Comments Elsewhere

Brandon Berg:

But by the very same logic, you’re not allowed to throw innocent people in jail to create the sort of society you want to live in.

But Brandon, you’re not entitled to do that.

Incarceration of the innocent is a moral crime and the victims of it are owed both release and proportional compensation from their victimizers.

That does not, contrary to your claims, entail that you can’t incarcerate anybody. “You can’t morally incarcerate the innocent” doesn’t entail “You can’t morally do anything that risks incarcerating the innocent.” But it does entail that you’re under some obligations of restraint.

First, you’re obliged to use violence only to the extent that it’s necessary to defend yourself and others from the threat posed by the individual person you’re using it against, since anything further involves not only taking a risk that you’ll harm the innocent, but taking a gratuitous risk that’s neither justified nor excused by the right of defense. You’re entitled, sometimes, to risk harming innocent people in order to defend against a concrete threat. You’re not entitled to risk harming anybody in order to preemptively ward off alleged future dangers posed by unspecified and unrelated third parties.

Second, you’re obliged not to use violence so as to make it impossible for you to compensate any innocent people that you may hurt, if you can possibly avoid it. If you’re going to risk hurting innocent people then you had better be prepared to do what you can to ameliorate or make up for the damage that you’ve caused, should it turn out that they were innocent after all.

Incarcerating people for crimes doesn’t categorically violate these obligations. Incarcerating alleged criminals just to serve as a “deterrant” to anonymous third parties does violate the first obligation, and you have no right to do that. Deliberately killing prisoners as a “deterrant” directly violates both of these obligations.

Either it’s okay to accept a certain false positive rate in the justice system because it ultimately makes us safer on average, or the rights of innocent people are sacrosanct, and we have to avoid punishing criminals altogether.

“A certain false positive rate?”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

—George Orwell (1946), “Politics and the English Language”