a difference in degree, and that the degree itself is different from one person to the next.

Therefore, there is nothing particularly wrong with capital punishment -- objections to capital punishment that treat it as a different kind of punishment are built on a false premise. One can still make objections that murder does not justify this degree of punishment, the objection only applies to those who object that there is something particularly wrong with punishments of this kind.

everlastingtongue

Alonzo,

I definitely see your point – and if I believed in an afterlife, I would agree.

Doubting Didymus

Quite. My problem is with your overextrapolations of such regularities. Allow me to demonstrate using your own example.

Absolutely. Thats just grand. Now, let us apply the same standard of evidence to the picking you have supplied for YOUR claim, which is:

1) Humans respond to deterrents with the appropriate modification of behaviour.

...

And thats it. You have not got a confession from a dying man, nor any record of unusual bank transactions. The sum of the evidence you really have is comparable to your number (2) 'The fact that a spouse if cheating and planning a divorce is a plausible motive for murder.'

That is my objection. You rely entirely on a single, higly suspicious premise that you want to extend, without justification, to the whole spectrum of human behaviour.

These examples are incomparable. You say: "Jones has a job and therefore he will probably go to work", and then you say words to the effect of: "Jones wont hit me if he is threatened with a fine, therefore he won't kill me if threatened with death". Can't you see that we are dealing with chalk and cheese there? You are overextrapolating quite badly, as if you said: "Jones has a job and therefore he will probably go to work", even if his job is casual, irregular, subject to extended leave periods, he is not even certain he won't be fired, and he has a tendancy to quit jobs wthout notice. Just because you can construct simple examples where human behaviour is predictable does not mean you are justified in applying them to every conceivable situation.

I see, and this applies to every aspect of human behaviour that you want it to? Well, good. How about: "a humans desire to tear its own child to shreds is increased in proportion to the reward you offer her", or: "A humans desire to press the red button guaranteeing the destruction of all life in the continent of europe is increased in proportion to the punishment you threaten him with".

In both cases, rewards and punishments would have zero effect on my behaviour, and I think that holds true for the vast majority of the human population. Whats going wrong? I'm overextrapolating. I'm using generally held principles, and applying them to situations outside the range of the usual events that they were formed in. I should not be allowed to use the motivation principle as the lynchpin of my case that either of the above statements is true, and if any soul wandered along and caught me doing it, they would be quite justified in asking me for more and better proof.

You make a case against sociology, which I care little about. That is not neccesarily what I was asking for, I am merely asking for anything better than the highly spurious connection to universal truths about human behaviour. I maintain that you do not have enough support for the claim you are making. Can you even establish the beginnings of the appearence of a correlation between the death penalty and murder rates? If not, how can you make the claim, not just that the death penalty is a deterrent, but that it is more of a deterrant than other alternatives?

I consider holding on to beliefs without any evidence for them is something badly wrong with the world. People run around believing any crazy thing they like without a shred of proof, and it aggravates the buggery out of me. Nor do I think that the words 'crap' and 'damn' are examples of gross violations of etiquette. If you disagree, however, you are free to take the issue further.

Alonzo Fyfe

The argument that capital punishment is different in degree and not of kind hardly depends in an afterlife.

I think that you are still projecting your preferences on others. Because there is no afterlife, and because your life right now is fairly comfortable, you may see your own death as particularly bothersome.

Yet, this is still consistent with holding that, in your case, you see capital punishment as a significantly greater degree of punishment over life imprisonment. Yet, it still fits on a cointinuum. Some view life imprisonment as worse. Of those who view life imprisonment as worse, there are some who will see it as slightly worse and others who will see it as significantly worse.

But this is a continuum with no sharp lines.

Alonzo Fyfe

Doubting Didymus

The principles that bd-from-kg are using on in his argument are, indeed, taken for granted in several areas of study, from psychology to economics to risk analysis to decision theory.

For example, the most basic formula used in explaining and predicting decisions is:

benefit * percentage > cost * percentage

The formula gets more complex as the number of alternatives increase, and costs must include opportunity costs. Indeed, there have been some extremely complex models worked out to capture decision making in complex situations.

Basically, any increase in either the benefits produced by an action, or the certainty of those benefits -- and any decrease in the costs associated with an action or the percentage chance that those costs will be suffered will increase the value of the action.

Accordingly, by decreasing the benefit or the percentage chance it can be obtained, or increasing the cost or the percentage chance it will be suffered, one makes the option less attractive.

Benefits and costs are measured subjectively, according to the values (desires) of the agent.


You write: How about: "a humans desire to tear its own child to shreds is increased in proportion to the reward you offer her", or: "A humans desire to press the red button guaranteeing the destruction of all life in the continent of europe is increased in proportion to the punishment you threaten him with".

Actually, yes, it makes perfectly good sense.

Now, for some people the cost would be so great, that it would be difficult -- perhaps even impossible -- to provide a benefit to weigh against it. Yet, if you threaten people with a sufficient amount of torture (and promise to release them from this torture if they perform the requested action), a great many people can be taken to the point where they would tear the child or push the button.

Or, perhaps you are not imagining what a sufficiently large benefit would be.

Let's just modify the example a little bit. Your hand is placed on a button which controls a shredder that is getting increasingly closer to your child, but if you release the button then this will destroy all life in the continent of europe.

Now what? By putting a sufficiently high cost on the opposite side of the equation compared to the benefit of saving your child from being shredded, suddenly there is a decision to make, and it is no longer makes sense to say that your decisions are not based on cost/benefit analysis and that it is impossible to contemplate a decision that would result in the shredding of your child or the destruction of all life in europe.

Now, the costs and benefits must be things that are of value to the agent. Offering chocolate to a person who hates chocolate would not be a benefit. Yet, with respect to capital punishment, the view that people generally value their lives can be safely assumed.

It is still consistent with this theory that some people may never press the button, that the costs are so high for them that no amount of pain and suffering can be inflicted (with the benefit offered being the stopping of that pain) above the cost of pushing the button.

You cannot refute this system by claims about what the effect would be on your behavior -- because that effect depends only on your personal values, and your subjective values may see some things as extreme benefits or costs -- or insignificant benefits or costs -- compared to what other people value.

Or, what seems likely, your predictions about what you would do in extreme situations (e.g., faced with the benefit of ending a very painful torture, or offered an extreme benefit that has value for you).

Now, I think that bd-from-kg is making a mistake in applying these basic principles of decision making to capital punishment. He is oversimplifying the situation by isolating variables that cannot be isolated in the real world. Eliminating capital punishment will not have one, single, isolated effect -- but will have additional side effects, some of which may end up countering the direct effect that bd-from-kg writes about.

bd-from-kg's possible mistake may be like that of a person who holds, 'it is axiomatic that if we light a fire, we can get warm. Fire. Warm. What can be more obvious than that?' But if one is in a room with a sprinkler system that will spray the room with liquid nitrogen if it detects a fire, then it is NOT the case that fire -> warm. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. Many murders act on a pre-analytic attitide that 'the SOB got what he deserved'. Capital punishment may deter murders, but promoting the pre-analytic sentiment 'that SOB got what he deserved' may cause more murders than capital punishment deters.

Such a theory is at least consistent with the empirical evidence that shows that there are more murders in capital-punishment societies than non-capital-punishment societies, that murder rates tend to drop in areas where capital punishment is abolished, and murder rates tend to go up when a society that has no capital punishment starts using it.

If you want to refuse the basic principles that bd-from-kg are applying, you are going to need something much stronger than what seems to be the case about your own decision making. You are going to have to come up with something that explains why whole fields of academic study are built on a false premise.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

Thanks for clarifying the point I’ve been trying to make with DD. I’ve gotten tired of arguing what seems to me to be a very simple, self-evident point.

I don’t have time to answer the rest of your post (and the last one) substantively riight now, but I do have one comment. I think it’s a bit unfair to say that I’m “making a mistake” by ignoring the factors you talk about. Nor am I “oversimplifying the situation” facing a given potential murderer. Even if the factors you mention exist and are strong enough to outwiegh the deterrent effect in the long run, it’s still true that capital punishment is a deterrent: a regime of capital punishment would deter a person contemplating murder if his incentive was strong enough to overcome the disincentive of a (possible) long jail term but not strong enough to overcome the disincentive of (possible) execution. What you’re talking about basically is indirect effects that actually carrying out the threat of execution might have on the mindset of other, later potential murderers. This is certainly relevant to whether capital punishment is a good idea, but it’s not relevant to whether it’s a deterrent.

As I commented earlier, your argument is reasonable in the sense that it does not contradict well-established principles of human behavior. Whether it’s correct - i.e., whether it corresponds with the facts - is another matter.

Alonzo Fyfe

Unfair? I may be wrong, but it is a fair objection.

I also note that you and I may be using the term 'deterrence' to mean different thing. When I hear people say that capital punishment is a deterrent, I interpret this to mean that the total of all direct and indirect effects will be to reduce crime. You seem to be limiting the term to direct effects alone.

If this is correct, I would agree that capital punishment is likely to be a weak deterrence, but there is still reason to believe it can promote more murders all things considered. And it is the second factor, not the first, that ultimately determines whether capital punishment is a good idea or not.

The AntiChris

bd-from-kg
The only thing that is self-evident is that incentives and disincentives may have the power to alter behaviour and I don't think anyone has disputed this. What you have not argued, and nor would I expect you to, is that any difference in the degree of incentive/disincentive will alter behaviour.

Your original claim (on the consequences of abolition of the DP) was:
Your reasoning is that the increased disincentive of the DP over life imprisonment is sufficient to alter the behavior of potential murders. This reasoning appears to be based on this:
The "general rule" here is that behaviour, in certain circumstances, may be altered and not that behaviour is always altered. Unfortunately, the "facts" do not appear to support your claim that the DP does reduce the incidence of murder so the onus is on you to do more than appeal to "general principles" to justify your claim.

Chris

Doubting Didymus

Just a final note.

I come from a grounding in science, where demand for evidence are as common as muck. All the time I see scientists constructing plausable hypotheses based on general inferences, only to be shot out of the sky by the machine gun rattle cries of "evidence!", which they fail to provide. Anyone here who knows about evolutionary theory will have heard of "adaptationist just-so-stories": hypotheses built on the generally accepted and rigorous premises of natural selection, but are devoid of actual evidence. Such hypotheses are routinely shouted down with scorn. If they then went around saying that their case is already good enough, and that anyone who disagrees should be under a burden to disprove them, they'd be laughed out the door.

To me, a hypothesis is worthless if it has no facts that support it, and I suppose I should understand that this is a higher standard than most people demand. As such, I will cease my fruitless baying. I sincerely can not imagine believing something based on such flimsy support as "general rules" that usually hold true in most situations, more-or-less. Sure, its a basis. It's a start, but shouldn't you at least make the effort to find out if it IS actually true, as opposed to simply making a case that it probably ought to be true? It seems that's just me, however, and the rest of the world works differently.