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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2363 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Are the death penalty (and penal theories broadly) not downstream from how we feel about others? Such that it’s about feelings, and not “theory”?

  • I can imagine a criminal to whom I have no social feelings; if the crime is bad, I would like him punished severely, even to the point of death. This is because the absence of administering the punishment is evolutionarily painful to me. Humans evolved to want to punish wrongdoers.

  • I can, for brief moments, imagine myself being such a loving Amish fella that I genuinely love every human as if they were an adorable puppy or priceless artifact. And I see their sins almost like “mistake theory”. If this is a person’s abiding belief, and he believes in an afterlife, then I can imagine the evolutionary need for revenge simply turning off, entirely.

Is there necessarily more to it than this? Those who opposite the death penalty probably don’t have an abiding feeling of vengeance. Those who support it would probably feel better knowing crime is taken care of (a sense of balance being restored).

If I were the victim of a terrible crime, I would accept the criminal as 'effectively dead' if they were imprisoned for life without parole but if I was given the option to put them to death, I would do so since it's probably better for society.

Life without parole is extremely rare though, and death row prisoners constantly drag victims back into court over and over again with legal bullshit.

An evolutionary need for revenge is a misalignment in the same way a foot fetish is. Evolution just wants you to maximize your offspring. If you live in a world filled with positive-sum opportunities and mistake-theorist competition, then evolution wants you to sing kumbaya and grow the economy together so that there's more resources for your many children to use on their many children. If you live in a zero-sum world dominated by conflict theorists, evolution wants you to waste as few resources as possible in swiftly eliminating the competition. Neither really leaves room for using up resources on vengeance, especially if seeking vengeance puts you at risk at all. If anything, the extra costs associated with seeking revenge are a punishment on you for not eliminating the competition before they could do whatever they did that makes you want to seek revenge.

Our instincts evolved in a different environment, one where revenge and harming defectors were conducive to genetic fitness, hence the instinct for revenge and/or harming defectors never went away. Children show this instinct. The variables of today aren’t the variables of our prehistoric environment. If you didn’t retaliate when a tribe member harmed the group, the group as a whole perishes, and those genes are lost. If you don’t retaliate when an enemy attacks your tribe, either the enemy takes your mates or your own tribal group disposes you. Hence the genes.

So the feeling of dissatisfaction from an inability to retaliate will stick around unless you’ve somehow developed a sense of superseding brotherly love in an abundant positive sum environment where the harm is trivial and low stacks (because heaven), or something like that. Importantly, this feeling can be hellish because it’s your deepest biology signaling that your very genetic fitness is at stake — not much different than if your very life were at stake, because genetically it is.

Revenge is a product of simple iterated game theory. Humans not being solitary also adds up to this. Can't survive alone -> can't just kill all competition -> intra-tribe squabbles are nonlethal -> being known as a spiteful person becomes valuable.

I'm vaguely in favor of the death penalty, but not so much as a penalty.

It just seems that some humans are irredeemable and mentally broken enough that it seems like the only thing to do is to just remove them entirely.

If you had a tied up evil person (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc take your pick) and a gun in hand, what would you do?

For the punishment minded maybe they shoot the person in the gut and let him die a slow death over a week. I'd generally just shoot them in the head and be done with it.

If someone has personally wronged me I become all in favor of punishment. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but I feel that the emotional response is not a good guide for society wide policy.

I'd say so.

Almost, anyway. Opponents have a weaker desire for vengeance such that it's subordinate to other desires. Like "I would like to be generous in my victory" or "I should live according to these religious principles" or even "I don't want blood on my hands."

But evopsych isn't enough to explain it. The desire for vengeance is competing with other adaptive behaviors. At the extreme end, maybe it drives someone to kill a criminal even though it costs him his own life. That's not any more sound, in an evolutionary sense, than forgiving every sin.

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