bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

What do you mean by “actual” cost? Cost is a value term; it’s entirely subjective. Are you talking about cost as perceived by society as opposed by cost as perceived by the person involved?

At any rate, what I had in mind from the start was the cost as perceived by the potential criminal, as should be clear from my use of terms such as “motivated” and “states of affairs that they find more desirable”.

According to your preferred desire-belief-action model of human behavior, I didn’t leave anything out: the action that the agent believes will satisfy the most (or strongest) desires is the one he will choose. But I’m open to reasonable arguments that don’t follow this paradigm.

I’ve had more time to think about this argument, and it now seems even less plausible to me than it did before. Here’s why.

You speak of an “aversion” to killing people. But what sort of aversion might this be, that might prevent someone from committing murder when he has something substantial to gain? After all, a person might have a quite strong aversion to doing something yet do it anyway. For example, I have an aversion to hard physical labor, yet I do it often enough to get something I want. Most people have an aversion to changing dirty diapers, but lots of them do it anyway, over and over again. The only types of aversion that seem to have any substantial effect when the stakes are real are (1) fear – an aversion to serious negative consequences to oneself, and (2) guilt – an aversion to feeling that one has done something wrong.

Now most people have an aversion to murder of both of these kinds. Capital punishment increases the first type of aversion. But what effect does it have on the second?

It seems to me that capital punishment can only decrease a person’s aversion to guilt over murdering someone if he believes that capital punishment is wrong. If one feels that it’s right, it’s hard to see why knowing that the state “does the right thing” to murderers would make him feel less guilty about committing murder.

In fact, if the mere abstract knowledge that people were being justly killed decreased one’s aversion to killing people unjustly, then the actual experience of killing people justly should have a far stronger effect of the same kind. Yet millions of Americans did just that in World War 2, for example, and we did not see an explosion in the number of murders committed by former soldiers after the war, as one would expect if their experience had produced a noticeably lower aversion to murdering people. So it seems that your theory is contradicted by the facts.

Now let’s consider the case where the potential murderer believes that capital punishment is wrong. Then he would regard all executions as unjust killings. But the only possible reason for so regarding them, as far as I can see, would be a strong belief that all killing of human beings (except, perhaps, in self-defence) is wrong. But a person who believes that is going to have a strong moral aversion to killing people! He is certainly not going to be able to rationalize a murder that he himself commits if he believes that all non-defensive killing is wrong.

So either way, whether a person regards capital punishment as right or wrong, I see no way that the knowledge that people are being executed could decrease his moral aversion to murdering people. This theory just doesn’t survive careful analysis.

bd-from-kg

everlastingtongue:
I'm working on a longer answer to this. But the answer to the precise question is that there isn't going to be any actual data, because it's a crime in the countries involved to collect such data, much less publish it.

In the meantime, it may be of interest that I don't regard this as a reason to restrict immigration of Moslems. As it happens, the bulk of the immigrants into western Europe at present are Moslem, and the crime rate for practically all immigrants is higher than that of the native population, especially when they're coming from a substantially different culture. (You might be interested in reading what was said about the Irish when they started arriving in America in large numbers. And much of it was true.) But historically this has been a transient phenomenon; it disappears in two or three generations at most.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

I forgot to ask about one point. You say:

What psychological tests would those be? Are there studies showing that people actually faced with these alternatives are about as likely to choose one as the other?

trillian

I'm completely against the death penalty- for the reasons other posters have already stated... but there is another point no one has mentioned yet.

Living breathing criminals can be a valuable source of information.

1. They offer us an opportunity to explore their psychology.
The more sick and perverse the crime, the more we should want to keep them alive! This can aid in recognizing how their "nature" came to be what we can do to recognize or prevent a future criminal. Perhaps future technology will be able to scan their brains searching for a biological reason. Maybe as they get older, they will share secrets of their childhood. We are still in the infancy of understanding the human brain. There are many possibilities here.

2. As they sit years in prison, perhaps there was a crime they didn't admit to which is still unsolved somewhere. They could still have valuable information for police- especially the serial killers who may not have kept careful track of their spree.

We can't learn anything from them when they are dead.

trillian

Harpy

some info that might meet DDs needs

murder rates

A United Nations survey of research findings, conducted in 1988 and updated in 1996, found no evidence of the death penalty being a more effective deterrent than other penalties -- Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, and Canada's murder rate dropped 43% in 24 years, from 3.09 in 1975 to 1.76 in 1999

Also details of the differences in murder rates between states with the death penalty and those without. It seems that those without have lower murder rates.

edited to say that Korihor has posted a nice relevant link here http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=54593

Alonzo Fyfe

You are correct, my wording could have been better.

It is a warning not to impose what you THINK the difference in value may be on the value that people actually place on things. Research suggests that no form of punishment above 15 years in prison actually has an increased deterrent effect -- for any crime. Where punishments differ from one state to another, or from one country to another, or in the same region over time, it is possible to measure a statistical relevance of an increase in punishment to a decrease in crime up to the point where the punishment reaches 15 years. At that point, there is no additional deterrent effect by any increase in punishment.



What you leave out is the possibility that a change in a social institution might have effects other than the direct costs of an action.

Eliminating capital punishment might have two effects. (1) To reduce the 'cost' of punishment -- and thus decrease its deterrence value., and (2) increase the aversion to killing -- thus decreasing the number of people for whom deterrence is relevant because it decreases the number of people who would consider killing to start with.

In my own case, for example, capital punishment or not has no relevance whatsoever to my decisions not to kill people. Even if the punishment were a $100 fine, I would not murder -- because I have an aversion to murdering itself, not just an aversion to the effects of punishment.

I suspect this is true of a great many people.

If a reduction in capital punishment reduces the punishment value of murder, but increases the percentage of people who will not murder no matter what (because they are raised in a society that says that killing is so wrong it is virtually never justified), then we can have both an elimination of capital punishment and a decrease in murder rates.


What type of aversions are there?

An aversion to murdering is simply a desire that one not be a murderer -- period. It does not matter whether there is a penalty or not. It does not matter if anybody finds out or not. One simply has a very strong preference that he or she not murder.


Desires and aversions are not an 'on/off' switch. They come in degrees, and can be outweighed by more or stronger desires in the opposite direction.

However, the stronger the aversion, the harder it is for that aversion to be outweighed, and the the more one will procrastinate, seek alternatives, or simply refuse to perform the action in question. If we can increase the aversion to murdering, then we can reduce the number of murders.


Our moral sentiments, like our use of language, is largely learned at a very young age when we are not capable of engaging in sophisticated analysis. What is of concern here is the effect on the six-, seven- and eight-year old who hears, in a society where capital punishment is permitted acquiring the attitude that killing is sometimes okay, compared to a child in a non-capital-punishment society learning that killing is never okay.

One common sentiment among murderers is the sentiment, "That SOB got what she had comming to her; she deserved to die." Where could a person pick up a sentiment like that in a non-capital-punishment society?

Again, we are not talking about people who give detailed analysis to the meaning of capital punishment but, instead, people who act on pre-analytic sentiments acquired in childhood. The pre-analytic sentiment, "That SOB got what she deserved," is significantly easier for a child to acquire in a capital-punishment society. Thus, the pre-analytic sentiments that make murder possible are easier to find in a capital-punishment society.

[Note: I write as if these points are written in stone. They are not. This is my theory and I have not heard it defended in detail anywhere. So, any air of certainty that may be found in the above comments is merely pretense on my part.]

Doubting Didymus

Indeed. I had a feeling this sort of data was out there.

However, I am still interested in seeing bd's evidence, as it is not terribly uncommon for two conflicting sets of data to coexist, and we start having to look at reliability of sources, differences in research, circumstance, etc.

On the other hand, should bd fail miserably to provide any evidence yet again, then I must take the usual skeptical approach and dismiss it as a complete load of "dingos kidneys", probably made up on the spot.

Too bad, bd. It seems your "universal principle of human behavior" ain't so universal after all.

Mike Rosoft

Do you understand my line of reasoning?

Not really. You seem to be saying that there’s a significant difference between some punishments, less between others. But how does this relate to the question of the death penalty? The whole point of the death penalty is that it’s thought to be a more serious punishment than even life without parole.

I was clarifying my point about the arbitrariness of death penalty. You have agreed that death penalty is vastly different from imprisonment, even a lifetime one. I am arguing that for this reason, and since there is no way to fairly decide between death penalty and life imprisonment, the lesser of these sentences ought to be imposed.

But this is just a supplementary argument. The main reason why I oppose death penalty is that it doesn't work, and that it can be used on innocent people.

Well, maybe not the whole point. Another point is that a dead person will certainly not commit any more crimes, even agains prison inmates.

Crimes committed by prisoners are a problem. But death penalty will not solve it, unless you execute all people who would otherwise be sentenced to prison terms.

Additionally, how many people were killed by criminals sentenced to life imprisonment or similar sentences after their release or escape, or during their prison terms? And is crime against other inmates a valid argument for death penalty: wouldn't they be executed anyway if you had your way?

By the way, did you read the Amnesty International's report I have offered to you?


Mike Rosoft

bd-from-kg

Doubting Didymus:

Huh? It’s the most common idea in the world. Everything we know about the world (beyond direct observation) is based on the assumption that some observed regularity or regularities hold in cases where they have not been directly confirmed.

In fact, it would seem that you don’t have the slightest conception of what it means to say that something is evidence. To illustrate, let’s consider a case where Laura Smith is shot to death. The killer is shot in turn by a policeman who happens to be nearby. As he’s dying he says that he had been hired by Laura’s husband Norm to kill her because she was cheating on him and planned to divorce him. the police confirm that Laura was having an affair and had talked to a lawyer about a divorce. They also learn that Norm had withdrawn $10,000 from his bank account a week earlier and that this same amount had been deposited in the killer’s account.

Chances are that Norm will be convicted. Why? Let’s see:

(1) As a general rule a confession of a dying man is truthful.

(2) The fact that a spouse if cheating and planning a divorce is a plausible motive for murder.

(3) Norm can give no reasonable account of why he withdrew the money from the bank, and people do not ordinarily withdraw large sums of cash from the bank for no reason.

Note that every one of these facts is considered “evidence” because it’s a specific instance of a general rule about human behavior. There’s no further evidence that this specific case is not an exception; it’s presumed that it’s not an exception because there’s no evidence that it is. In this case the presumption that Norm’s behavior is in accordance with these general rules rather than being an exception to them is strong enough to constitute “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” of first-degree murder.

That’s how the world works. We draw conclusions based on observed regularities in human behavior, just as we draw conclusions based on regularities in nature. All “evidence” is only considered evidence on the basis of some such regularities. If we weren’t willing to make generalizations about how human beings operate, and to draw conclusions based on these generalizations, life would be impossible.

It’s also worth noting that we often draw conclusions based entirely on such regularities, when we have no other evidence whatsoever. Thus, for example, if we know that Jones works for IBM and that today is a work day for him, we are justified in concluding that he’s at work without checking out the matter further. (We could be wrong, but the odds are heavily against it.) Or, if I go to sleep on Monday night and wake up with the sun shining, I’m justified in assuming that it’s Tuesday morning.

Some general rules are more reliable than others. The old Jack Benny routine (“Your money or your life” - “I’m thinking, I’m thinking”) is funny because it’s practically unheard of for anyone to hesitate as between giving up the small amount of money he happens to have on him and giving up his life. That’s an extremely reliable general rule. On the other hand, the general rule that “people do not generally go out of their way to visit a place that’s of no particular interest and which they don’t normally go to” is pretty reliable, but exceptions occur often enough that they don’t astound us. Obviously we’re justified in having more confidence in conclusions based on very reliable rules than in conclusions based on less reliable ones.

So what’s the general rule that I’m relying on? It’s simply this:

Principle M (the Motivation principle): The prospect of a reward (i.e., a thing that the person in question desires) will motivate someone to do something if he believes that he will get the reward as a result. And the bigger the reward (i.e., the more the person desires the thing in question) the more he’ll be motivated to obtain it. Conversely, a punishment (i.e., a thing that the person desires to avoid) will motivate someone to avoid doing something if he believes that he will receive the punishment as a result. And the greater the punishment (i.e., the more the person desires to avoid the thing in question) the more he’ll be motivated to avoid it.

This says nothing directly about whether the person will do the thing in question; that depends on the number and strength of other desires that might be affected by the act and by alternatives. But any reward or punishment for any of the alternatives will “weigh in the balance” in proportion to the strength of the desire or aversion involved.

You suggest that I’m being unreasonable in expecting you to “just accept it and move on.” But in fact, not only do I expect you to accept it, I know perfectly well that you (like everyone else) do accept it, and apply it all the time, every day, except when you’ve decided to be obstinate for some obscure reason. And you know very well that this rule is extremely reliable.

Now what you want me to cite as evidence, I presume, is statistical studies done by sociologists using multiple regression analysis to (supposedly) show that the death penalty is a deterrent. Of course such studies exist; for example the classic paper by Erlich: The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death, American Economic Review, vol. 65, no. 3, June, and a newer paper by Dezhbakhsh, Rubin, and Shepherd: Does capital punishment have a deterrent effect?. [Note: The first paper is widely available on the internet, but you have to pay to see it.] But frankly I don’t set much store by such studies. As I pointed out in a post to Alonzo Fyfe, the so-called social sciences are in such a primitive state that a researcher can get pretty much whatever conclusions he’s looking for. Thus, in an amusing (to me) passage in the second paper cited above we read:

This summary of mixed results goes on for several more paragraphs. Note that all of them are based on essentially the same data.

It’s pretty obvious that the conclusions are colored by the ideologies of the people doing the research. In fact, anyone who is familiar with the methods used in this field can figure out how to massage the data to get his own preferred conclusion.

So here’s the problem. Studies of this kind constitute “evidence” only to the degree that the following principle holds:

Principle S (the “Sociology is a Science” principle) The results of multiple regression analyses by sociologists are valid – i.e., they accurately represent the real world.

Unfortunately this is a very unreliable principle. No doubt such results happen to be correct in come cases, but in many others they aren’t. Sociology, sad to say, is not a science at this point, and it probably won’t be for a long time.

So I put my money on Principle M. As far as I’m concerned, conclusions based on this principle are incomparably more solid than conclusions based on Principle S, for the simple reason that Principle M almost always holds (in fact, I know of no confirmed exception), whereas Principle S is violated so often that it’s rather laughable to refer to it as a “Principle” at all.

In fact, I have so much confidence in Principle M that if I should become convinced that the death penalty is not a deterrent after all, I would conclude that most people do not regard execution as something to be avoided more than a long prison sentence. But if this is true, it pretty well destroys one of the main pillars of the case against capital punishment: the premise that execution is uniquely fearsome. Either the death penalty is a deterrent, or it’s not an especially fearsome punishment. You can’t have it both ways.

P.S.: Comments like “that is absolute crap” and “prove your damn claim” are out of place in this kind of discussion. For that matter, your whole tone has been needlessly hostile and abusive. Aren’t you supposed to be a moderator?

bd-from-kg

trillian1 :

It seems to me that we have a pretty adequate supply of living breathing criminals for this purpose.

I’m at a loss trying to imagine what use such information could be put to in a free society. But if it can, as I said, we have plenty of such people to study.

They have plenty of time for this before they’re executed. And if they had any chance of being paroled, it’s far less likely that they’d be inclined to confess to additional crimes.

If anything, this is an argument for expedited executions. It seems to me that if someone is going to confess to a new crime it’s most likely to be shortly before being executed. It would be desirable to make this sooner rather than later.