And this purely causal deterrence cannot fully explain the pattern in human use of punishment, for reasons given by posters like orthonormal here and here: this would not explain why never-used punishments can deter, and why past punishments, with a promise that future criminals of this type won’t be punished, ceases to deter.
I don’t understand this statement, because from my point of view it does fully explain punishment. It may be valuable to see if we’re having a semantic disagreement rather than a conceptual one.
When someone says “you can’t change the past” they’re trivially correct. It works for both executing prisoners and paying your bill / tipping your waiter at a restaurant. In both cases, you take the action you take because of your influence on the future. The right response is “yes, it’s expensive, but we’re not doing it to change the past.”
The punishment (combined with the threat thereof) causes the perception that crime is costlier; that perception causes reduced crime; crimes are punished because not punishing them would cause the perception to weaken. Everything is justifiable facing forward.
Do you disagree with that view? Where?
I meant “causal” in a different sense, one I spelled out with the bulleted list. Here, “causal” doesn’t mean “obeying causality”, it means “grounded in reasoning only from what an action causes [in the future]”.
I think we disagree on the definition of “causal.” I am willing to call indirect effects causal (X causes Y which causes Z → X causes Z), where you seem to want to reverse things (Z acauses X). I don’t see the benefit in doing so.
A judge who doesn’t realize that letting a prisoner escape punishment will weaken deterrence has no place as a judge- it’s not causal societies that get pumped, but stupid societies.
For any given proctor countermeasure, there are more powerful cheating measures that can overcome them; and any explanation for why students don’t escalate to that level will ultimately rely, in part, on students acting as if they were reasoning from the acausal consequences (and the fact of their correlation).
This is strengthening my belief that you’re using acausal the way I do above (Z acauses X). I still think that’s a silly way to put things, though.
For example, why talk about selection effects against counterfactual worlds, when we can talk about selection effects against factual worlds? People try things in real life that don’t work, and only the things that do work stick around. Tests get ruined when students are able to cheat on them, and the students cheat even though it ruins the test!
It seems like ‘acausal consequences’ are just constraints from indirect consequences, but with the dangerous bug that it obscures that the constraints are indirect. Stating “fishermen don’t overfish common stocks, because if they did the common stocks would disappear” ignores that fishermen often do overfish common stocks, and those common stocks often do disappear.
The ultimate justification for why students don’t cheat more is “it’s not worth it to them to cheat more.” That’s more fundamental than the test not existing if they cheat more.
I don’t understand this statement, because from my point of view it does fully explain punishment. It may be valuable to see if we’re having a semantic disagreement rather than a conceptual one.
When someone says “you can’t change the past” they’re trivially correct. It works for both executing prisoners and paying your bill / tipping your waiter at a restaurant. In both cases, you take the action you take because of your influence on the future. The right response is “yes, it’s expensive, but we’re not doing it to change the past.”
The punishment (combined with the threat thereof) causes the perception that crime is costlier; that perception causes reduced crime; crimes are punished because not punishing them would cause the perception to weaken. Everything is justifiable facing forward.
Do you disagree with that view? Where?
I think we disagree on the definition of “causal.” I am willing to call indirect effects causal (X causes Y which causes Z → X causes Z), where you seem to want to reverse things (Z acauses X). I don’t see the benefit in doing so.
A judge who doesn’t realize that letting a prisoner escape punishment will weaken deterrence has no place as a judge- it’s not causal societies that get pumped, but stupid societies.
This is strengthening my belief that you’re using acausal the way I do above (Z acauses X). I still think that’s a silly way to put things, though.
For example, why talk about selection effects against counterfactual worlds, when we can talk about selection effects against factual worlds? People try things in real life that don’t work, and only the things that do work stick around. Tests get ruined when students are able to cheat on them, and the students cheat even though it ruins the test!
It seems like ‘acausal consequences’ are just constraints from indirect consequences, but with the dangerous bug that it obscures that the constraints are indirect. Stating “fishermen don’t overfish common stocks, because if they did the common stocks would disappear” ignores that fishermen often do overfish common stocks, and those common stocks often do disappear.
The ultimate justification for why students don’t cheat more is “it’s not worth it to them to cheat more.” That’s more fundamental than the test not existing if they cheat more.