Expanding on this: I don’t think ‘fairness’ is a fundamental part of morality. It’s better for good things to happen than bad ones, regardless of how they’re distributed, and it’s bad to sacrifice utility for fairness.
However, I think there are some aspects of policy where fairness is instrumentally really useful, and I think the justice system is the single place where it’s most useful, and the will/preferences of the American populace is demonstrably for a justice system to embody fairness, and so it seems to me that we’re missing a really important point if we decide that it’s not a problem for a justice system to badly fail to embody the values it was intended to embody just because we don’t non-instrumentally value fairness.
My perspective here is that many forms of fairness are inconsistent, and fall apart on significant moral introspection as you try to make your moral preferences consistent. I think the skin-color thing is one of them, which is really hard to maintain as something that you shouldn’t pay attention to, as you realize that it can’t be causally disentangled from other factors that you feel like you definitely should pay attention to (such as the person’s physical strength, or their height, or the speed at which they can run).
Not paying attention to skin color has to mean that you don’t pay attention to physical strength, since those are causally entangled in a way that makes it impossible to pay attention to one without the other. You won’t ever have full information on someone’s physical strength, so hearing about their ethnic background will always give you additional evidence. Skin color is not an isolated epiphenomenal node in the causal structure of the world, and you can’t just decide to “not discriminate on it” without stopping to pay attention to every single phenomenon that is correlated with it and that you can’t fully screen off, which is a really large range of things that you would definitely want to know in a criminal investigation.
My perspective here is that many forms of fairness are inconsistent, and fall apart on significant moral introspection as you try to make your moral preferences consistent. I think the skin-color thing is one of them, which is really hard to maintain as something that you shouldn’t pay attention to, as you realize that it can’t be causally disentangled from other factors that you feel like you definitely should pay attention to (such as the person’s physical strength, or their height, or the speed at which they can run).
I think that a sensible interpretation of “is the justice system (or society in general) fair” is “does the justice system (or society) reward behaviors that are good overall, and punish behaviors that are bad overall”; in other words, can you count on society to cooperate with you rather than defect on you if you cooperate with it. If you get jailed based (in part) on your skin color, then if you have the wrong skin color (which you can’t affect), there’s an increased probability of society defecting on you regardless of whether you cooperate or defect. This means that you have an extra incentive to defect since you might get defected on anyway. This feels like a sensible thing to try to avoid.
This is not for criminal investigation. This is for, when a person has been convicted of a crime, estimating when to release them (by estimating how likely they are to commit another crime).
Will write a longer reply later, since I am about to board a plane.
I was indeed thinking of a criminal investigation context, but I think the question of how likely someone is to commit further crimes is likely to be directly related to their ability to commit further crimes, which will depend on many of the variables I mentioned above, and so the same argument holds.
I expect those variables to still be highly relevant when you want to assess the likelihood of another crime, and there are many more that are more obviously relevant and also correlated with race (such as their impulsivity, their likelihood to get addicted to drugs, etc.). Do you think we should not take into account someone’s impulsivity when predicting whether they will commit more crimes?
Expanding on this: I don’t think ‘fairness’ is a fundamental part of morality. It’s better for good things to happen than bad ones, regardless of how they’re distributed, and it’s bad to sacrifice utility for fairness.
However, I think there are some aspects of policy where fairness is instrumentally really useful, and I think the justice system is the single place where it’s most useful, and the will/preferences of the American populace is demonstrably for a justice system to embody fairness, and so it seems to me that we’re missing a really important point if we decide that it’s not a problem for a justice system to badly fail to embody the values it was intended to embody just because we don’t non-instrumentally value fairness.
My perspective here is that many forms of fairness are inconsistent, and fall apart on significant moral introspection as you try to make your moral preferences consistent. I think the skin-color thing is one of them, which is really hard to maintain as something that you shouldn’t pay attention to, as you realize that it can’t be causally disentangled from other factors that you feel like you definitely should pay attention to (such as the person’s physical strength, or their height, or the speed at which they can run).
Not paying attention to skin color has to mean that you don’t pay attention to physical strength, since those are causally entangled in a way that makes it impossible to pay attention to one without the other. You won’t ever have full information on someone’s physical strength, so hearing about their ethnic background will always give you additional evidence. Skin color is not an isolated epiphenomenal node in the causal structure of the world, and you can’t just decide to “not discriminate on it” without stopping to pay attention to every single phenomenon that is correlated with it and that you can’t fully screen off, which is a really large range of things that you would definitely want to know in a criminal investigation.
I think that a sensible interpretation of “is the justice system (or society in general) fair” is “does the justice system (or society) reward behaviors that are good overall, and punish behaviors that are bad overall”; in other words, can you count on society to cooperate with you rather than defect on you if you cooperate with it. If you get jailed based (in part) on your skin color, then if you have the wrong skin color (which you can’t affect), there’s an increased probability of society defecting on you regardless of whether you cooperate or defect. This means that you have an extra incentive to defect since you might get defected on anyway. This feels like a sensible thing to try to avoid.
This is not for criminal investigation. This is for, when a person has been convicted of a crime, estimating when to release them (by estimating how likely they are to commit another crime).
Will write a longer reply later, since I am about to board a plane.
I was indeed thinking of a criminal investigation context, but I think the question of how likely someone is to commit further crimes is likely to be directly related to their ability to commit further crimes, which will depend on many of the variables I mentioned above, and so the same argument holds.
I expect those variables to still be highly relevant when you want to assess the likelihood of another crime, and there are many more that are more obviously relevant and also correlated with race (such as their impulsivity, their likelihood to get addicted to drugs, etc.). Do you think we should not take into account someone’s impulsivity when predicting whether they will commit more crimes?