Do we want to stop all crime?
I was driving just now, and having a thought experiment with myself.
I'll preface this that I have virtually no philosophy background, so if this is endlessly retreaded material, forgive me in advance.
With all of the talk about AI enabled security cameras, drone surveillance, digital fingerprinting and other technologies of the last few years, this topic has been top of mind for me. These technologies are being sold primarily with the goal of stopping crime, and improving public safety. There are obviously tons of issues with all of these technologies regarding bias, privacy, and so on, but I wanted to distill their pitch down to first principles, that is: is it even desirable to live in a world with perfect law enforcement?
Come with me on a magical thought experiment, and put aside real world law enforcement concerns like racism, invasive surveillance, weaponization, and all of the other problems with police for a moment.
Imagine we lived in a world where if someone committed a crime, they were instantly caught, a speedy trial was given to them, and they were quickly punished. This world does not surveil people who are not committing crimes. It doesn't get the wrong perp ever. It doesn't use excessive force to apprehend them. It doesn't selectively enforce laws against people it doesn't like.
It's as perfect of a law enforcement apperatus as we can possibly imagine. It's the fantasy that all of these security vendors and tech bros are trying to sell to us. Imagine that world is not only possible, but real.
Even with all of those caveats, would that desirable?
There's something to me that still feels dystopian about not being able to get away with crime under any circumstances.
Is it possible that we all have this quiet compulsion and drive inside us that we think that some amount of crime is desirable in society? Do we secretly want the option of doing crime and getting away with it if the need arises?
I can't quite pin down why I want crime to still exist at some low, simmering level, but I also can't ignore the fact that I do, and that when I imagine an entirely crime free society, it feels oppressive and stifling in my head, even though in this thought experiment, it's as perfect as can be. I think I'd probably feel differently if I had ever been the victim of some horrible crime, maybe? But I have been robbed, hit and run, and so on, and I still feel this way, so maybe not.
Has anyone else had a good think about this? Anyone else feel similar? Any possible explanations?
It all comes down to what crime is. Transgression is a part of the human experience: the prevalence of the Ritual Clown in human cultures across time and space speaks to that. (The wiki is very lackluster: JStor has better explanations for a greater time-cost.)
There are places in which being gay is a crime, being trans is a crime, being poly in a crime, practicing miscegenation is (was?) a crime. I don’t really want to live in a world without these things.
Let's say that the laws of this society align perfectly with your own personal set of ethics.
Even with that caveat, I think I would want some small amount of people to be able to get away with things.
I thought about unjust laws, resistance to autocratic governments and so on, but if I'm honest with myself, even if I handwaved those problems away in my thought experiment, I'd want there to be a slight chance of being able to, say, steal a car. I don't know really why though.
I agree actually, which is why I brought up the ritual clown. Transgression is important. it also occurs to me that one of the ways that children (and people in society in general) come to understand what the limits of that society are is by breaking smaller, less important rules. if we treat all crime as an immediate disappearance (or however this is to be dealt with) we risk enforcing hard boundaries on what is (and i think should be) a grey area.
hold on, also to deal with situational crime? is breaking into a burning building to save a kitten a crime, because you’re breaking into someone else else’s property? so on.
edit: this is a fun philosophical convo. thanks for bringing it to us!
I think this gets at the interesting parts of the question too. In this hypothetical where all crime is detected, as long as the enforcement is “just” then your example crime may not be a crime, or may not be punished as a crime. (Similarly, speeding to get someone to a hospital when unable to call for an ambulance, or when waiting for an ambulance would take longer).
This idea is deeply reinforced by existing legal systems. One could write a law which is written in a way by which breaking into property is allowed under certain circumstances. In fact, one could also argue that system already exists as we allow certain individuals to do this (namely those who are tasked with enforcing law and participating in rescue) even though it's not carved out in legislation but instead through case precedence.
I've undergone a few significant shifts in my set of ethics, so I recognize that even what I believe right now is probably wrong in many ways and won't reflect what I think in even 5-10 years.
I think you need to specify what kind of things. Do you want some small amount of people to get away with murder? With rape? With defrauding millions of people with a pyramid scheme? With illegally collecting information on nearly every person on the planet?
All of these are examples of crimes which happen with some regularity and they all have very different real world consequences both in magnitude and scope.
This hypothetical is full of so many caveats and holes I'm not sure how to even begin to address it. It might as well be impossible to imagine a world where there is no crime. Any such world I can imagine wouldn't have crime in the first place, because how do you get severe wealth inequality if no one steals and values such a thing? I can't imagine wealth equality on a scale so wide that no one would need to shoplift to survive, for example, and thus it's really hard to talk about a minor crime like that. As OP pointed out as well, there's so many frivolous laws it's hard to imagine many folks who would make the firm stance that no one should commit crime ever, because with enough time and effort I doubt there's anyone out there who wouldn't find at least one crime they were okay with people committing. Surely so if we think about all the things that have ever been criminalized in any society that has been present on the earth, as at least one of those laws would enslave the person in question to some monarchical figure.
I mean, the police wouldn't listen to my wife when she was 14 and reported her rapists.
It would really be nice to get away with that murder.
Crimes contingent on the outcome of another crime certainly make this hypothetical even more messy.
Especially given the vigilante nature of sekeing justice in an unjust system.
Right which is part of what I was getting at with my comment... how can we even truly imagine a perfectly just system necessary for us to unpack passing judgement on whether crimes should be allowed to be committed? I can't imagine a world that isn't suffering from the consequences of others, which would be necessary in the first place to have laws which are, by themselves perfectly just without spending endless time carving out caveats like this. Nobody should murder, but I'm not going to be upset when a severe criminal is murdered as an outcome/reaction to their grave crimes.
That's why I love the idea of brutally harsh black/white 'you broke the law' judgements, but incredibly flexible 'you deserve to be punished for it' punishments.
Hypothetical me murders rapist. Yup I am a murderer. But maybe my punishment is 8 hours of community service.
But biases cloud that pretty damn fast.
Fucking based.
</noise>To be explicitly clear, this is a hypothetical murder that has been fantasized about.
Said individuals are still alive to the best of our knowledge.
It was explicitly clear without an additional clarification, no worries. I know the feeling, and I'm sorry for what your wife has experienced.
Well every crime is a crime because somebody wants to do it. If nobody wanted to do these things we wouldnt have bothered making rules about it. There is no law about not being allowed to drink lava because nobody is out here trying to do that.
So these prohibitions we have in the world are a consequence of wanting to stop people from doing things they want, because it in some way affects other people in ways they dont want.
But if you can "get away with it", that sometimes means that the rule you broke didnt actually involve inconveniencing anybody. Like if you violate public urination laws because you peed on a bush in an empty park at night. Thats not really a big deal to anyone.
But if you then put a bunch of surveillance cameras in the park and record that guy, you are sort of manufacturing a problem that didnt need to be one. Which is undesirable.
I think this is the best argument so far in the thread. Crime is sometimes dependent on the circumstances, and perfect enforcement would seem to preclude that.
Firstly what is crime to you? There are plenty of crimes that most people would consider crimes and an equal amount that are considered business as usual thanks to capitalist ideals. Shoplifting is one such example.
My quick thoughts on this topic is that we can discuss governance, the state, social policy and all that fun stuff but I feel like in this context crime represents a sort of freedom and resistance to a powerful entity that wants to oppress you. This is my quick draw response to this. I will have to chew on this thought experiment for a while to give a more thought out and reasoned reply.
In your scenario, where only bad things are crime, apprehension is instant, and enforcement is perfect, I think the benefits clearly outweigh the costs (if any costs actually exist). I would want perfect enforcement.
Generally, the optimum amount of fraud is not zero. That's an aphorism describing the ever-increasing compliance costs to trying to reduce fraud/crime/etc to zero. But in your scenario we've established that enforcement is instant and perfect so that wouldn't really apply.
Similarly, it's generally good for society for it to be too difficult to prove all cases. (A high bar protects the innocent). But we've already established that enforcement is perfect, so that doesn't really apply either.
And finally, crime is sometimes important to push social change. See as a trivial example Rosa Parks or the sit-in protests, where nonviolently breaking the law helped force necessary social change in the United States. But we've established already that only actually bad things count as crimes, so there's no need.
So yeah, sounds pretty great!
You can't talk about that sort of scenario without discussing who gets to define what counts as crime and why. Plenty of laws exist or have existed purely for the sake of "managing undesirables". And in system from your hypothetical all the state would need to do in order to fully purge a group they don't like would be to make it illegal to be that thing.
The current US administration is already trying to do that with trans people and brown people, and they've gone through a bunch of bullshit to basically say nothing trump does can be illegal.
There would be no resisting other than outright war if a system like that was in place.
The problem, as stated by others, is how we decide what a crime. There are plenty of examples of civil disobedience leading to changes in what is considered a crime. In your perfect scenario, I guess you could argue that everyone has agreed to what constitutes a crime. In that scenario, that probably also eliminates crime.
While a fun thought experiment, the main reason to still "allow crime" is to push back on what society feels is a crime. If somehow we have all magically agreed what is and is not crime, then I imagine most crime would be limited to the heat of passion crimes. Is that better? If I get angry at someone cutting me off on the road are they immediately caught or do I have a chance to retaliate? If adultery is not a crime and I come home and find my wife in bed with another bed, does this system still eliminate my passionate response?
It's obviously even logically impossible for a society to work this way, because it's impossible to get any group of people to completely agree what should and should not be a crime.
But in your questions, for the purposes of this experiment, the laws are according to your own personal sense of ethics, and the laws are instantly enforced. So if someone cuts you off on the road (and that's illegal in this world), they're instantly caught. Similarly, if adultery is legal (again, that depends on if you think it should be according to your own set of ethics), the system doesn't eliminate your passionate response, but if that response is murder/assault, you're instantly caught the moment after you do it.
Edit: I realized the topic said stop all crime, but in my head what I was imagining was really punish all crime. Stop all crime is basically just the plot of minority report and it's pretty obvious why punishing someone for something they haven't done yet is unethical, so I think it's a little more interesting to think about being able to detect, prove, and punish all crime after it occurs.
This feels like a Twilight Zone episode waiting to happen. Even in multiplayer videogames where there are behaviors that can get you removed without questions or appeals, a lot of stuff slips through the cracks that shouldn't be allowed and a lot of people get dinged for things they shouldn't have, because even if the system was perfect and functioned as intended, behaviors would change to counteract them. People would go right up to the edge of acceptable behavior and try to get others to retaliate, or find some weird rule interpretation or interaction that allows them to do a heinous thing for the hell of it. Unless this all knowing, all powerful system can judge by intent, in which case there are probably better uses for this god device or the level of technology that could produce it.
There are two knobs that are obvious in my mind. One is social and one is technological.
It seems obvious to me that having police sit in a car all day means that they only catch car related crime. This social structure may or may not be optimal for that society and the type of crime that takes place there.
There is also the related issue of habit and reskilling. How do we transition from a cop car cop society to a neighborhood police officer who has relationships of mutual trust with the communities they serve? Police have incentives which are external to their on-paper duties: they might be surrounded by other bad cops who abuse their position and external organizations like fraternities or police unions might reinforce this hierarchy which does a net harm to society.
The technological knob seems more dangerous because it is faster to spread and easier for people to abuse. Unless you have an all seeing computer that makes it impossible to commit "real" rather than simulated crime, ie. Prime Intellect, then people will be arbitrarily targeted by technology for making the mistake of using the Burger King app too frequently or too infrequently. Monitoring and enforcement will be uneven and unjust.
There's a variety of pragmatic reasons why the thought experiment isn't applicable to the real world: no universal agreement on criminal activity and suitable punishment, no powerful system is instantaneous and perfect and impossible to abuse, and figuring out the right proportionality of punishment is just truly unknowable except by some omniscient entity capable of understanding our inner thoughts (hence why it's a popular invention).
But I do want to try and engage in the thought experiment on its more philosophical grounds and propose that even if those practical issues were solved we wouldn't like it. Humans aren't perfectly rational, perfectly computing machines ourselves - we want some slack to be lazy and selfish and getting an unfair leg up even if we don't perceive our behavior as such. We spend the vast majority of our lives as amoral entities in that we don't even think to apply moral reasoning to every thing we do. Trying to coerce people into behaving morally every moment would be exhausting and consume all our mental energy even if there was some outside system which handled enforcement for us.
Separately, if your thought experiment fleshed out into a pretty good anime intrigues you, go watch psycho pass where the police are given a means to determine someone's crime coefficient.