The Utilitarian Theory of Punishment

Surprisingly, Utilitarianism gets more-or-less intuitive results when it comes to what cases of punishment are morally permissible. But to gets those results in a way that diverges from our ordinary moral intuitions.

Technically, this is a lecture about chapter 13 ofJeremy Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

[peaceofcrap]

For the first few videos of yours I saw, I was amazed at how proficiently you could write backwards on the glass. Then I realized it's probably much more likely and straightforward to assume you just write normally and then mirror the video.

[mikesnelling]

Excellent, many people seem to wilfully misunderstand Utilitarianism. Your presentation rigorously clears up many silly objections.

[michaeldrew]

The start made me chuckle. Love your sense of humour to have included that. Also while I'm commenting, I love your work/content.

[AdvocateAsaf]

Amazing lectures leaned alot from you Sir.

[VinegarBob]

14:06 'It seems totally unfair to then go back, find the people who exhibited that behavior, who acted in that now impermissible way in the past, before there was a rule against it and punish those people'. Welcome to 2023.

[khizraprincess]

Your lecture was better than reading from a book.😃

[jamesmantooth]

Thanks for providing interesting content,
and not asking me to press a button,
and leaving a few seconds of time at the end so that I could press a button if I want to.

[FranklinCounty]

This was really helpful Thank you so much.

[HandelGothicEnjoyer]

“If consequences dictate
Course of action than
It doesn’t matter what’s right
It’s only wrong if you get caught.”

[specijuma]

Thank you so much. Made it so simple to understand

[stevepowsinger]

I’m late for class but this is great stuff.

[brianover_reviews]

This was the best of your lectures that I have seen so far. I can hardly find any fault with it. And I have to say that in modern eyes, you made a great case for Utilitarianism! Any moderate or liberal person, upon hearing this lecture, would want to take the Utilitarian position. It WAS the dominant position for thousands of years to punish consensual but "deviant" sexual acts, but the majority of people in advanced countries now strongly reject that idea.

I would only add that these moral principles are not as new as you are suggesting. The morals of Jesus in the Gospels are often strongly on the side of humaneness, even for "sinners, " as long as they are repentant. (Sometimes the Old Testament takes that view.) As for no ex-post-facto laws, that's encoded in the US Constitution, and as for disliking excessive punishment, there is of course the eighth amendment in the Bill of Rights.

But, that aside, great job on this topic.

[fluffysheap]

18:20 we still punish deviant sexual acts - bestiality, incest, necrophilia. What's changed is not the philosophical position on punishing deviancy, we just don't consider homosexuality to be deviant any more.

[DJsaima]

the minute Jeffrey could not spell scenario I could relate ...hahahhaxxx

[alexsch]

As a (kinda-sorta) utilitarian person who's trying to prove that punishment is bad altogether I still love this video.

[TheAutisticPhilosopher]

Around 11 minutes, I got confused by you writing -50 and calling it the reason we must do something... Were you calling it +50 for the pleasure gained from people not being hurt by the criminal?

Being in prison = -5 pleasure
People who would have been hurt = -50 pleasure (but only if they knew they would have been hurt? Who exactly gets these pleasure points? How do you account for preventing harm of people who didn't know they were going to be harmed?)

So we end up with an end result of -5 points if we imprison the criminal, instead of the -50 points if we allow him to go out and hurt more people. Writing this out helped me understand better. In this case, the maximum pleasure is negative either way. That's what confused me I think. There's really no pleasure, but we're minimizing the pain?

By the way, great videos. Since discovering your channel I've been much less interested in gaming/funny/fails/whatever. I'd rather be thinking.

[antongusev]

It matters so it seems who one considers his community and who he chooses to ignore

[kensey]

Perhaps diminishing marginal utility can help address aggregation.

[DonutSquig]

Fun fact: there is no study that proves there is a correlation between the severity of a punishment and deterrence. Punishment as it is used in penal codes is purely a method of exacting revenge.

[r.michaelburns]

Or is it that we just don't trust that the machines would do what we're promised they would do -- that on some level, we would fundamentally know that the experiences were false and therefore the pleasure would always seem hollow, if only in some way we could never properly identify? And why assume that we are experiencing reality now? If we come to believe that we would simply be trading a mediocre false experience for a better false experience, why WOULDN'T we choose the better one? We're already testing ways of creating virtual realities and is it so unlikely that people who grow up with that technology will prefer VR to mundane reality? Aren't some people already leaning in that direction? The assumption that people will just always be inclined to turn down the Experience Machine and the rest seems to me to be just another prejudice...