You raise a good point though, some people enjoy their punishment and it gives them an incentive to commit crime. For some people jail is like this. They might have friends or family in jail, and it can give some people a sense of belonging. In this case, jail does not provide the punishment that might be required. Of course I’m sure this is the exception, not the norm.

Of course as an economist I refuse to make a moral judgement on such people…

Wrong is a value laden term. Wrong also tells us that something has a negative externality. By saying it is wrong, you are making the same value judgement that I made when I discussed that case.

Just saying something is wrong and not making a decision is not a choice. In that case the choice you make by doing nothing is to let 6 billion people die.

It is important to divide the positive and normative parts of your analysis. Economics lets us use the framework of methodological individualism to set up the problem, but we can’t make a decision until we apply some value judgements.

In the example you have provided, all choices provide a negative social welfare. The social planner should make the choice that minimises this cost. That is the positivist part. Next we need to attach values to each of the choices, which will allow us to make our decision, this is normative.

Personally I’d rather that we all died, as that would be the end of it, there would be some immediate negative impact on utility (the pain of dieing), and I’d attach zero future payoff to everyone. Compare this to the childs case, she/he gets a negative payoff immediately, and a reoccuring negative payoff into the future. However, an economist can compare individuals payoffs in an objective framework, so as soon as I do I have become subjective and what I have said is value laden.

This argument is ridiculous rauparaha, I think the people we are discussing this with (except for satsumasalad) are so desperate to sound moral and caring infront of people that they have become as close minded as the Catholic church in France before the revolution.

You do seem to be saying exactly what Idiot/Savant accuses you of…
Given a theoretical situation where the world was going to be destroyed unless the only person who could save it was allowed to rape a child, it seems like economists would agree that the benefits of saving 6 billion people would far exceed the “externality” of the rape of a child.
However it would still be wrong to let this happen.

How about removal of parts of the body for certain offences? This would be easier to implement than what most of us mean by “torture.” And we wouldn’t be alone – some parts of the world do this already. And we used to do it, not all that long ago. You could do it under general anaesthetic, it needn’t be physically painful. The “torture” would be with the criminal for the rest of their lives, of course. Would that be preferable?

I dispute though that you wouldn’t find anyone suitable who was prepared to be a torturer. Much like executioners in the days of capital punishment, being a state-sanctioned torturer/maimer would be a career like any other, distateful to some but tolerable to others. People find ways of coming to terms with things that society considers essential – abbatoir workers, undertakers, pooperscoopers, or, further along the spectrum, podiatrists or dare I say bankers – all of these are jobs I couldn’t bring myself to do, but have legions of dedicated professionals who love their work. Ever seen “Worst Jobs in History”? If society accepts and approves, you’ll get people to do the job. No worries.

It is important to realise that I’m using a simple utilitarianism framework to analyze issues. I am not trying to say what is right or wrong, just trying to understand why things can be seen as right or wrong. It is important to question our beliefs, if we don’t then we will never know if something we believe it completely wrong.

I thought that liberals would agree with this form of analysis, and it would be conservatives that would be up in arms. However, it seems that in NZ everyone calls themselves liberal so that they can feel better than other people.