Hopefully Anonymous, my point is that optimal is functional. If we find that our “optimal” policy is not functional, we need to expand the scope of our cost-benefit analysis.
If enough people are seriously disgusted by the possibly of compulsory trials (and I think they would be), the policy is unlikely to pass a cost-benefit test. When people balk that a particular policy will take their freedom, they are essentially saying “this policy would cause me harm, since I value my freedom.” We need to look outside the most obvious costs and benefit when we evaluate policies.
A related example: by superficial utilitarian standards, compulsory medical trials for only the lowest-income members of society might seem a better policy than randomized trials in which anyone can be chosen regardless of economic status. After all, high-income people are far more likely to be meaningfully contributing to society. But the “poor only” law plainly violates our sense of equity and fairness, which is equivalent to saying it imposes large costs on us.
So I don’t think, as savagehenry says, that a society built on minimizing harm would be much less free, provided we define “harm” sufficiently broadly. People value their freedom too highly, and loss of freedom is quite harmful given these values.
Chapter 11 of the 9/11 commission’s report, available here, shows the commission was very wary of hindsight bias. The failure to prevent the attacks is said to represent a “failure of imagination,” meaning the intelligence community used the wrong model in evaluating terrorist threats.