Moral Principles & Justice

I'd like to take for an example, the moral case of the German national courts' decision to stop "haftpflichtbewaerung" (keeping especially dangerous criminals in jail after their sentences are up), merely because of the basic morality of "one crime, one punishment" (and, of course, maximum life sentence being like 20 years or so). It's obvious that these criminals belong in jail for the rest of their lives or dead-they will continue to be ridiculously dangerous. So why do we follow the morality of respecting their rights, even though it is ridiculously detrimental to the community?

It would depend on how the society wants to model their judicial system. If imprisonment is supposed to be serving a debt to society, then a fixed time would be adequate, such as in this case, and extending that time would be unfair. If imprisonment is to separate violent criminals from society, then the sentence would not be 20 years, it would be life with possibility of parole, and their behavior in prison would indicate whether or not their violent behavior has changed. This would also be consistent with using prison as a form of rehabilitation. Basically, they decided that it is more "fair" for someone to receive the time they received than to prolong their sentence.

This principle of fairness has value to us and can be demonstrated by experiment. "The ultimatum game is a game often played in economic experiments in which two players interact to decide how to divide a sum of money that is given to them. The first player proposes how to divide the sum between the two players, and the second player can either accept or reject this proposal. If the second player rejects, neither player receives anything. If the second player accepts, the money is split according to the proposal. The game is played only once so that reciprocation is not an issue."

So, experimenter gives Person A 10 dollars, and then Person A offers Person B part of the 10 dollars and then Person B decides to accept the deal or reject the deal. If both people are perfectly rational, Person A would give Person B 1 dollar and Person B would accept the deal since receiving 1 dollar is a better payoff than zero. However, most people reject an offer of 1 dollar. People value "fairness" so people reject the offer since the other person is being unfair. Knowing this, if you ever participate in such an experiment, don't offer 1 dollar, but something more fair such as 3-5 dollars. It might seem like both participants would have a net gain in happiness if they left with more money than they came in, but that is not what experiments show.

We value fairness, so we want society to have fair rules, and haftpflichtbewaerung was judged to be unfair by that society. On the surface, it might appear that implementing haftpflichtbewaerung would result in a net gain, but it is not necessarily the case. It would be similar to saying, "why do we have the burden of proof on the prosecutor and not the defendant?" It would result in more arrests and make society safer. But in the process, we would have to sacrifice our values to implement it. It has been traditionally said that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer." Society has determined that these principles are more consistent with their values and if it means a little more crime, it is worth the cost.