The sacred mystery of any deterrence theory is that it should stop me from doing something I would otherwise do. If I claim that I am a typical person wrt this enforcement system, yet I would never do the Bad Thing, and if any circumstance that could push me to doing the Bad Thing wouldn’t be stopped by the deterrence, then what use is this punishment? It must only have in mind a vanishingly small portion of the populace.
Yet if I do admit “I would do the bad thing except for the threat levied here”, well uh, all of a sudden I would be treated as a degenerate and dangerous. Who can trust anyone that would murder you in your sleep, if they could get away with it?
I think a lot of people WOULD tell you that it’s only a small portion of the population they need to deter. I don’t know if they’re right to argue that, but I think they would bite that bullet.
the fact that millions of murderers in the 20th century were technically legitimate and thus never punished due to the fact that they were wearing uniform at the time suggests that morality is much more contingent on social context than we might naively expect, and that maintaining strong norms against murder is actually a relatively recent social technology that not all societies have and it is worth preserving it.
So in other words, “If I were not raised in this murder-hating society, and if I thought I could get away with it, then I would murder”.
Yes, but that’s a needlessly obtuse way to frame it.
Someone who lives in a peaceful and supportive community, who has a remunerative job that isn’t too awful, who has a family that loves him, will very likely never once consider turning to murder. That same guy, in the counterfactual world where he lives in a dangerous slum where only violent criminals prosper, working a back-breaking job for barely enough to survive, might well consider turning to murder. But, uh, he’s probably not sitting around contemplating the personality and the incentives of his counterfactual self. People usually don’t.
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The actual effective response here is something like:
Have you ever been to a place where there are no police? Deterrence sure seems to be doing something, at least on the macro level.
Which is not actually a surprise. If you’re contemplating a model of human nature in which everyone would immediately turn to violent savagery if it weren’t for the immediate deterrent effect of the law, then yes, you will rightly conclude that it’s very stupid. But the deterrent effect of the law is enough to make a bunch of people, on the margins, somewhat less actively criminal than they would have been otherwise. And the absence of those people’s criminal behavior is enough to make other people less criminal than they would be in a counterfactual more-criminal world. Etc. This is an actual domino effect.
Also known as “how can we build norms that stick?” in other contexts.