Oof. You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity. It’s fine, it provides a mild disincentive, in some cases it works a bit, but it overwhelmingly doesn’t solve the problems discussed in this thread: mistakes people make, sometimes innocently, and sometimes because of lapses of judgment. You can’t punish your way into better judgment, people will continue to make mistakes. We’re not talking about crimes with intent here. We’re talking about screwups that killed people.
The approach that works is to fix systems so that mistakes are harder to make or their consequences are mitigated. This is sometimes called defense in depth: many overlapping protections mean that accidents are less likely. Extra defenses mean that when mistakes do happen their consequences are less severe. (None of this has anything to do with whether you punish people who act maliciously, and is actually independent of whether you also do that.)
The FAA is a good example: mandated redundancies, the NTSB does a root cause analysis on every accident to figure out how it made it through defenses. As a result flying is one of the safest modes of transport, even despite Boeing’s recent attempts to undo that legacy.
For the cases in question here, roads could be redesigned to reduce the likelihood and severity of vehicles impacting pedestrians. In another message in this thread I listed eight possible measures society could take to do this.
Honestly it’s starting to feel like it’s the “more punishment!” crowd that’s virtue signaling at this point. Of course it’s easier to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you punish any person you can point a finger at, it’s much harder actually getting to the root of anything.
>You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity.
It's not debated nor under debate, it's worked for that long. Not only has it worked that long but the effects are not even minor... otherwise it would have disappeared as it's pretty hard to maintain.
The punishment isn’t about corrective action, it’s about justice. If you kill off a whole family being a reckless idiot, you should not be able to just go on living your own life happily ever after. You should be rotting in prison without being able to live your own life. Both sides of the tragedy should be balanced out.
Yes, and neither this article nor I are advocating against justice being served. We are just making the point that this kind of justice alone doesn’t prevent future tragedies.
We can have justice, and we should, and then we should also feel a moral obligation to reduce harm from reckless or mistaken action in the future, no?
If we only have “justice” in the sense of punishment for harm, but do nothing to reduce the chances that we end up needing “justice” again later, then we’re just setting ourselves up for more future “justice” in the form of multiple destroyed lives: some through negligence, some through state action pursuing justice. Who does that serve?
I (and the original article) are advocating that we do more to reduce the likelihood that “being a reckless idiot” causes a whole family to be killed, because “justice” doesn’t prevent people from “being a reckless idiot” — and I for one would vastly prefer that my whole family not be killed, even if I knew that killer would be brought to justice.
The approach that works is to fix systems so that mistakes are harder to make or their consequences are mitigated. This is sometimes called defense in depth: many overlapping protections mean that accidents are less likely. Extra defenses mean that when mistakes do happen their consequences are less severe. (None of this has anything to do with whether you punish people who act maliciously, and is actually independent of whether you also do that.)
The FAA is a good example: mandated redundancies, the NTSB does a root cause analysis on every accident to figure out how it made it through defenses. As a result flying is one of the safest modes of transport, even despite Boeing’s recent attempts to undo that legacy.
For the cases in question here, roads could be redesigned to reduce the likelihood and severity of vehicles impacting pedestrians. In another message in this thread I listed eight possible measures society could take to do this.
Honestly it’s starting to feel like it’s the “more punishment!” crowd that’s virtue signaling at this point. Of course it’s easier to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you punish any person you can point a finger at, it’s much harder actually getting to the root of anything.