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[Sep. 5th, 2009|01:32 pm]
Scott
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I've got a British roommate and so I mostly read the British papers. The British have this thing where they think the think the rest of the world cares about what's happening in Britain a lot more than they actually do. They're always writing things like "Imagine what the average American must think of our government when they hear about Gordon Brown's latest blunder," whereas the real average American's response to hearing the news would be something like "The Prime Minister of Britain is named Gordon Brown? I must save that information in case I am ever a contestant on Jeopardy!"
So according the British papers, the eyes of the whole world are on Britain because of the Lockerbie bomber release case. I don't know if any of you Americans have heard about it. In 1988, a Boeing jet got bombed by terrorists and destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing about 200 people. The Libyans were very into terrorism at the time, and after a brief investigation, the bombing was traced to a Libyan agent named al-Megrahi, who was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. He was recently diagnosed with incurable cancer, and a few weeks ago the Scottish government decided to release him on "compassionate leave" so he could spend the last few months of his life among friends and family in Libya.
The British are outraged, and the British newspapers say the Americans are outraged too. They think that this is a horrible miscarriage of justice and that for sinister reasons one of the world's most evil terrorists has been allowed to walk away. There are actually two good conspiracy theories going on. One is that al-Megrahi is innocent. A lot of smart people believe this one, and according to Wikipedia a bunch of key witnesses in his case later admitted they totally made up large chunks of the case against him. According to this theory, he was going to launch an appeal that would prove his innocence, and the British released him so the truth would never come out. According to the other conspiracy theory, a British company wanted a multi-billion pound oil deal in Libya, and the dictator of Libya struck a deal with Britain that he'd give them the oil if they released this famous Libyan terrorist.
Let's forget the first conspiracy theory for a while and focus on the second. Why not? Everyone else is. In this case, the British released a terrorist who killed hundreds of people for the sake of corporate profits. We should be absolutely OUTRAGED, right?
Eh. I personally think it was just the nice thing to do. Let me explain.
There are traditionally several reasons given for punishing criminals. One, keeping them off the streets. If they're in prison, they can't commit any more crimes, and the rest of us are safer. Two, deterrence. If you know that robbers get stuck in prison for twenty years, you'll think twice before robbing people. Three, we enjoy watching people suffer when we can say "they deserve it".
Needless to say, I think two of these are good reasons. As a determinist and a utilitarian, I can't approve of making someone suffer just because "they deserve it". The determinist in me says "No, they don't deserve it". There but for the grace of genetics, environment, parenting, education, and geography go I. If al-Megrahi only turned terrorist because of factors outside his control (ie, everything), we can't hold his being a terrorist against him. We can lock him away so he can't hurt anyone, sure, but we can't hold it against him. And as a utilitarian, well, the principle of utility doesn't contain a term for "deserves". Making people suffer is bad. If making bad people suffer became good, we get into loads of trouble, including the sort of trouble that makes people become terrorists in the first place.
We know from evolutionary psychology that our desire to see bad people suffer is actually only the lower-brain-function version of the first two reasons mentioned, incapacitation and deterrence. Before we were smart enough to have big, multi-syllabic words like "incapacitation" and "deterrence", we still needed to incapacitate and deter criminals. So we evolved an unconscious mechanism for taking care of this - a feeling of wanting to make bad people suffer. This feeling took care of incapacitating and deterrint bad people for the first several eons of our evolution. Now we're smart enough to do it consciously and we don't have to worry so much about the "make bad people suffer" feeling, which misfires as often as not.
We don't need to incapacitate al-Megrahi any more. He's on his death-bed and in no condition to do any more terrorism. And letting him go won't hurt our ability to deter anyone else. No terrorist is going to think "Well, I was going to avoid bombing that airplane because I wanted to avoid spending my life in jail. But now I see that I won't necessarily spend my whole life in jail; if I contract an incurable form of cancer, I might be released a month or so before I die so I can say goodbye to my family. Quick, someone get me a pound of plastic explosives!"
So we have no reason to keep al-Megrahi in jail, and our reason for letting him out of jail is the principle of utility - it's simply a nice thing to do. Letting an old man die at home surrounded by his friends and family is nice whether it's a farmer from Kansas or a terrorist from Libya.
But thus far, we've been ignoring the theory that this is all part of a plot to make money for the oil companies by currying favor with the dictator of Libya so he gives British companies drilling rights. How does that factor in?
Well, let's start off by assuming we don't care much about how much money the oil companies make. This isn't very nice of us, but it's probably a correct assumption. Let's also assume we don't care that much about the employees of the oil companies. Also not very nice, but again, probably true.
How about this, then? The British government taxes corporations. I don't know how much, but let's say 30%. The papers keep referring to this oil deal as "multi-billion pound", so let's say it's a three billion pound oil deal. That means the British government would get a billion pounds extra taxes off of it.
To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "With a billion pounds, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all sorts of useful things like...love!"
Seriously, think how much the British government could buy with an extra billion pounds*. Several new schools? Maybe a hospital? 2.2 million new Corgis for the Queen?
Actually, we can go further with this. A few posts ago, I mentioned how in an efficient health care system, a human life might be valued at about $5.8 million - that's £3.5 million. Britain's National Health Service is pretty efficient, and I wouldn't be surprised if they used some sort of similar calculation. Let's say they do. In that case, £1 billion would be enough money to save about 172 British lives**.
So our problem is that the British government can do only one of the following two things:a) save 172 British lives.
b) prevent an old man with cancer from dying at home with his family.
I know which one I would choose.
...even without taking into account that the guy involved is quite possibly innocent.
By an interesting coincidence, 172 people is pretty close to the number killed during the original Lockerbie bombing. Refusing to release the Lockerbie bomber would be about equivalent, in terms of human cost, to committing the bombing in the first place. I'm not saying that the intentions involved are equivalent. Just that the consequences (ie the part of an action not used to pave the road to Hell) would be.
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." - Bertrand Russell
Footnotes
* One could make the following argument: if the British don't get the oil deal, someone else, let's say the French, will. The British public, if they are all good utilitarians, shouldn't care any more about themselves than the French. Therefore, there is no advantage to getting the oil deal. However, the British public are not all good utilitarians. If they were all good utilitarians, they could donate the billion pounds to starving Africans, and generate more utility than the French could. (In a counterfactual universe where everyone is good utilitarians, then no, it doesn't matter who gets the oil, but that's sufficiently different from this universe not to matter.)
** Not actually true because of this phenomenon, but still worth thinking about. |
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