Take a poor kid who has committed a crime. How do we evaluate that ethically as human beings? Conservatives will say throw the book at 'em. The liberal attitude (though since Clinton few liberals appear strong enough to ever admit it) is to look at the kid's background and be more forgiving. I would argue that ethically, we must approach this kind of situation with two minds simultaneously: as a judge, and as a ruler (there's also as a priest, who looks at the sin, and seeks to understand and forgive it, but let's put that aside for now).
- Judge. As a judge we look at an individual's actions, and judge them according to our notions of right and wrong. End of story.
- Ruler. As a ruler (policymaker) interested in the public good (let's imagine), your goal is to achieve social stability and justice. From that point of view, you have to recognize that environment leads to crime.
In other words, faced with an individual who mugged somebody we must be judgmental and censorious (as well as appropriately merciful). But facing a city full of muggers, we must recognize that, through the law of large numbers, there are environmental factors that CAUSE bad behavior.
As social policy, we cannot but punish bad behavior in individuals, as if each has complete free will. (After all, whatever happened to the guy in front of you, there are probably other people with the same history who have NOT become muggers.) But in making policy that applies to groups, we must act as if each is nothing but a complete product of circumstance.
The law of large numbers says that the larger one's sample, the closer to chance expectation the distribution will be. If you flip a coin four times and get three heads, or 75% of the time, it is unsurprising. If, however, you flip a coin 10,000 times, and the rate remains 75%, you can be certain the coin is weighted.
It's safe to assume that in any human society, a certain percentage of citizens will go bad -- become anti-social, criminals, evil. Perhaps this is an inevitable product of life; perhaps the multitudinous stresses of daily living, getting along with other people, dealing with injustices large and small, reigning in the ego, absorbing the many small assaults on our self-worth with which each person is confronted, and the contours of each person's inborn personality -- perhaps these factors are, like nodes of sound waves in a concert hall, bound to concatenate in certain places, ensuring that a certain percentage of the population slips into behavior that the society cannot accept.
Let us say that the estimated percentage of citizens over age 10 who will commit a crime in a given year in the United States is N. Therefore, according to the law of large numbers, if N% of your town's residents are arrested this year, you can feel as though things are in reasonably good order. However, if the rate is 3N% or 4N%, and your town or city has more than a few individuals, you must conclude that something systematic is wrong. It is unlikely to be coincidence that so many bad people have happened to land in your town. There must be some distinct CAUSE for this unfortunate conglomeration of malevolence. The racist may ascribe it to the number of blacks or latinos in the city or whatever, and conclude nothing can be done. But an enlightened person realizes that it must be a result of circumstances, and seeks to change the circumstances. The fact that so many conservatives argue that nothing can or should be done except bear down with ever-harsher punishments, may be a reflection of a racism implicit in their worldview. Or just an inability to see things with two minds.
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