Probabilistic, Reformative Justice

Introduction Imagine you are an all-powerful judge, presented with two indistinguishable copies of the same person — one evil and one good. You know that one of them has committed multiple murders, whilst the other one is completely innocent. However, it is impossible for you to figure which is which. Letting both walk free feels wrong, and convicting both feels worse. Intuitively, some form of compromise would be best.The hypothetical is contrived, but it illustrates the point I’d like to argue: the outcome of criminal cases largely follow a binary distinction, one that makes sense if the innocence/guilt of the subject is of crucial importance, but otherwise doesn’t. The core of this argument was developed by Fisher in Conviction without Conviction (2012).[1]Exposition and TaxonomyThe questions “Why do we enforce justice?” and “How do we enforce justice?” tell you a lot about a society. They split paradigms of justice along two axes: punitive vs. reformative, and binary vs. probabilistic. Here’s a table to illustrate the taxonomy, as well as my ranking for each quadrant:PunitiveReformativeBinary32Probabilistic4 (worst)1 (best)Let’s start with the mjx-math { display: inline-block; text-align: left; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; border-collapse: collapse; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; direction: ltr; padding: 1px 0; } mjx-container[jax="CHTML"][display="true"] { display: block; text-align: center; margin: 1em 0; } mjx-container[jax="CHTML"][display="true"][width="full"] { display: flex; } mjx-container[jax="CHTML"][display="true"] mjx-math { padding: 0; } mjx-container[jax="CHTML"][justify="left"] { text-align: left; } mjx-container[jax="CHTML"][justify="right"] { text-align: right; } mjx-mi { display: inline-block; text-align: left; } mjx-c { display: inline-block; } mjx-utext { display: inline-block; padding: .75em 0 .2em 0; } m