Though I guess we could look at crime stats still and notice crime dropped around the same time the machine was built. Well not the same time as the machine’s first subjects would be people committed violence well before their conviction and erasure. But a funny thought: this would be faith based technology. We would have to believe that the completely unremembered use of this machine is doing good.
The fact that we couldn’t assess negative effects, which are unpredictable, it would be insanely foolhardy to pursue this just to prevent some murders.
Not going to argue the hypothetical, just the questions in the OP:
**is this an ethical punishment? **
No. Personally, I value life quite highly, so I would consider nonexistence an even worse fate than even capital punishment. Since I don’t consider the DP ethically appropriate for even multiple murders, I don’t think this punishment is ethical either. Is it better than the death penalty?
No, it’s worse - there’s even less chance of a reprieve for the innocent, there’s no mechanism to learn from people’s bad example (Ever hear the expression “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”? Well, this device is a history unremembering device.)
**Would you support it, if you lived in this world where violent crime had dropped off since it started being used? **
No. Just as I am not a supporter of the death penalty even if it could be shown to reduce crime. I am not a utilitarian.
No, we’d be in a perpetual state of not being able to prove that we’d ever used the machine, but nevertheless suspecting that we had.
Maybe one of these machines was secretly invented in the late '80s, explaining the big crime drop in the 90s.
I think a more likely sign is that the current government keeps winning election after election because the opposition parties can’t seem to find anyone electable to run against them. And disliked groups suddenly start having inexplicably low birth rates.
Sounds like Lord Dunsany’s classic (but surprisingly little-known) 1906 story The King that was Not*
If you could build a device or create a magic spell that worked as advertised, how would you ever know that it worked? By definition, you yourself would be unaware of its operation. For all you knew, you pressed a button or cranked a handle or recited a spell and nothing happened. In fact, for all we know, such a device exists right now, but even its creator is unaware of its power. Scary stuff. It ought to be kept in the same room with the Universal Solvent.
On a “practical” matter, if you could use such a thing (were convinced it really did exist and knew, however fleetingly, that it had worked) how is its use different from simply shooting the object of your disapprobation? How is it any less murder, even if you don’t get blood on either your hands or your conscience?
Even if the technology were scientifically possible, the device would never exist. Consider some of the things that have to happen to bring a product to market. The inventor would get to the testing phase of the device and scrap it because there is no evidence that it works.
Since your OP says that there is no evidence that it works other than look back at crime statistics, it has no chance of being introduced.
Beyond that no prototype will work. Nobody will produce any product that doesn’t work. Nobody will intentionally buy something that doesn’t work.
How does application of this device reduce the violent crime rate? Are we assuming that there are a finite number of murderers and this will eventually eliminate all of them? Even if the death penalty were rigorously enforced, nobody believes it would eliminate all murders.
But to answer the OP:
It would not be ethical because of the changes forced on innocent, non-consenting people.
It is not better than the death penalty. As stated in the OP, the only violent criminals that would escape this punishment are the ones that got away. And since nobody would remember any of the murderers that were erased, the message to every would-be murderer would be: No murderer is ever caught. They all get away.
I am. No such machine could exist since you would have no way of testing it to know that it worked. What the OP is proposing is a logical impossibility.
Thank you to those of you who aren’t fighting it. I’m really just asking the question “is non-existence a fate worse than death?” If we could undo crimes by erasing people from history, should we do it?
I think if you could somehow do this without the butterfly effect screwing up the rest of our lives, it would be great. It’s the random re-shuffling of everyone else’s experience that people are having a problem with.
Yes, sure, and since I was Tonysinclair’s child with the woman he never met, I’m erased from existence as well, along with your criminals. Love the concept.
I’m entirely with Tonysaintclair on this one. If this machine ever get invented, let’s erase its inventor first thing so that this mass-murdering device never existed.
“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
The idea of the OP, I think, is to inter all an evil-doers actions with his bones. We not only throw him away as trash – the way we do with any executed criminal – but we expunge the record, delete his name, burn his books and papers, and everyone agrees never to mention his name again. The OP simply suggests a magical kind of way that this is enforced into technological law. No one actually remembers him.
Worse than death? No. Not really. Once you’ve decided to execute someone, there really isn’t much more you can add to this. (I suppose you could torture him to death, but, in the end, he’s dead. You can leave the corpse hanging from the gibbet until it rots, but that doesn’t add anything to the guy’s suffering.)
If that were all there were to it, I’d oppose it, but only mildly. It seems a shame to lose out on any good the guy might have done in his life.
It’s all of the other baggage involved in the hypothesis that complicates it, so that I can only really support it in the most extreme of cases. Nuclear war, asteroid impact, etc.
This is the crux of the problem. Every time it’s used, history is being rewritten, and it would appear that we live in a world that has been devoid of major crimes. There would be no “default” to compare it to.
How do we know it hasn’t already been invented and used? That 1997 nuclear attack on Washington DC never happened. The deadly ebola outbreak in Chicago never happened. Jack the Ripper II never terrorized London. And the attacks that leveled Dubai never happened.
And the global attacks on 9/11, annihilating tens of millions, were reduced to merely 3000 fatalities.
So if a guy pushes the red button and causes armageddon, he gets erased from history. But the guy who breaks into your house and murders everyone you love, or the guy who shoots up the elementary school down the street, or the guy who bombs the local marathon? Why not erase them and undo all that mayhem?
I think in the hypothetical, people know the machine exists, and they can infer that it works based on the fact that ever since it was invented (but from their perspective, never actually used), there is no more heinous crime.
