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Reinhart is starting from the moral proposition that we ought to weight the lives and happiness of the criminal underclass and the pathologically uncivilized the same way that we weight the lives and happiness of the (much more numerous) productive and pro-social members of society. In this telling, if there is a policy approach which would massively decrease the quality of life of the criminal class - i.e. mass incarceration, three-strikes laws, public execution, forcible institutionalization of chronic hard-drug abusers, etc. - we ought to look very negatively at that approach, even if its effects would substantially and demonstrably improve the quality of life of the vast majority of non-criminal citizens, since the drop in utility among the targeted class proportionally outweighs the gain in utility among the beneficiary class. The easy way to route completely around Reinhart’s utility calculus is simply to say, “I assign close to zero value to the lives and interests of the criminal element, and their loss is pretty directly my gain. The amount of decrease in their utility which I would happily sacrifice to even marginally increase my own utility is nearly-infinite.”
Comparing murder to air pollution is an embarrassingly obvious red herring; air pollution is a distributed phenomenon, culpability for which is incredibly difficult to attribute to clearly-identifiable actors, and is a byproduct of economic processes which are on the whole beneficial to society. Nobody is polluting the air because they just want to kill birds and make people sick. Violent crime, on the other hand, is a purely negative phenomenon, not resulting from any process that’s otherwise positive, and its perpetrators are, generally, almost cartoonishly easy to identify and apprehend if the state is given the proper resources and has the will to utilize those resources effectively.
why would you need to do this if you do the other things? unless you are only talking about violent drug users when you mention abusers, this would end up punishing innocent people too.
Its good for the people gaining money and status from succeeding in it. They perceive themselves as more successful or better off than if they were working some minimum wage job which is the best they can do in the legal labor market.
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