Neo Nazis and the Alt Right

Politics and religion
501

Here’s the problem. In a world of finite resources, you will end up putting a price on human life, even if you claim you’'re not.

For example, car accidents happen. Sometimes they kill people. We could prevent every single one of those fatal car accidents if we chose to devote sufficient resources to it.

Admittedly, the resource cost of doing so might be very high - for example, making the only available cars super-safe armored vehicles that cost a million dollars apiece and travel very, very slowly.

But we choose not to spend our resources on doing that, and so we implicitly put a price on human life. Whatever a human life is worth, we don’t think it’s worth paying a million dollars for car and getting to our destinations much, much slower.

If not being willing to pay the resource cost to save every savable human life is ethically indefensible, every human being on the planet that uses more resources than the bare minimum needed to sustain life is ethically indefensible.

(And even in a world of limitless physical resources, like Star Trek’s Federation, there is always one scarce resource - a person’s time. Until we achieve immorality, and repeal the laws of thermodynamics, every person has to deal with managing a finite resource.)

502

[quote=“HumanTon, post:501, topic:128049, full:true”]If not being willing to pay the resource cost to save every savable human life is ethically indefensible, every human being on the planet that uses more resources than the bare minimum needed to sustain life is ethically indefensible.
[/quote]

But that has nothing to do with not putting an economic value on a human life. What I’m saying is that the decision to whether doing something or not shouldn’t have to deal with economic value of lives, but with ethical concerns. Timex response that a person who commits capital crime has ceded certain rights is an approach that, although I disagree with in respect to the right to live, I understand more fundamentally than the economic argument, which is nonsense (because once you take away a person’s right to live the wasting of resources becomes irrelevant, acollorary to the main ethical argument).

We don’t refuse to stop (the huge majority of) car accidents because of the economic cost (the cost for a radical lowering of accidents would be lower than you think, just make all transportation public, with no private transportation and well trained drivers) but because there are certain freedoms we consider are worth the risk, irrespective to the economic costs.

Healthcare is one of the few areas were the cost to save a life could actually take away resources from others, and that’s why you have ethics committees, so the decision is not economic but based on better chances of success.

503

Absolutely correct, practicality always plays a role in these things. But economics should only be considered in matters of right and wrong in terms of constraints. Economic optimization does not lead to moral optimization, a freer and more open society, maximization of happiness, etc.

If imprisoning people convicted of capital crimes for life was overall economically infeasible and a great burden to society, then there would be a serious argument to be made that the only practical options for safeguarding society involved some form of capital punishment. I could swallow that, with some distaste.

Considering the wealth of modern America and the scant percentage of the population on death row, there’s no way to make a straight-faced argument about economic constraints in any way materially influencing the debate on life imprisonment vs death. We can easily afford either option. The only issue in contention in the context of the modern American debate on capital punishment is whether we consider state sanctioned vengeance to be morally defensible.

504

This is all really well put, and helped my organize my own thoughts on the issue. Thank you for that.

505

But saying that it’s not economic if blatently false.
It absolutely is economic. If resources were unlimited, then you would do everything possible to save every single person. But you don’t. Some people die because it’s not considered worthwhile to try and save them.

Certainly the chance of success plays into the decision, but so does the cost.

506

It mostly doesn’t. The scarcity of resources and the need to choose is economic. The actual decision is not and should not be so (going by most standing medical ethic rules, at least in Europe).

507

Saying ethics are the only thing that “should” matter doesn’t magically make resources unlimited, though.

There is no healthcare system in the world that does not make decisions based on finite resources as well as ethics.

508

Again, finite resources force the need to make decisions. But the decisions themselves are not based on putting economic values to lives, but on the best use of those resources from an ethical standpoint (valuing lives ethically, and within very rigid constraints on what factors can be considered)…

509

Some things to consider here is that while death row is not a large population, part of this is because many people who commit capital crimes are NOT put on death row, because the death penalty is not used in many places.

You’d need to look at things like the entire population of prisoners who have life terms without parole.

Currently, about 10% of our prison population is serving a life sentence. In 2012, around 50,000 people were serving life without possibility of parole. To put that into context, I live in a city with around 30k people. That’s a lot of people.

And they will never re-enter society. They are purely a drain on resources. They have all committed terrible crimes, and been found guilty by due process.

The average annual cost of imprisoning someone, nationwide, is around $32k. For these prisoners, due to being generally higher security situations, the cost is higher, but we can work with that number for argument’s sake.

So we’re talking a total cost in 2012 of $1.6 BILLION annually to keep these people in prison.

That’s a lot of fucking money, dude.

Which is exactly the same thing being done here.
It’s more ethical to spend those resources improving the lives of society at large, then keeping a person alive in a box for years upon end.

510

We have hospital manager accused of homicide here for doing this. That is, for rejecting a medical recommendation on budget grounds.

511

Your ethics board does exactly that, every day. You’re just phrasing it differently.

512

[quote=“Timex, post:509, topic:128049, full:true”]Some things to consider here is that while death row is not a large population, part of this is because many people who commit capital crimes are NOT put on death row, because the death penalty is not used in many places.

You’d need to look at things like the entire population of prisoners who have life terms without parole.

Currently, about 10% of our prison population is serving a life sentence. In 2012, around 50,000 people were serving life without possibility of parole. To put that into context, I live in a city with around 30k people. That’s a lot of people.

And they will never re-enter society. They are purely a drain on resources. They have all committed terrible crimes, and been found guilty by due process.

The average annual cost of imprisoning someone, nationwide, is around $32k. For these prisoners, due to being generally higher security situations, the cost is higher, but we can work with that number for argument’s sake.

So we’re talking a total cost in 2012 of $1.6 BILLION annually to keep these people in prison.

That’s a lot of fucking money, dude.[/quote]

So your argument is that all those 50k people should be sentenced to death and killed as fast as possible?

If no, why not, given your argument?

If yes, yeah, that sounds a lot like a totalitarian regime atrocity to me, sorry.

513

I don’t think she should be put to death by the state, that’s a line I prefer not be crossed, humans being fallible.

However, I also believe she and other like her aren’t actually people. They’re like tigers. A tiger’s going to kill you, and it’s not really the tiger’s fault, the tiger’s a tiger, still, we keep tigers away from people. That this particular tiger looks like a person and talks like a person doesn’t negate the fact that it’s actually not a person. It’d be great if we could go into her head, flip a switch or two and restore the “people” settings, but without that option, treat it like a tiger.

514

[quote=“Telefrog, post:500, topic:128049, full:true”]
Interesting discussion to come up now. Canada is currently grappling with this issue. Karla Homolka is apparently volunteering at an elementary school. Due to her participation in the abduction, rape, and murder of at least three girls in the early 90’s, people are understandably upset at this newest revelation.[/quote]

Statistically, reincidence for those types of crimes is under 20%. So I say in cases like that you maintain surveillance for a while until a panel of experts judges the risk to be low enough.

For people under psychological treatment the risk lowers to 9%. Of course this is a different society and all that, but it’s worth looking at the real numbers.

515

You’re skipping over the sordid and unpleasant part, which is how the amount of resources was determined in the first place, to concentrate on the part that allows the decision makers to feel ethical. Which is only human nature, after all. But it doesn’t mean someone doesn’t need to make that first decision.

516

Honestly, ya, I don’t really have a problem with it, if they all committed capital crimes like murder.
Certainly there could be some exceptions there, where perhaps their guilt was not established as conclusively. But in cases where it’s known beyond doubt that they committed the crime, such as with mutliple eye witnesses, video footage, etc? Ya man, I do not have a problem with executing them.

It’s not totalitarian at all. Such an action by the state has no impact on the rights of virtually every member of society.

These people committed crimes so heinous that society at large, through a free and democratic process, determined that they were unfit to participate in society again.

517

The Atlantic recently published a great article about children psychopaths.

Basically, you can train them to act like “normal” non-psychopathic people, but there’s no “cure” per se. They can get married, hold a job, raise kids themselves,and go on to lead productive lives, but at a very basic level, they will never have empathy and they will always be a bit of a danger to the society they live in. They may never commit a violent crime, but they may also just snap and murder someone because their inner voice told them to give in to their urges.

As a parent, I can’t imagine the horror of going through something like this:

[quote]
One bitter December day in 2011, Jen was driving the children along a winding road near their home. Samantha had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.

“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.

“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.

“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died.”

“I know.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“I want to kill all of you.”

Samantha later showed Jen her sketches, and Jen watched in horror as her daughter demonstrated how to strangle or suffocate her stuffed animals. “I was so terrified,” Jen says. “I felt like I had lost control.”

Four months later, Samantha tried to strangle her baby brother, who was just two months old.[/quote]

[quote]
“In the children’s mental-health world, it’s pretty much a terminal diagnosis, except your child’s not going to die,” Jen says. “It’s just that there’s no help.”[/quote]

518

We are talking 50k people you are taking their most basic right away from!

[quote=“Timex, post:516, topic:128049, full:true”]These people committed crimes so heinous that society at large, through a free and democratic process, determined that they were unfit to participate in society again.
[/quote]

So if society, through a free and democratic process, determines adultery should be punishable by death, you would be ok with that?

519

I do believe in reinsertion, but also that if a psychopathy is detected related to a serious crime, internment and treatment (until cured, if possible, and if not for life) is an acceptable alternative (that’s what we do here). But a mental illness needs to be diagnosed for that step, imho.

520

No, they are voluntarily CEDING those rights, by committing capital crimes.

You are trying to create a strawman where these are just randomly selected people, to be murdered by the state. That is not the case. These are people who, through their own voluntary actions, murdered other innocent people.

I would not agree with that decision, but it would be a reflection of the society’s beliefs. I don’t believe it will happen though.