Is there a academic study of the heuristic of choosing between option A versus option B?
People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing. I have this terrible thought of a quant rapist: juggling their risk that the victim stays quiet or otherwise acts (police or revenge). Deciding on the Kelly Criterion for losing 20 years in prison.
I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly. It is annoying when muderers are cast as being idiots. I imagine the protagonist runs a hedge fund and gets bored of getting away with white collar crime.
In this modern age, I'm rather interested in the inverse: lawmakers doing proper scientific research, and legislating based on that; attempting to discover the sociological or economical truths rather than chasing slogans and acting on beliefs and agendas.
They do that in many countries. Basically they check the likelihood of being a repeat offender and try to minimize that. Tax crimes become harsher than violent crimes because of it, for example… it is not popular amongst the population though.
A behaviorist perspective on justice, punishment, and rehabilitation does not require morality.
1. Pragmatism - Justice can be effectively framed around practical outcomes and societal safety, it requires no moral framework.
2. Remorse and Emotional Response - Feelings of remorse can be understood as conditioned responses shaped by environmental influences rather than as reflections of moral responsibility; remorse does not necessitate moral weight as they can arise from societal conditioning and past experiences.
3. CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Approaches demonstrate that behavioral and emotional changes can occur without delving into moral implications, and requires no moral reflection.
4. Behavioral Accountability - Individuals can be held accountable for their actions based solely on their observable behavior and its consequences, without the need for moral judgments. The focus is on modifying harmful behaviors through interventions and reinforcements rather than assigning moral blame.
So, this framework provides a rational and effective approach to understanding and managing human behavior, focusing on the pragmatic aspects of justice, rehabilitation, and accountability, it does not require an already shaky and subjective moral judgment or moral accountability, and as thus, need not be morally justified.
If you want me to elaborate (with examples, too), I am willing to as my time allows.
I know a woman who was raped by her father. The state is going to release him in a few years, so now her family lives in terror of that day. Where is the justice in that, and what does the rapist bastard being or or not being a ""rational economic actor"" have to do with any of it?
Indeed, a big part of a society's system of justice is "letting most people sleep at night."
Whether there's justice or not in a rapist serving their sentence and going free (given that, one assumes, the sentencing guidelines were decided by dispassionate thinkers trying to reason about society as a whole)... It goes out the window if a family lives in so much fear they decide to "fix" the issue by taking the law into their own hands.
Then the society has to decide whether to jail the family, and so on.
Hammurabi's code seems harsh by modern standards, but at the time it was positively progressive. It was attempting to replace a retaliatory tradition so bloody it could wipe out entire bloodlines. He was trying to impose an upper limit on consequence to allow a society of semi-strangers to reach some meta-stability.
>Is there a academic study of the heuristic of choosing between option A versus option B?
I don't know of a paper on that specific question, but for example, Gary Becker got his Nobel prize because he applied economics to a wide range of human behavior including crime and punishment. Here is a famous paper of his on crime:
> I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly.
At the start of the movie Heat, one of the hot head robbers kills one of the guards. De Niro, the leader of the robbers, immediately kills the other guard and says something along the lines of 'it's capital murder either way so may as well not leave any witnesses'. Ultimately, it's Di Nero being non-rational and driven by emotion that leads to the final scene in the movie.
> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers.
This imperfection feeds into the argument for not punishing rape as harshly as murder: the rapist is likely to misjudge the chances of the murder being discovered and traced back to them, when doing the risk math to decide how to proceed. If their imperfect thinking leads them to overestimate their chance of pulling off the perfect murder (or the perfect coverup after one) then that pushes the chance of equal punishment leading to more murders higher.
"Doing risk math" oversells it for crimes of opportunity, where decisions about how to keep the action quiet after it has happened is going to be very emotion/panic (rather than facts/stats) driven, but for premeditated attacks I suspect things will flip the other way.
> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing.
why is that a good thing?
Perfect economic thinkers are good, because they'd be predictable and can be reasoned with. Providing economic incentives to such means you can direct behaviour in an easy and efficient way.
Irrational thinkers cannot be reasoned with via economic rationality. Therefore, either you have to stack the incentives so high that the cost becomes overbearing, or you use some other means of control that's less nice.
Being perfect economic thinkers doesn't mean they are all powerful. How does one go kill one guy without consequence? The only person this perfect economic thinker has access to is himself, and surely, he values his own life at infinity.
Ethics is an agreement between people in society, which cannot be captured via economic rationalism alone, but economic rationalism can take into account current ethics, as well as other actors' propensity for more or less ethics.
People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing. I have this terrible thought of a quant rapist: juggling their risk that the victim stays quiet or otherwise acts (police or revenge). Deciding on the Kelly Criterion for losing 20 years in prison.
I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly. It is annoying when muderers are cast as being idiots. I imagine the protagonist runs a hedge fund and gets bored of getting away with white collar crime.