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by caf 937 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.