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chaosmage  1yr ago (text post)   2514 thread views

Should lifetime prisoners be incentivized to kill themselves?

The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.

I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?

It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?

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You see, this might be because the problem is wider than utilitarianism. It's the whole of sufficiently deeply considered consequentialism, optimizing over global outcomes. Utilitarianism is an ethical decision theory; something like deontology is a set of heuristics.

Good point.

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