Sunday, March 12, 2017
Minority Report
In the film The Minority Report criminals were apprehended and punished for crimes that they had not yet committed, but which they were about to do. Thanks to the infallible accuracy of psychics who could predict the future, law enforcement could stop crime and punish it BEFORE it happened, saving potential victim's from trauma and death. But is it justified punishing a crime that hasn't and will never happen? Can we punish someone just because they have a certain --or even a high likelihood -- of causing serious harm? Assuming a system of identifying the dangerous were reasonably accurate if not infallible, should those dangerous individuals be punished?
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I believe that in the movie The Minority Report, the people are somewhat justified in punishing a crime that has not yet been committed. I think that it makes sense to incapacitate a person who, in the future, commits a violent crime such as murder or rape in order to protect the well-being of everybody else. Unlike the article we read by Ferdinand Schoeman called On Incapacitating the Dangerous where one of the major objections to this form of punishment was how do we classify someone who is dangerous, in The Minority Report, the police know exactly which people commit violent crimes in the future. Therefore, they are able to save potentially hundreds of lives by incapacitating the dangerous people in their society. If we consider what incapacitating the dangerous would mean in our world today, it would be similar to being quarantined for a contagious disease. It would not be meant as a form of punishment but rather a precaution so as not to endanger everyone else. Through incapacitating people with dangerous tendencies, we could potentially give those people the therapeutic help they need and possibly make them less dangerous. I think that depending on the degree to which the person displays dangerous tendencies, a person could be allowed to simply live his or her life normally except with moderate government supervision or, for the most dangerous, be put in a place similar to a prison.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you as a result of the fact that I strongly believe that a person cannot be punished until they commit a crime. Because of the unpredictable nature of humans it will never be possible to determine whether or not we are actually going to commit a crime. I think we would find it very difficult to explain to criminals that they were punished because of something they did in the future. I believe there is no one set future that is predetermined for us. Every single day we make decisions and are faced with choices that influence our future actions. Therefore, we can never really be sure that a person will do something terrible in the future and I think it would be wrong to detain someone. Additionally, this would destroy lives and families. I imagine it is extremely difficult to argue in a court system which we have in place that you are going to send someone to jail because of something they will do in the future. All this being said, however, I do think it isnt the worst thing in the world to monitor past criminals who have been released or look at family history relative to crime. I believe there is evidence that certain people are more likely to commit crimes than others. While I think it is wrong to arrest them before they do anything, I think it is okay to keep an eye on them with their best interests in mind.
DeletePeople should be punished or detained if they have a certain or a very high likelihood of causing serious harm to others in the future. This can be seen as an extension of Mill's harm principle. The justification can be found in Ferdinand Schoeman’s article, “On Incapacitating the Dangerous”. Schoeman brings up the example of quarantining individuals if they are sick with a deadly disease, a widely accepted practice. Such actions are based on the fact that “persons are isolated because they are dangerous to others.” Not every single person an infected person comes into contact to will contract the disease, but the chance of spreading such a life-threatening illness rises significantly. This risk is enough to justify quarantine, as by not doing so, society could be harmed to an extent to which that risk should be taken in the first place. If the foundational justification for quarantining people is to prevent harm to others, then individuals who have an extremely high chance should, by the same underlying justification, be detained and punished. An example in the real world would be bomb threats. There is never a guarantee that the bombing is going to occur, but chances of one happening is significantly increased with a threat. Individuals that issue bomb threats are promptly arrested by the police, interrogated, and only let go once the police know that the risk of harm is low enough to release the detained person back into the public.
ReplyDeleteHowever, an individual who is dangerous at the time of detention should not remain in jail forever. Limitations must be established to determine how long a person can be detained for. A simple solution to this issue relates to the harm principle. Since an individual should only have one’s liberty restricted if one will cause harm, a person should be detained as long as they are still deemed dangerous. This point of view is supported by Schoeman, who writes that in order to keep an individual detained, “there is reason to require almost continual proof that the person confined is still dangerous.” The quarantine example applies perfectly in this scenario. When someone has a deadly disease, they are not subject to life in quarantine. Instead, the state only keeps an individual confined “for as long as it takes to eliminate or reduce significantly the possibility of contagion.” With bomb threats example, only if police have sufficient belief that the arrested individual will most likely or certainly not carry out the bomb attack will they let the person go. In essence, the state can only legitimately punish and restrict the liberties of individual if and only if they still pose a danger to society.
Now we can consider the example of an infallible device that always can predict with certainty whether someone is going to commit a crime in the near future, similar to the psychics in The Minority Report. With such a device, the government should be required to restrict incapacitate individuals who will cause harm. Even if the crime won't happen with incapacitation, there is a guarantee that it will happen absent intervention. As such, any inaction taken by the state would essentially be directly harming an individual, since the state has the power and knowledge to prevent this harm from happening. Mill furthers this point by saying that “a person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction.” This directly applies to the state as well. If the state’s job is to restrict liberties in order to prevent harm to others, by not incapacitating someone who will for certain harm another individual, the state implicitly endorses the behavior that it was made to eliminate. Taking action to detain such individuals would be akin to quarantining an individual whose disease is guaranteed to spread to everyone that person meets, which almost everyone would support. Only until the chance of harm that an individual poses reduces so levels that society can endure should they be released.
I personally disagree with this, I think that nature of humans to make choices should create a variable that must be considered when dictating whether or not a person should be prematurely punished. I do agree that a person with an extremely infectious disease should be quarantined in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading. However, I do not believe this example correlates to that of the Minority Report as people have the ability to make choices in committing the crime or not as opposed to the disease which will spread regardless of the intentions or decisions of its host.
DeleteLooking at it closely, a crime is "an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law" or simply "illegal activities" as dictionary.com explains. The most important thing to note here is that the action itself is what is illegal, so the question becomes, is an action that's not yet been done (therefore not really an action) illegal, regardless of the likelihood? I believe the answer is no, as there is a chance for the action not to occur in the first place. Furthermore, I believe this Minority Report idea of preventing crime before it takes place actually inhibits choice. If a crime is prevented before it occurs, then the agency detaining the 'future' criminal is in fact preventing that very person from making the decision to, or not to commit the crime.
Ultimately, the reason this topic/debate is so insoluble is because its foundation rests on one unanswerable question, is life predetermined, otherwise known as fate/destiny? If the answer is yes, than government arrests of 'future' criminals would be completely justified as they would have complete evidence against them. However, I believe that the future is molded and shaped by the decisions that people make in the moment, so that not only would these pre-event arrests prevent people from making their own decisions, but also in some cases simply not actually work. In fact, with more thought in the matter, I believe that the existence of these psychics (or whatever form it may take) can't actually exist with 100% accuracy.
Personally, I do not think that the law enforcement in Minority Report is justified in their premature arrests. I do not believe that an individual should be vulnerable to arrest or punishment before even committing the crime unless there was already a concrete plan and the individual was preparing to carry out the plan. However, this is where one may run into trouble. When evaluating it closely, there is a fine line between arresting someone for plotting to murder and arresting someone for merely having the thought that they could potentially commit a murder. Humans act upon free will, and seemingly random judgement, countless times every day. With this kind of unpredictability, it would not be possibly to justifiably arrest someone under the assumption that they will, in the future, act upon a newly formed thought if they have not yet taken steps toward actually formulating and executing a plan to carry out their new idea. I think this is where a distinction can be drawn between being justified and unjustified in arresting someone who has not yet committed the crime itself. If an individual has actively taken steps toward carrying out their crime, it is evident that they pose an immediate ad direct threat to others. However, if an individual has done nothing more than think about the possibility of committing a crime, that individual does not yet pose any more of an immediate threat to the public than any other person. Humans have the power to make decisions all the time. One of those decisions includes whether or not to take action in regard to a certain idea. If the individual has not yet taken any steps towards fulfilling that idea, there is no grounds for that individual’s arrest to be justified.
ReplyDeletePunishing a person for a crime that they have yet to commit is unjustifiable because it goes against the principles of the American justice system. Under the statis quo in the United States, everyone is considered to be innocent until they are proven guilty in a court of law. When a system, like the one in Minority Report, is put into effect the justice system is assuming that a person is guilty even though may not have even committed a crime. This presumption eliminates a person’s right to a fair legal trial. This leads down the slippery slope of who decides if someone might commit a crime. If the government is in charge of the system, it could lead to abuse of power. Even worse, if a biased group of people are running the system, there would be no guarantee that a person is being arrested based on the mere chance of committing a crime in the future, instead of for a crime already committed. The second major flaw comes with the accuracy of the system. While the prompt does say the system will be relatively accurate, it cannot always guarantee justice. Even though there is a small chance of innocent people being locked up, it could still cause irreversible harm to others through the form of the death penalty or taking people away from their loved ones for long periods of time. While the system may have good intentions on paper, it still has major flaws in execution. In the current state law enforcement, officers and courts have the power to charge people with crimes such as conspiracy to violate laws in order to punish people before they cause harm to others. Also the current system has proceedings in place such as burdens of proof and the use of juries that that help prevent innocent people from being punished. The United States does not have a perfect justice system, but when you put a system into place like the one suggested, those flaws become even bigger problems.
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ReplyDeleteThe movie Minority Report has an interesting plot in which psychics predict crimes and the police force stop the perpetrators of those crimes before they are able to commit them, and imprison them. While this is an interesting idea to ponder, it has no place in reality as the actions of the police go against the idea of how we believe the justice system should work. If there is a technology that is infallible in predicting crimes, not using this technology would be as immoral as not warning someone in the water that there is a shark nearby. This technology has the ability to remake society for the better by ensuring no crime, and by rehabilitating criminals before they are able to dig themselves into a moral/social/financial hole. This technology could have the ability of apprehending a possible murderer/delinquent and nudging them off of their current path of disorder. However the characters in the Minority Report have a different goal of hunting down and imprisoning criminals indefinitely for a crime they have yet to commit. It is completely logical to punish those who have created an increased risk for those around them, such as in the case of a terrorist plot, as they have disregarded others safety and have a malicious intent to harm. However, the future criminals in the Minority Report are charged with a crime that they have not had the slightest thoughts of, compared to the previous cases where there was the knowledge that they are increasing the likelihood of harm for others in society. The possibility of a predicable murder in the future just gives all the more reason to intercept the murderer, attempt to rehabilitate them, and use the technology again to prophesize if they still have plans for harm. As a society whose plan is to rehabilitate prisoners and preserve the safety of its members, the arrest of prophesized criminals is moronic when the salvation of those criminals is not only a possibility but much more likely. A criminal who already committed a crime and is suffering the consequences is far less likely to be receptive to help, as they already must serve their punishment. This is compared to someone who knows that they either fix themselves up or they will serve need to serve punishment. A good example of this would be a child that behaves poorly and gets no ice-cream compared to a child that is promised ice-cream if he behaves well, the child who is promised ice-cream before behaving poorly is much more likely to behave well.
ReplyDeletePreventing a bad thing before it can happen is a good thing. Punishing someone before they can do something bad, however, is not a good thing. If the criminals are apprehended before they can commit a crime, in order to save the victims the trauma, then they are apprehended for doing nothing. I can’t agree with this. Stopping the criminal before the crime is committed is definitely a good use for this technology, because the emotional and/or physical trauma to the victims will no longer occur. Preventing this for citizens will lead to a less afraid and more productive society. Since the crime does not occur, the criminal is in turn no longer a criminal. Due to their new status as “not a criminal” the person does not deserve punishment. If a person consistently has to be prevented from committing a crime, something like detainment could possibly be a way to keep everyone around them safe. Overall, I think that someone who is going to commit a crime is not a criminal until they do, so they should not be punished if they do not actually commit a crime.
ReplyDeleteI would like to start out with a flaw in the system in Minority Report that the main character himself states at the end of the movie. The system requires that people who will commit the crime don’t know about their future since they can then change the future. This is an important point since the criminal could very well not commit the crime if they knew and you could potentially have a murder rate of zero by just alerting people and convincing them not to commit the crime. Furthermore, I personally think that we should not arrest someone just because we know that they will commit a crime in the future does not mean that they actually will commit the crime. They could just as easily change their mind. The example I might use is someone who is insane but has been mentally conditioned to not murder someone when they hear a certain keyword. If this system predicts a murder, and the police go to arrest the insane person, we don’t know if they will hear the keyword before the murder is supposed to happen. If they do, then we would be arresting someone on their intent when they would not actually commit a crime. I feel like a better system would be to actually watch the people who would commit a crime around the assigned time, and then arrest them just before they would commit the crime. This way, you are much surer that they will actually carry out the crime instead of assuming that it will be carried out. This simple would fix would actually make the system more acceptable because there is a little gap between crime and arresting instead of potentially a day or more.
ReplyDeleteIt is justified to punish a crime that has not and will never happen if some action is taken toward its completion. This is the system we have in place now where I can have the idea to kill my mom or rob a bank but if that idea never actually leaves my head or if I don’t take any steps to carry out my plan, I can’t be punished; however, if I have a plan to commit a crime and I actually take a step toward carrying out that crime, I have now engaged in conspiracy to commit a crime for which I can be punished. That step doesn’t have to be a crime itself – it just has to indicate that those involved were aware of the plan and intended to break the law. If we punished people for having ideas to commit crimes, no matter how sure we were that they would act on those ideas, we would have a flawed system because then we are creating “thought crimes” which is a restriction on freedom of thought and expression. This is similar to Farrell’s theory on self-defense and the ARD system. He recognizes the flaw in his analogy given the ARD system attacks as soon as there is a threat and cannot stop whereas humans can wait until the attack actually starts. Similarly, you can’t punish someone for posing a “threat” – they have to actually start to carry it out before you can punish them.
ReplyDeleteI believe that everyone agrees that preventing crime and more specifically horrible crimes with massive impacts is something that society should strive to do. Taking action to prevent those crimes that pose a harm to others can be justifiable; however, those actions cannot be designed to punish people who could commit a crime before they have committed a crime. We do have policies in place to punish people who are actively taking actions to commit an act of terror or violate the law, but those policies only enter into effect after a person has been found guilty of violating a law. One cannot simply be arrested for purchasing a gun or certain types of explosives, even if that could put them at higher risk of committing a crime. Furthermore, as a result of flaws in the system, this type of policy would detrimentally impact minorities in this nation, as African American and other minorities are statistically (which is a stat that is under debate) more likely to commit a crime in the United States. Under The Minority Report system, almost any person of minority status could be punished for doing nothing wrong. In a Justice system that is fair, individuals can only be punished after they break the law and commit a crime. The Justice System in The Minority Report clearly fail to uphold that tenant of any justice system used by humans. Additionally, if we look past the Justice system and look at nature of people, we know that individuals do not know the future or know what they will do in that future. This is something that is discussed in The Minority Report and highlights how people who are at a higher risk of committing a crime might not ever break the law. Punishing those people is a blatant miscarriage of justice and undermines the rule of law and the fairness/ blindness of justice. Regardless of the possible benefits society might see by implementing a reasonably accurate system of detection, people who might be dangerous are not dangerous until they attempt to harm others, and until that moment, they cannot be punished.
ReplyDeletePunishing crimes before they are committed flips our classic view of justice onto its head. We have all heard the phrase, "innocent until proven guilty", but under a system that can punish crimes before they are committed it's quite the opposite. While taking action in order to protect people is important, it's unjust to take action against an individual that has done nothing wrong. There are a lot of variables at play and it's hard to believe that it would ever be possible to predict if someone will commit a crime.
ReplyDeleteDoubt aside, I think that if a system like this did exist it would be ok to take action in order to deter the crime from being committed, but completely unjust to punish a person for that crime. Under the currently legal system that we have in the United States there is not really a precedent for it. There are charges for conspiracy to commit murder but that person shouldn't be charged with murder because at the end of the day they didn't commit it. Even charging someone with conspiracy to commit murder is a bit of an overextension because in a system that is infallible there would really be no harm. The only punishment that should really be instituted is if a crime is actually committed, or if an individual resists the intervention to stop the crime from being committed. Those are instances where it is completely just to institute a punishment, but otherwise no harm, no foul.