| > if you apply civil standards of proof, you can't mete out punishments. You can only adjudicate rights: "which one of us gets to stay?" So you're fine with expelling a student (and likely ruining his life) on the basis of the findings of this 'court', so long as we don't admit that it's effectively a punishment? > You can't ignore the cost of false negatives in order to avoid false positives. So you disagree with Blackstone's "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", I take it? Erring on the side of 'not guilty' is a cornerstone of civilised justice systems. It isn't 'ignoring' anything. > if you're being rational, you're trying to minimize SocialCost(false_positives) + SocialCost(false_negatives). No. Again I refer you to Blackstone's formulation. Your utility function fails to capture the whole picture. > Setting the burden of proof high to minimize false positives does not minimize the total social cost. Yes it does. Blackstone was right. What you are suggesting undermines the legitimacy of the justice system, which brings great costs. It also makes false accusations more likely, as well as more harmful. It also assumes that a bad outcome is no worse for having been committed by the state, which is not so; it is far worse that an injustice be committed by the state than by ordinary citizens. |