The world is filled with cheaters, thieves, killers and other individuals that disregard laws or established ethical standards and allegedly put their own interests before those of society when the two conflict.
Would the human species be better off without them?
I realize that some laws are bad and that it is impossible to agree on one set of ethical rules nor determine who’s right or wrong in many cases. The world is complex and there are many shades of grey.
Let me give a couple of examples:
Two hunters, let’s call them Toto and Nunu from the wiwi tribe find a rabbit. One of them, Toto, kills Nunu so that he can get all the glory and have a bigger piece of rabbit (He just loves rabbit, what can I say…).
Toto takes credit for a scientific breakthrough actually made by brilliant Nunu. He gets rich and Nunu starts drinking and becomes a hobo.
In both cases, this seems a clear loss for the tribe and society as a whole. Less hunters is bad. Less smart people is bad.
Feel free to make whatever assumptions to make the question valid. I personally view it as benefits of eliminating an enormous amount of overhead (jails, police force, safes, armies, encryption, fences, locks, DRM,etc.) VS. the drawback of reducing diversity and becoming weaker (What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?). Diversity is good for longterm survival.
If those ethical standards include beating your wife, sending children to work in coal mines, or telling bounty hunters where they can find runaway slaves then I think it’s safe to say that those people are doing society as a whole a service. What is currently the established law or ethical standards aren’t always morally correct.
Of course not. I’m asking if the elimination of the elements I described would harm our species in the long term. I’m trying to look at humanity in the same way a myrmecologist would look at a bunch of anthills: without regard for individuals in the colony and with a long-term view.
My questions are vague partly because I do not have the necessary skill to properly translate the concepts in my head into words and partly because I don’t want other people to be constrained by an overly narrow topic.
I guess I’m just wondering whether a human society in a hypothetical earth did not know crime of any kind would fare better than ours in the long run or not. What are the ramifications of such a drastic change? I hope this makes it clearer.
I think, maybe, you are asking whether ethical deviants bring more to the party than they take away.
Possibly that a disregard for rules is coupled with an ability to ‘think outside the envelope’
I’m not sure, I’ve generally thought that getting caught doing something ‘wrong’ is a sign of stupidity - however there is plenty of scope for breaking conventions without resorting to criminality.
Um…yes. The problem is that no one is 100% cheater, killer or thief and we don’t know who is until they commit one of these acts. That’s why we, as a society, allow you to do what you want until you do something that breaks the rules. At that point we take you out of society for what one would hope is an appropriate amount of time. Once you’ve learned your lesson, we let you back in to try again (provided your crime wasn’t that severe).