We don’t need to discount child molesters’ utilities to punish them. Punishing a child molester deters others from molesting children and acausally deters those who have already chosen whether or not to molest children. Since this good outweighs the negative utility of the punishment, punishing them is the right thing to do.
The child kinda likes chocolate ice cream; vanilla is his favorite flavor, but chocolate’s OK. The adult [child molester] absolutely, totally loves chocolate ice cream; it’s his favorite food in the world. I, personally, give the kid the ice cream, and I think so does well over 90% of the general population.
I give the ice cream to the child because otherwise my actions will be seen by society as an endorsement of child molestation, which will make more people molest children and which will lower my status. If no one else ever knows about my actions, I would give it to the adult because not being given ice cream by strangers is not an effective deterrent. However, in real life, I would probably never be certain enough of this, so I would always actually give it to the child.
I feel like you will object to this on the grounds that I am ignoring my intuition that the child molester deserves to be punished, which provides more reason to punish than just the considerations I have discussed and massively tips the scales toward punishment. However, not everyone shares this intuition (see here, here). They’ve done studies where they measure people’s moral intuitions and detect differences. When I hear people justifying punishment for its own sake rather than as a deterrent or rehabilitative mechanism, I feel like I am living in the 1800s and hearing arguments for slavery. (Of course, this too is an intuition.) In the US south, “well over 90% of the general population” had an ‘intuition’ that slaves are subhuman and that their utility should be discounted. I don’t know how to tell which intuitions are really components of our utility function and which will be destroyed by moral progress but I know that I do not have this particular intuition and I have no reason to support any decision procedure that takes punishment as fundamental rather than derived from deterrence.
This is absolutely on point and I thank you for it. I’d gotten mixed up as to the role of intuition in moral arguments, in that generally one should aim to have a coherent system that makes big-picture intuitive sense; one cannot have a system that has been jury-rigged to empower specific intuitions. I’m relying a bit much on the latter; I have a bigger system that makes overall sense and I think leads to similar results, and my point may simply be articulating that system.
We don’t need to discount child molesters’ utilities to punish them. Punishing a child molester deters others from molesting children and acausally deters those who have already chosen whether or not to molest children. Since this good outweighs the negative utility of the punishment, punishing them is the right thing to do.
I give the ice cream to the child because otherwise my actions will be seen by society as an endorsement of child molestation, which will make more people molest children and which will lower my status. If no one else ever knows about my actions, I would give it to the adult because not being given ice cream by strangers is not an effective deterrent. However, in real life, I would probably never be certain enough of this, so I would always actually give it to the child.
I feel like you will object to this on the grounds that I am ignoring my intuition that the child molester deserves to be punished, which provides more reason to punish than just the considerations I have discussed and massively tips the scales toward punishment. However, not everyone shares this intuition (see here, here). They’ve done studies where they measure people’s moral intuitions and detect differences. When I hear people justifying punishment for its own sake rather than as a deterrent or rehabilitative mechanism, I feel like I am living in the 1800s and hearing arguments for slavery. (Of course, this too is an intuition.) In the US south, “well over 90% of the general population” had an ‘intuition’ that slaves are subhuman and that their utility should be discounted. I don’t know how to tell which intuitions are really components of our utility function and which will be destroyed by moral progress but I know that I do not have this particular intuition and I have no reason to support any decision procedure that takes punishment as fundamental rather than derived from deterrence.
This is absolutely on point and I thank you for it. I’d gotten mixed up as to the role of intuition in moral arguments, in that generally one should aim to have a coherent system that makes big-picture intuitive sense; one cannot have a system that has been jury-rigged to empower specific intuitions. I’m relying a bit much on the latter; I have a bigger system that makes overall sense and I think leads to similar results, and my point may simply be articulating that system.