Thanks, could you respond to my reply to dlthomas, as well?
That’s the conclusion I keep coming to, but I have trouble justifying this to others. It’s just such an obvious built-in response that bad people deserve to be unhappy. I guess the inferential difference is too high.
Follow Up: What is your opinion of prisons? How unpleasant should they be?
Is the answer to the second question something like “the unpleasantness with the best [unpleasantness] to [efficacy in discouraging antisocial behavior] ratio, while favoring ratios with low unpleasantness and high discouragement”? (Feel free to tell me that the above sentence in unintelligible).
Yeah, I saw the comment. I wasn’t going to reply to it, but I might as well unpack my reasons why: the ethics of imprisonment are fairly complicated, and depend not only on deterrent effects and the suffering of prisoners but also on a number of secondary effects with their own positive or negative consequences. Resource use, employability effects, social effects on non-prisoners, products of prison labor, et cetera. I don’t feel qualified to evaluate all that without quite a lot of research that I currently have little reason to pursue, so I’m going to reserve judgment on the question for now.
Thanks, could you respond to my reply to dlthomas, as well?
Yeah, I saw the comment. I wasn’t going to reply to it, but I might as well unpack my reasons why: the ethics of imprisonment are fairly complicated, and depend not only on deterrent effects and the suffering of prisoners but also on a number of secondary effects with their own positive or negative consequences. Resource use, employability effects, social effects on non-prisoners, products of prison labor, et cetera. I don’t feel qualified to evaluate all that without quite a lot of research that I currently have little reason to pursue, so I’m going to reserve judgment on the question for now.
Sorry, and thank you.