No, effectiveness is not an excuse for immoral, disproportionate punishments. And morality is not nearly as irrational or difficult as you make it out to be. The victims of a scammer are not nearly as badly hurt as the victims of a pedophile. And since both crimes are perpetrated by knowing adults, there's no "they couldn't help it" compassion for the victims (note that it's not illegal to have pedophilic tendencies - it's illegal to hurt children by acting on those tendencies). So, the moral calculus is simple: same internal culpability for the perpetrator, but different levels of damage to the victims results in different levels of moral culpability.

And even for such heinous crimes, the death penalty is not acceptable, nor is corporal punishment. There is still value in a human life beyond such crimes. In addition, there is always the problem of applying major punishments to people who are actually innocent - which is a far more common occurence than proponents of such punishments typically admit. How happy would you be to be killed because you got confused for a scammer?

Not to mention, the deterrence effect is vastly overstated - there is little evidence of a significant difference in rates of major crime depending on the level of punishment, beyond some relatively basic level. Actual success rates of enforcement are a much more powerful predictor of crime rates. You can have the worse possible punishments, but if almost no one gets convicted, criminals will keep doing it hoping they won't personally get caught.

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ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent [-]

>No, effectiveness is not an excuse for immoral, disproportionate punishments. And morality is not nearly as irrational or difficult as you make it out to be. The victims of a scammer are not nearly as badly hurt as the victims of a pedophile.

Not true. You talk as if your views are universal fact. They are not. Effectiveness is THE only metric because what's the point if things are ineffective? Effectiveness is the driver while compassion is the cost. The more compassion the more ineffective things typically are. You need to balance the views but to balance the views you need to know the extremes. Why does Singapore work? Have you asked this question? Unlikely given your extreme view points.

At best you can just disagree with Singapore. But you can never really say that your view points are universal. Singapore chooses the make the trade off of compassion for effectiveness.

Secondly, I personally know scam victims who are worse off than pedophilia victims. Pedophilia can be a one time traumatizing act while a scam victim can lose a lifetime of work.

>Not to mention, the deterrence effect is vastly overstated - there is little evidence of a significant difference in rates of major crime depending on the level of punishment, beyond some relatively basic level. Actual success rates of enforcement are a much more powerful predictor of crime rates. You can have the worse possible punishments, but if almost no one gets convicted, criminals will keep doing it hoping they won't personally get caught.

Weed is rarely used in Singapore because of death penalty. It is highly effective. It is not overrated. There are many many example cases of it being highly effective. I believe about 15 people have been hanged.

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npteljes 4 days ago | parent [-]

>what's the point if things are ineffective

To be human, for one.

Extreme example: all you need to do to end all scams (and other, human-caused ills in the world) to just kill all humans. No humans, no human-made horrors.

Or, in case we'd like living humans, they could be kept in a way where they can't interact with one another. Boom, human on human solved.

>Pedophilia can be a one time traumatizing act while a scam victim can lose a lifetime of work.

This is very offensive, and makes zero sense, not in itself, not in the context of your argument. Please do reconsider.

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ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-]

>To be human, for one.

Humans can be evil. Realistically to be human is to straddle both sides of good and evil. It is highly unrealistic and delusional to think humanity represents a paragon of goodness. No. Often evil must be done for the greater good. This is not just a movie trope, it's also reality.

>Extreme example: all you need to do to end all scams (and other, human-caused ills in the world) to just kill all humans. No humans, no human-made horrors.

Right and the extreme example is wrong. Just like your extreme example of absolute morality at the cost of zero effectiveness.

>This is very offensive, and makes zero sense, not in itself, not in the context of your argument. Please do reconsider.

No you can't use this shit to throw your weight around. I know one person who was scammed and blew his own head off with a bullet. Which one is more offensive? You're offending me.

I think we're done. I don't want to argue with someone who uses "offense" to avoid talking about the hard things that must be talked about.

You're the type of person who thinks in terms of black and white, and you try to think that the white is the most obvious form of reality that can ever exist. But this is just the surface.

I don't know about you personally, but these are the types of people in my experience end up being similar to catholic priests in the sense that They end up doing the worst shit behind closed doors.

The people who are actually open about the their own moral faults are actually much more moral then they think. But that's just my personal experience.

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npteljes 3 days ago | parent [-]

>Humans can be evil.

My mistake. I meant to write humane there.

I don't mean to discredit your experience regarding scam victims, as the effects, just as you described, can be horrible. But there was no need to bring other horribleness into it, and compare, and minimize that other horribleness. That comparison and minimization is the offensive part.

But then again, letting the offensiveness part go, this doesn't make sense: "Pedophilia can be a one time traumatizing act while a scam victim can lose a lifetime of work". Scams can also be a one time act, not even traumatizing, and pedophilia can easily ruin someone for life.

It doesn't need a flawed argument to validate a tragic experience. Even on the internet, people can understand that it's terrible that someone took their life after losing their life's work to scams.

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ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-]

No need to bring horribleness? You are the one who brought up pedophilia.

My whole point was to bring pedophilia to the same level of severity as scams to essentially show you there’s no logical need to bring that up as a disgusting example. You heightened the level of horribleness, then pretended to be offended when I was trying to lower it.

As you say there’s no need to bring horribleness into this but you decided to do it then pretend to be offended when I compared the two.

You talk as if you’re authority. You’re saying shit like “You should do this” “Or you can’t do that” as if you’re automatically correct and dishing out orders. That’s your tone and it’s not appreciated. You “should” let your own logic stand and don’t make statements as if they are absolute truth without evidence.

The fact of the matter is to you, Singapore is inhumane. But an entire city of people disagrees with you and they have the results to show for it. So march right over to them and give them the orders you gave me. And they’ll give you the opposite order right back. That’s just your opinion. So who the fuck cares? You think telling me that I shouldn’t use severe punishment and stating it in an authoritative way is going to change my opinion? Fuck no.

Tell me why your way is objectively better. And then I’ll tell you why a place like Singapore is better.

First, Have you even considered the positive aspects of what Singapore does? The lack of accessibility of drugs alone has saved the lives of countless thousands of people who otherwise would’ve given in to temptation and ruined their own lives by becoming addicts. The cost? Roughly 15 hanged people.

Thousands of people is a loaded number I made up but it’s a reasonable ballpark counterfactual of the amount of lives saved that we can use to illustrate the deeper logic here which is this:

Your morality results in you killing more people. By being more humane you have actually done a greater evil.

That’s how the real world works. So stop tramping around and delivering orders. Tell me objectively why it’s better.

I’m betting you can’t. But go ahead, prove me wrong.

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npteljes 3 days ago | parent [-]

Nah. I won't deal with this many personal attacks. Discussion over.

	▲	ninetyninenine 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well also you're wrong and you know it. So you're running away. Your overly authoritative attitude and tonality was just wrong, especially with the "offense" bullshit, so I had to comment on it. If you read carefully, none of it was an actual attack. It just feels that way, just like how your own tonality felt like an attack to me. Good day sir.