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 seeking 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.
In that case I think the effectiveness of enforcement should be proportional to how certain society at large (a perspective fairly incorporating all groups and demographics somehow) was in that code of ethics.
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!
Would the system balance competing ideas when deciding enforcement of laws? For example, driving dangerously fast even if not causing any accidents but certainly still elevating anxiety in many other drivers, balanced against the need to get the pregnant woman to hospital quickly because she’s about to give birth?
Yeah, this is basically the core problem, right? I took the concept to mean that you would only get prosecuted if there were no extenuating circumstances. And I was literally thinking about this while driving a few minutes ago. I love thought experiments, but this world is so ideal it doesn’t tell us anything about our own. In the real world, slack is good.
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.
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.
In the Star Trek TNG episode Justice, they come across basically a utopian society, but one of the crew makes a mistake and they learn that all legal infractions are punished by death.
It's an interesting conversation about unjust laws, power, and responsibility.
It reminded me of (the later part of) a piece of speculative web fiction titled Manna, where a lack of certain types of privacy is just a part of first a dystopia, then what is otherwise portrayed as a utopia.
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.
With another bed! How scandalous!
/noise
Hah, that's a quality typo. Thanks for the laugh
My take is no, it's a perfect goal, something to strive for but in reality the only way to stop all crime is for everyone to live in a prison and identify those who through biological mental diversity are predisposed to immoral acts. It's an effort that in the closest realization creates a dystopia that will be too fragile to be sustainable as crime becomes relative to caste rules.
The better effort is to design a decentralized, anti-fragile world that combats the banality of evil. Instead of cameras or gun control, you focus on removing the factors driving good people to evil acts. Theft of bread arises from the existence of the hungry. There will be some level of crime as a cost of a strong and free world, but that far from discouraging or defeating, is a reason to iterate on a world that compassionately teaches sociopaths to be compassionate, the the lonely, isolated, and nihilistic, that they have an community. That everyone has a responsibility and duty to caretake the world around them.
We have social signals that indicate nudges to crime like trash field streets with no green spaces. We need to first act on our knowledge of creating a good society and engendering a civic duty that is tangible. We know what creates problems in our communities, but often ignore them as someone else's issue or lack of resources for ourselves to act disempowering the strongest force to prevent crime, ourselves making friends with our neighbors and looking out for on another. That does not ignore that biological mental diversity will create seriel killers, kelptomanics, those who will always jump the guard rails of civil society.
Yet first, over surveillance or authoritarian power options to combat crime in totality, I suggest we focus on building and strengthening the guardrails that we can all maintain to nudge human behavior in bounds. Providing the security a worker needs to say no to dumping toxic chemical run off, or the time and resources someone needs to speak up when they hear or see domestic abuse or just be mindful enough to invite the angry racist to dinner and through social norms erode and diffuse those beliefs.
For most to commit an crime is due to an imbalance, hunger with lack of bread, desire imposed by consumerism as need, an community propagandized in to a enemy the source of their troubles, trauma normalized into expectations, an a single act that keeps food, shelter and belonging. If we tackled Maslow's Heirarchy of needs seriously in the structure of society we'd be left with solving the crimes of those for who that isn't enough.
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.
I'm going to question your assumption that the appropriate response to a crime is punishment. Sure, that's what we do now, but should it be?
Step back and consider what the overall goal is. If it's to stop crime, it's pretty obvious that punishment isn't the way to go or we wouldn't see any crime now.
Kind of a fallacy there, isn't it? Punishment doesn't have to stop all crime for it to be effective. It just has to stop some of it. Haven't really done any research about it, but the fact that you might go to jail seems like it would at least deter some amount of people from walking out of best buy with a new phone they didn't pay for.
I don't have the statistics for petty theft and jail sentences, but generally speaking incarceration does not reduce violent crime or recidivism.
The certainty of getting caught seems to be a bigger factor, but the severity of the punishment is far lower on the list. Plus as a "fun" bonus, because incarceration limits your ability to work, etc. and you spend early sentences around more experienced criminals, you actually make low risk for recidivism folks higher risk by over punishing them.
So again, can't speak to specifics but generally the jail part isn't particularly correlated to crime reduction. Including more jail and guaranteed jail time.
Even evil entity GEO Group taught staff that. We didn't follow it of course.
More severe punishments might not deter crime directly, but I don't think it's possible that punishment itself doesn't deter crime at all. Also, incarceration isn't the only punishment for crimes. Fines, community service, and probation are all punishments too. I mean, even the process of actually being arrested is a punishment, because it's hugely disruptive to your life and embarrassing.
Like if Walmart had a policy where you shouldn't steal, and stealing was illegal, but if they found out you were stealing, they couldn't actually do anything about it, why would anyone pay for anything at Walmart again, other than feeling that they should? I'll grant that some amount of people would continue to pay for things just because it feels morally wrong not to, but would most people?
I can say from firsthand experience working as a waiter who primarily lived on tips, if there's no punishment for not paying for something, a lot of people just won't. On a given shift where I had maybe 30 tables, I'd say 5 or so of them would stiff me. I think that's a pretty close comparison.
You said "might go to jail" in your example so that's what I was responding to. And I specified that the severity of punishment is much lower of correlation to crime than the certainty of being caught. Most of our severe punishments are incarceration.
Note: I didn't say there is zero connection, but it's not nearly as large of a factor as people seem to think.
And yes I think that most people (over the developmental age) don't need externally imposed morals to tell them not to steal. Most people don't steal even when the odds of them getting caught are near zero. Things that are less universally considered "wrong" probably would be different.
The Purge is a way more interesting concept if you imagine hacking in and wiping out medical and student loan debt, repurposing land for community gardens, and guaranteeing housing for everyone as the outcomes instead of looting and murder but I suspect it doesn't film as well.
One of the reasons I can't get on board with your thought experiment is that I actually don't think my morality should be law. That's far too much responsibility and I don't think so highly of myself to think I'm always right.
An older source (I fucked this up and lost the full PDF link, will come back later and fix. It's from 1990.)
Slightly less older
Same age
Much newer
2026
If the goal is to punish, punishment meets that goal.
It's easy to fall into the "we've always done it that way" trap. In the old days folks used to beat their kids to make them behave. Kids still misbehaved. Other countries are looking at rehabilitation instead of focusing on punishment.
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.
I think it actually is quite applicable to the real world, even though the scenario itself is obviously unrealistic and impossible. The thought that led me down the road of pondering this in the first place are proposals in my city for instituting some new surveillance technology (flock cameras, and some drone as first responder stuff).
A lot of the arguments against those technologies focus on all the harm they cause if they're misused, or exploited. But it made me think that even if they weren't, would they still even be desirable? Would we even want a perfect version of them?
Usually when there's a proposal for something, opposition is focused on the negative side effects that maybe haven't been considered. The noise a new train line makes, or the crime that a casino being built would bring. The benefits that the people who are bringing the proposal are touting are usually universally good things, and if the idea was perfect, everyone would support them. It's the implimentation that's the problem. I was wondering this is truly the case with police surveillance technology though.
I saw this in my city a few years ago as a microcosm. They put red light cameras at a lot of stop lights. In theory, it's a good idea. It just mails you a ticket when you run a red light. They're pretty accurate, they have a recording of the incident so it can be reviewed and appealed if there's a problem. Everyone, including myself, hated them. They were deactivated after a few years. Why? I don't really know. If I'm honest with myself, I want to be able to run red lights sometimes I guess, and I want other people to be able to run them too sometimes? I don't know, it's a weird idea, but in that case, I want crime to be possible on some level.
It made me think about the idea more broadly, because if most people truly do want a little bit of crime, isn't there a good chance we may be over investing in law enforcement? Or at least, investing incorrectly?
I never see this argument being made, most probably because it would be political suicide, but maybe also because it's not something a lot of people considered.
There are a few crimes I do that I really enjoy.