You can’t just pick and choose sentences out of context.

Oh well, at least you got a pat on the head form Steve.

This can’t possibly be what he meant, otherwise he would have chosen infinity rather than 10 (thus making the statement, it is better to let all guilty men go free than to convict one innocent person). Since he didn’t say this, he is acknowledging that there is some tradeoff, and is proposing that 10 is the correct value. Why 10? We still don’t know.

Similarly, although less irrationally, it is one thing to put my life at increased risk due to more murderers running around. This is bad. But it is far, far worse to fear the state. *I* am strong, *I* am cautious, so I know that I could prevent a murderer from killing me. Heck, I could probably subdue him with some sweet martial arts moves I saw in a movie last week. I have very little risk! But no amount of roundhouse kicks is going to protect me if the state comes knocking at my door. They have a legitimized monopoly on force.

These all have profound effects on the relationship between the state and the people at least as profound as those of hc reform.

By the way, is it really necessary to label the arguments of those who disagree with you “sophisty”?

I suppose this is for me a moral thing. The state executes people on _my_ behalf, and I want no part in wrongful execution. I want this even if it comes at some cost in efficiency (I mean in minimising the total number killed).

I think Bennett Haselton’s point is a good one, that the stigma attached to having (say) your husband murdered vs. executed is very different.

When I think about medical care, there is an interesting squiggle which I wonder how many people share. In treating cancer patients I’d be happy to argue for efficiency, in the sense that we should adjust the level of potentially dangerous treatments to minimise the number of deaths, regardless of each one’s proximate cause. But in providing inoculations, I would be tempted to weight a death due to vaccine higher than one due to the illness. So there is some quirk about the number of people involved and how high their risks are, I think. I’d also go with pure efficiency when discussing what weapons to give soldiers, I think. (A helicopter with worse reliability and better armour-plating: just do the numbers.)

Yes, I though someone would resort to this kind of sophistry, that it’s only ‘providing health care to people who can’t otherwise afford it’. Are you really unaware of the change in the power relationship between citizen and government entailed in that?

>you raise the cost of being a citizen in the U.S., regardless of whether or not you murder someone else or not. This doesn’t lower the cost of murdering someone at all.

Surely it does, since it makes living in the United States without being a murderer less attractive (so the cost of being executed for committing a murder is lower).

Consider taking things to extremes, where you execute everyone who you think has a 1% chance of being a murderer, surely in this case you might as well commit a murder if you see any marginal benefit at all to murdering someone: the punishment has completely lost its deterrent effect.

Moreover, if it becomes widely known (for example, through the Innocence Project) that the ratio of innocent to guilty executed is high (and therefore, the number of crimes for which the actual perp escaped punishment is high), the general population of criminals, and potential criminals, are more likely to conclude they can act with impunity, and again, deterence is undermined.

Finally, as MattF points out, if it becomes widely known that innocents are being executed in substantial numbers, the legitimacy of law enforcement officals is weakened. This too has implications for deterence. Lower public confidence in the competence or commitment to justice of officials will lead to lower voluntary cooperation with the police, fewer tips, fewer witnesses, lower conviction rates. The loss of state legitimacy could also be expected to lead to a reduction in the number or quality of prosecutors and police willing to serve a state with little commitment to justice, leading to weaker cases and lower conviction rates. Deterence deteriorates.

To Patrick Sullivan: You’re equating the execution of innocent people to providing health care to people who can’t otherwise afford it? Hmmm. I guess that would equate Medicare and veterans’ health care with executing innocents. Sounds warped to me but I’m not a libertarian.

Yes, we worry about the capacity of government to do ill, even evil. That doesn’t negate its ability to do good as well…like, I assume you would concede, catching, prosecuting, and punishing criminals; fighting fires; defending the nation; preventing terrorism; building and maintaining a national transportation system. Maybe even more.