ohwilleke

One of the big moral issues I think we are going to face is that more and more bad things that happen are going to be considered foreseeable, and if you can foresee something and don't prevent it, the natural response is to hold the people who fail to stop it responsible.

The Ford Pinto case is the classic example of that kind of thinking. A jury held Ford liable for astronomical damages because an insider testified that Ford had accurately predicted the number of deaths that would have occurred due to its failure to take a fairly inexpensive (but hardly free) safety measure, and had concluded that losing in court and paying for the deaths was cheaper than taking the safety measure. The jury didn't like their math.

Of course, Ford had no way to predict, as they could in Minority Report, exactly which person was going to die, and they knew that the deaths would be a tiny percentage of all Ford Pinto drivers.

We hold landlords responsible for failing to prevent rapes because their failure to repair lights and locks in a bad neighborhood makes the result predictable.

No one has successfully sued American Airlines for failing to prevent the highjacking that caused the WTC disaster. But, had the same thing happened with the Israeli airline, in Israel, heads probably would have rolled because Israel has long expected such tactics.

Getting back to the topic, the system in Minority Report had a lot going for it. For one, it was not intrusive. Only potential murders were targeted. Not the private details of everyone's life. No real system could every hope to be so clean. For another, its accuracy, while not perfect, was high. And, it was high in a fairly nuanced kind of way. Even when it made a mistake, it was prone to arresting the right person for the wrong crime (i.e. being seriously likely to commit murder who in the end wouldn't have done it, rather than being someone who would actually have committed that murder). In contrast, the most serious mistakes in our current system involve someone who simply looks like the guilty party.

The murder and mistake that formed the basis of the plot was a deliberate attempt to screw up the system which could only be committed by an insider at the highest level, a risk in our current system just as much as the Minority Report system.

The two really big moral failings in Minority Report were: (1) the gross exploitation of the precogs, despite their incredible contributions to society and the horrid circumstances of their birth and youth that gave them their powers, and (2) the way the persons who were prevented from murdering were treated.

Attempted murder and murder are not equally serious crimes, regardless of how the murders are prevented. Yet, the punishment for attempted murder in Minority Report, was worse than a life sentence in prison, and just short of a death sentence. Many murders are crimes of passion, and not an indication of propensity to commit a crime in the future (especially in the Minority Report world where premeditating murder didn't make sense). Yet, the punishments were incredibly harsh and allowed no opportunity for those arrested to argue an appropriate sentence, even while admitting their guilt.

Demosthenes

As I recall, the would to be murderers were all caught at the act of about to commit their crimes when the precrime units burst upon the scenes. That would have been more than enough to put the to be murderers away.

Loren Pechtel

Actually, they tried to get there beforehand. The one that they showed us went right down to the wire but that's not what they *WANTED* to do--it's the equivalent of defusing the bomb when the timer says 0:00.

Also, consider the case they busted in on--yes, the guy had something sharp in his hand. He did not appear to have the intent to commit murder at that time, though--presumably when he got his glasses on he saw his wife's boyfriend but he was interrupted in the act of putting on his glasses so the motivation was not yet there.