@tehdrumerer3
key difference being: the townspeople can CHOOSE to riot or abstain from rioting. the innocent man cannot choose whether or not to be framed. the non-aggression principle applies perfectly here.
@SimonBellaMondo
I’m in the camp that Utilitarianism gets the right answer here (not to frame the innocent person) as long as having a functioning society matters in the long run. But I believe that Utilitarianism is difficult to apply in general because of the difficulty in quantifying happiness and because of the uncertainty of future events.
@bbblackwell
Utilitarianism lacks proper humility because it requires omniscience to accurately account for innumerable interconnected consequences. As Gandalf said, "Even the very wise cannot see all ends".
@tangerinesarebetterthanora-v8k
People are rarely utilitarians if it doesn't benefit them.
@ekamitayoga
The counter argument to the Sheriff example is so easy that I am surprised this Sheriff argument gains any ground. It is basically the equivalent of the child wants a cookie or will throw a tantrum. We all know, for many reason of habituation, conditioning, setting standards, future positive outcomes, that even though the tantrum may be big, stuff may break, the child may be unhappy for X amount of time, and this may make the people living near him unhappy for X amount of time, it is better in the long run to not give into the child's tantrum. It is for the sake of the child, household, etc in the long-run to not support that habit. If a community or society throws a tantrum in the form of a riot, it would still be better to condition truth, justice, etc. for future beings and situations to offer the greatest positive outcome, even if it may be hard in this moment.
@indef2def
Yes, I bite the bullet on Sheriff, as well as Transplant. These arguments are designed to mislead our moral intuitions by (1) smuggling in real world knowledge about likely additional consequences, even though the thought experiments explicitly rule those consequences out, and (2) creating heavily biased emotional focus on some of the sentient beings involved relative to others. Thinking about Sheriff generally makes us imagine how horrific it would be to be falsely accused, convicted and executed. It steals focus from the people who would die in the riot, condensing them into a number as an afterthought. A version of Sheriff that would be fair to our intuitions would be one that had us read a name and description of 101 people in order, including the way they might die in the riots, thus evoking similar empathy for all of them, and then asked, "should one of these people you've read about be framed and executed while the other 100 live their lives, or should 100 of them die in the painful way you've read?"
@robward8247
my god this is an amazing high production version of the arguments i force my friends to suffer through when i overanalyze a comment they make in a serious note, if you havent been approached by the teaching company (or whatever theyre called now) - you should be
@RyanApplegatePhD
Is there a clear statement about over what time frame we are adding up pleasure/pain in utilitarianism? It seems like if you added up over 30 years or 100s of years, we can argue that police framing innocent people, in the long run sum, will lead to more pain, because it would undermine the stability of the state itself, which pretty much everyone agrees leads to better outcomes for people.
@Litwinel
This Sheriff Counterexample sounds very similar to Trolley Problem.
@douglashurd4356
Not all pleasures or pains are equal. Premeditated execution by the state of an innocent, good member of society is an infinite 'pain'. It preempts all future joys experienced by that person and all joys that person will evoke in others, etc., ad infinitum. It seems that Smart's conclusion justifies slavery. If the sheriff were really that good, they could find the worst inciter(s) of the future riots and condemn (or simply dox) that person rather than some innocent.
@yakiudon7921
Fascinating. Is this the original "Trolley Problem?". I'd imagine subsequent thinkers made tweaks to Aggregation, possibly including weighting factors, and moving baselines or changing datums, in order to rescue the sub theory.
@jamesfforthemasses
on one hand, caught or uncaught, the sheriff sets a dangerous precedent that could spiral into something worse, and on the other, the aforementioned homosexuality is a grand example of how cruel laws were and are indeed passed in order to please or reassure the general public. Our conventional truth/honour evaluation of the framing is a very logical insurance policy against lawless societies where no crime is truly accountable.
@V01D_ANGEL
For the framing of an innocent man, you have to consider long term consequences too. Say you execute the innocent man. The riots don’t occur, but what happens next time the people unleash their wrath on an innocent person? Do you roll over every single time? You created a precedent that justice is irrelevant, so every time the people throw a fit you just give in. In the long run I think it would be worse from a utilitarian perspective as well
@jamesrandall7902
I think it is worth pointing out that the objection doesn't necessarily put pressure on Aggregation alone, but also Hedonism, as you could keep Aggregation if you ditch the simple 'pleasure/pain' hedonism of Bentham's utilitarianism, and patch in a more Moore-like sense of hedonism, or something else that allows the set of possible goods to contain more than just pleasure, and the set of possible bads to contain more than just pain.
@scottanderson3577
Innocent guy in the frame is arguably more innocent than the many rioters who were harmed in the riot they attended. ...or whatever.
@peter-u7k8z
Aggregation works properly in this example, if it is done right. What the argument omits, is the original perpetrator, who might repeat the crime, if left to get away with the first one. This would add a new victim and another possible riot to the attempt of avoiding the first one. Having riot on both sides of the argument and at least one additional victim at the side of killing innocent, the example actually suggests preserving of the innocent life in face of riot, regardless of convincing abilities in the person of the sheriff.
@zak3744
It doesn't seem at all controversial to me. This is in fact how our criminal justice systems work. They aim and intend to punish wrongdoers, but we know that by the very fact of having a system in place, innocent people will inevitably get punished. I don't think that should really be in dispute. When we decide, as a society, to have a criminal justice system, we are saying that the mistakes it will inevitably make are a worthwhile price to pay to avoid the expected harms of a lawless society. Now, we may have strong impulses to guard against wrongful punishment, and assign a very heavy weight to such an outcome (for instance "better a hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person be punished"). But this is a question of the weighting of outcomes, not one of principle. By supporting a criminal justice system at all, we acknowledge that there is some level of punishing the blameless that is worthwhile, even if that level is statistically very small. The only way to say you could never tolerate the sacrifice of the blameless for the greater good is to say that you do not support a criminal justice system at all, as a point of principle.
@JM-us3fr
It’s difficult to say where the line should be drawn, but I do think that a Sherrif should generally not frame innocent people even with considerable positive utility. This was stated in the video, but the long-term utility of the people’s faith in the justice system is worth a rather large sacrifice, but again it’s not clear how large of a sacrifice would tip the scale the other way.
@JamesLee-js1cd
If the man being framed was a utilitarian, would he not agree to being imprisoned in order to appease the riot? If the entire society was utilitarianist, would there be a riot in the first place?
@petardraganov3716