sorry for the double post but I wanted to get this off my chest:
I don't want GAF to think I don't appreciate the time taken by all of you to formulate and write all the responses and comments, because I very much do, and I continue to spend time thinking about your criticisms.
But it still seems to me that many moral justifications being brought up against my thoughts on this matter are rather shaky, unless people's definition of morality is more about practicality, convenience to society and distancing ourselves from possible blame.
Clearly removing a dangerous criminal from among us is more urgent than helping a person in need, since ignoring the former could result in damage to society as a whole, whereas ignoring the latter will probably only result in damage to that particular person and possibly those close to them.
But that's not a moral argument in my opinion, it's a practical one. And taking it further - justifying an investment in rehabilitating criminals by saying it comes from "empathy" seems inconsistent to me if a similar investment isn't made in rehabilitating non-criminals in need of assistance. Why is it reasonable to exercise this empathy on members of the one group when there are still members of the other group in need of it?
A partial answer to this that has come up a lot is that "there is a chance these criminals are actually innocent and as such deserve our empathy, because harming an innocent person by mistake is deeply wrong."
To which I ask: Is it more wrong to harm an innocent person due to mistakenly identifying them as a criminal than to bring harm due to negligence and apathy to someone we have no reason to believe is a criminal to begin with?
Once again, it seems like the actual reason we do this is more about practicality and convenience to society than about being moral or empathic. Nobody wants to know they were directly responsible in harming an innocent person, but if an innocent person is harmed because of a more ambiguous systemic failure then there is less reason for anyone in particular to feel guilty...
If I changed the morbid hypothetical kickstarter situation by replacing "criminal sentenced to death" with "terminally ill innocent person who can't afford a life saving (or life prolonging) treatment" would it still be just as morbid and offensive?
It would look something like this:
Let's say I've been diagnosed with a deadly illness and have 1 year to live. During that year I'm essentially immobile, in a hospital, but I can seek financial assistance from anybody willing to hear me, and I can use this assistance to buy additional years of life prolonging treatment (which keeps me bed-ridden in the hospital but alive) or to hire a lawyer and appeal the state's decision not to pay for an expensive cure, or to hire a private investigator in the hopes of uncovering new evidence regarding the circumstances of my illness, etc.
(Maybe I want to prove the illness was brought on by poor work conditions, therefore justifying my claim that I deserve the necessary payment for the cure).
Since my options for earning money within the hospital are rather limited I decide to set up a public fund, a sort of kickstarter or patreon if you will. People can donate money and I can give regular updates about what I'm doing with that money, and as long as I can pay for the things I mentioned above the cost to the taxpayer of keeping me alive would be almost nothing - essentially just the cost of running the patreon.
Lastly, something important I have learned from this thread so far is that money may not be the optimal metric used to examine this situation. Perhaps a combination of court time, public discourse, media coverage and funds spent should be used instead. And when I do this it seems to make even less sense to me that all these limited resources be concentrated so heavily on extreme criminal offenses. It's true that by doing so we greatly increase the chances of saving a wrongly accused person from irreversible punishment, but it also means we are taking away court time, media coverage, public discourse etc that could have been used to help many other individuals who will die in anonymity because they didn't do enough harm to society to warrant our attention...
