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Daniel Greco's avatar

You might be interested in the "anti-Blackstonian" movement in legal theory. I have in mind in particular Larry Laudan's work (eg, early chapters of "Truth, Error, and Criminal Law"), but he's been influential. While he doesn't model the relevant tradeoffs exactly as you do, what he does is pretty similar in spirit, and he also concludes that the idea that we should very strongly prefer acquitting the guilty to convicting the innocent turns out to be a lot harder to justify than normally thought.

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Steven's avatar

Fundamental failure to understand the operative frame of reference.

To punish the guilty is a matter of proportion: does the punishment fit the crime? To punish the innocent who committed no crime is therefore like trying to divide by 0: the result is effectively infinitely disproportionate.

Worse, they aren't merely like values incremented in positive and negative directions. To punish the innocent is categorically different from punishing the guilty, it is itself another moral wrong of commission. Commission and omission are not directly comparable. Justice and injustice can't be traded like a fungible unit of exchange.

Then you finish with an entirely unsupported bit of bad faith mind reading. This entire article is an illogical ad hominem against people who disagree with your preferred policy. Given the title of this space, it doesn't belong here.

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