[kawhah]

> for every fairly executed person we can have up to one wrongly executed person, and that's totally fine?

you are confusing two ratios. the number of fairly executed people and the number of guilty people who are acquitted are obviously totally different.

[zoky]

But that's the standard, isn't it? Better 10 guilty men go free than one man wrongly imprisoned? And since we're talking about lives saved versus lives lost, it seems appropriate to apply the same metric. So how many people would have to be actually guilty of murder and fairly executed to justify wrongfully killing a single innocent human being?

Personally, I'd say that number is really high, possibly infinite. I'm not inherently opposed to the death penalty, but I can't think of any fair number of actual murderers I'd be willing to execute if it meant the death of somebody who truly didn't deserve it.

[caf]

It's a different case, because one compares two very different harms: "guilty man goes free" vs "innocent man imprisoned", and the other compares two very similar harms: "person dies".

The whole point of the "Better 10 guilty men go free..." aphorism is that the two harms are not equal, and that a guilty man going free is less than 10% of the harm of an innocent man imprisoned.

The driving interlock case is just a straight up classic trolley problem.

[anonymous_sorry]

I guess the argument is we shouldn't be endangering people who desperately need to be able to drive "erratically" for good reasons, in order to protect drunk-drivers from themselves.

I suppose have some sympathy with that argument, which is why I said a minimum of 1:1 (a lower bound on the ratio).

Drunk drivers kill innocent people as well of course.