Punishing future crimes

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future?

Easy. When they can predict you well enough and they think you can predict them well enough that if you would-counterfactually punish them for committing a crime in the future, it influences the probability that they will commit the crime by enough to outweigh the cost of administering the punishment times the probability that you will have to do so. Or when you want to punish them for an unrelated reason and need a pretext.

Not every philosophical question needs to be complicated.

It is interesting that utilitarian ethics would allow you to kill Hitler, but not steal his wallet.

Punishment is pointless if you cannot expect anyone (who could potentially commit a certain undesirable act) to ever realise any connection between the undesirable act and its punishment. This seems to me to be the case in this scenario as described, so pre-punishing Hitler would be a waste of resources.

If we, however, imagine that we're living in the future, and the Time Travel Licensing Agency has declared it legal to go around vexating would-be serious criminals, then stealing Hitler's wallet and publishing the fact would help increase the impact of the TTLA's deterrent. But this is really a scenario where time travelling doesn't add anything interesting to the idea.

(Small aside: I'd replace stealing Hitler's wallet with, say, slashing his bike tires, to more effectively take the issue of guilt-free personal profit out of the equation without invoking the "you don't need the money" clause.)

So, to restate, you can inflict negative utility on someone who will later inflict negative utility on others in the future, but the former will not prevent the later. Do you do it?

Uh, no. I usually try not to make a practice of being cruel when nothing positive comes from it.

You only punish people for crimes so future crimes don't happen. If no one can see the correlation between the crime and your punishment, it does no good unless you are actually preventing them from committing a future crime.

My idea is that you should punish them if they are the kind of person that before they do a crime, consider whether they could have avoided any past punishments by being the kind of person that doesn't do the crime.

EDIT: Changed my answer.

Do you do it?

No.

You would be harming another human being without expecting any benefit from doing so. Punishment is only justified when it prevents more harm than it causes, and this is specified not to be the case.

Our sense that people 'deserve' to be punished is often adaptive, in that it prevents further wrongdoing, but in this case it is purely negative.

And again I link to Yvain's excellent "Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease" for discussion of consequentialist and "words can be wrong"-aware analysis of blame-assignment and punishment.

My Grandpa used to have a watch from when his batallion (of the Red Army) looted one Goring's mansions. He much enjoyed it, especially being jewish, (and the family enjoyed the story), and I don't much care how the f*g psychopath felt about it. I think I'd take the wallet.

Suppose that I'm aware that future villains are punished in their pasts by wallet theft. I now wish to decide whether to commit a big crime; and I consider whether my wallet has often been stolen.

If it has, then I've already suffered the punishment, and have nothing to lose anymore - so I commit the crime.

If it hasn't, then I conclude committing the crime would lead to a time-traveling paradox, and don't commit it.

So the less you pre-punish people, the less you encourage them to be villains.

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future?

If this is a question about justice, then the answer is "when you have jurisdiction". Otherwise, you risk double punishment.

On the other hand, if this is a question about cooperative game theory, then go ahead and punish if you know for sure they will transgress. But notice that punishment only serves its proper deterrent purpose when the criminal knows the transgression for which he is punished, and which player or coalition is taking credit for the punishment.

I decided to send this comment as a message to Bongo.

It seems (to me anyway) that if you punish future crimes without making it known to them that you've punished them in particular, you prevent the crimes of anyone who one-boxes on newcomb, whereas if you let someone know you've punished them in particular, you only prevent the crimes of anyone who one-boxes on transparent newcomb. You should, therefore, make it known to the world that you will punish future crimes, and that you will do so in a way that will not become noticeable until after the crime has been committed.

It's difficult to craft a Utilitarian argument for stealing his wallet. The only easy way to do so would be if the money went to charity.

That being said, I would probably still do so. As a rationalist, I know it's not a positive action, but it would still give me (irrational) emotional enjoyment. Plus, you get a great story out of it. Imagine being able to tell your friends that you ruined Hitler's evening.

I note that by 1933, the SA had already been committing violent crimes under Hitler's command for over a decade. So the edited puzzle presented is fundamentally unrelated to the question, unless you think that a $40 fine and a ruined evening is an excessive punishment for a decade of violent crimes.

Given that the cost of administering the punishment would be worth paying to prevent the crime...

You should punish them if they are the kind of person that before they do a crime, accurately consider

• whether being the kind of person that doesn't do the crime implies they should have avoided some punishments in the past that they in fact did receive.
• whether being the kind of person that does the crime implies that they should have received some punishments in the past that they in fact did not receive.

And then weigh the gains from the crime against the against the losses of the punishments they should have received or and the gains from the punishments they should have avoided.

OR

If at some point they considered whether to be the kind of person that does the above, and decided not to because that would make them susceptible to punishment of future crimes.

--

I think the above conditions are finally sufficient, but not necessary. Some other kinds of agents are worth to punishing for their future crimes too.

Also, the question I was answering above was not really "when should you punish someone for their future crimes", but "what kinds of people are worth punishing for their future crimes". Maybe that's why the answer is so long.

Do you do it?

Yes.

The title here is misleading. "Punishing future crimes" isn't necessarily implied by the wallet theft. Not actively supporting the personal security and property rights of the to be villain is all that is required. If Hitler is considered morally irrelevant it is just a matter of whether having the money is better than not having it.