Do you remember a sports car like the DeLorean, which was also used as a time machine in the “Back to the Future” trilogy? The story of its creator, John DeLorean, is quite instructive. As soon as he started producing cars, he was charged with drug trafficking. Later, he was able to prove that the story had been framed by the FBI, but his entire fortune went toward paying lawyers. One can also recall many stories where someone spent a decade or two in prison, after which it turned out they were innocent. Of course, in such cases, monetary compensation may be provided. But how can you compensate for the loss of a significant part of one’s life, often the “best” part, when a person is still young, most productive, and capable of easily starting a family or building a career?
Even after proving your correctness in state courts, you can lose a lot. In far from all cases will you be entitled to even monetary compensation, and if you do achieve it, it will still not cover the loss of part of your life or the lost profit from funds that you had to spend on proceedings rather than investing. A stationary bandit, by making a mistake, can easily destroy your life.
Of course, there is an argument that this is the price that must be paid for security, and the system is permitted to sacrifice the lives of a few if it is capable of saving many. But does the person putting forward such an argument understand that the mistakes of state authorities are paid for from their own pocket? The state does not have its own money, after all. Would he pay compensation to a falsely accused person himself if it were not taken from his pocket through cleverly designed and rather hidden tax collections? Hardly; most likely, he would say that the person who made the mistake should deal with it, without reaching into his pocket as an outsider. And would he support such a system if he himself ended up among those few victims? Most likely, such a situation would anger him.
Also, conversations about the position of the permissibility of making sacrifices for the “greater good” prompt us to remember who generally possesses such a mindset. Research in which participants had to solve moral dilemmas demonstrated that psychopathic predispositions are linked to a willingness to make a sacrifice. For example, this was well shown through a modified trolley problem, in which one must decide whether it is permissible to approach one fat person and push them under the trolley to stop it and save five other people tied to the tracks. The choice in favor of making a sacrifice was linked to an increased level of all psychopathy indicators. And, it should be noted, psychopathic individuals in their responses to various dilemmas were willing to sacrifice the well-being of other people, but not willing to sacrifice their own well-being (they, of course, would not throw themselves under the trolley).
Now it is worth asking: how does the immoral and cruel choice to throw an innocent person under the trolley to save other people, which only psychopathic individuals might decide upon, differ from the choice of a stationary bandit to impose such costs of legal proceedings on a person and apply punishments that can completely destroy their life when there is a probability of their innocence? If we are going to allow the second, then it follows that the first is also permissible. But most of us are peaceful and non-psychopathic individuals who, by their own hands and decisions, would not be able to sacrifice a person. So perhaps it is not worth supporting a system that does this? And, again, you yourself would not want to suddenly find yourself in the place of the victim.
And if someone does not mind becoming a victim for the good of others, they would like to be pointed to something regarding our main theme. In such a case, they, for example, have no right to argue from the position of the inadmissibility of mandatory therapy to strengthen the violence inhibitor in individuals with its dysfunction, justifying this by the possible error of its application to the “innocent.” Is that not so?
