The short version is that in a society where justice relies on the strength of the individual, there is more conflict, more injury, and more murder. In areas of the USA with more of an honor culture, the murder rate is 10x what it is in areas without one.

The problem is that in an honor culture, people have a need to demonstrate how capable they are so that they will not be considered potential targets. This demonstration takes the form of proving that you will be willing to seek to right any perceived injustice, and are capable of doing so. But these demonstrations tend to involve violence, and lead to conflict. Up to and including murder.

In a law and order society, by contrast, people's safety is based on the continuation of law and order. Which means that justice is available to all, regardless of strength.

Consider. The strength difference between the average man and average woman is the difference between the average NFL linebacker and the average man. Do you think it right that the average woman's ability to obtain justice is dependent on whether some man stands up for her? And yet that is how things tend to work out in an honor culture.

I want to live in a law and order society. A place where potential rapists are deciding whether to worry about the police, and not whether to worry about me.

I've heard of guns described as 'the great equalizer'. An NFL linebacker, average man, and an average woman would each have an approximately equal ability to obtain 'justice'.

> I want to live in a law and order society. A place where potential rapists are deciding whether to worry about the police, and not whether to worry about me.

As someone else pointed out, the prison term for rape is about 10 years. So in your society, potential rapists worry about facing 10 years in prison, and in the other, an extrajudicial death penalty. Seems to me the latter might be a better deterrent.

There is no need to theorize. You can just look at statistics. According to Wikipedia, the rape rate in Germany is estimated at 9 per 100,000. (Men and women.) The rape rate in the USA is estimated at 2.1 per thousand women per year. Rapes happen per capita at 10x the rate in the USA as in Germany.

Theories about deterrence notwithstanding, Germany is actually working out better than the USA. This is typical of other statistics that I've seen. Being in a society that has internalized law and order is safer. By about a factor of 10.

(Side note. The internalized US belief in deterrence is why we have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. And yet we also have higher rates of violent crime than any other developed nation. Deterrence may sound good, but it doesn't seem to work out very well in practice.)

It's a cool statistic, but it only says that whatever the US is doing must be worse than whatever Germany is doing. You would also have to say that the two countries are sufficiently representative of law and order vs. extrajudicial, which I don't think is true.

As an example, over 40% of Americans have a gun in the house, and the most common reason given is self-defense. We literally have more civilian owned guns than civilians.

Meanwhile in Germany it is estimated there are 5x as many people as civilian owned guns, and over 60% of the population wishes to increase restrictions on gun ownership. The idea that you should want to own a gun to defend your home or person is nowhere in the national discourse.

When it comes to rape and violent crimes, Germany is more of the rule than the exception. Europe is generally at similar rates to Germany. The USA is an outlier. Within the USA, areas with more of a historical honor culture (for example the South), have higher murder rates than areas without (like New England). Internationally, all countries with murder rates above the USA's also have a belief that it is your individual responsibility to defend yourself.

For a source of all of this, and more, read Enlightenment Now. Seriously. There is a very strong correlation, which is likely causative, behind violent crime rates and a belief that you are responsible for protecting yourself and your loved ones from a violent world.

You're trying to equate 'extrajudicial death penalties' (and in context, they were revenge-based, not defensive) with gun ownership and self-defense.

You're then equating 'Germans don't really think about using guns for self-defense' with 'a law and order society'.

And then you're trying to say that we can make informed comments about "extrajudicial death penalty vs. law and order society" by looking at "more gun ownership in the US vs. less gun ownership in Germany". It just doesn't compute.

The comparison isn't there. The stats don't fit the argument.

You're right that I'm stating things that are correlated without showing a good argument for causation. But the book that I keep recommending, which (incidentally) is on record as Bill Gates' favorite book, shows multiple lines of evidence including lines that indicate causation.

But if you don't want to be convinced, I won't bother trying to convince you. Because any one line of evidence is easily dismissed and life is too short for me to pursue this topic in full depth.

So far, my original interest in the book from your earlier mention has been reduced by your less-than-stellar use of statistics in making your point. If that's all the book offers, my time is better spent elsewhere.

As for this topic, let me add some more. In interviews with convicted murderers, the most common reason for murder is that they felt wronged and that there was no other form of justice available to them. This is direct evidence that a desire for extrajudicial justice is the top cause of murder.

Murder is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated in places and communities where people feel that they do not have access to the justice system. In the USA that means concentrated in minorities, inner cities, and rural areas. Unsurprisingly, murders are concentrated in the same groups.

This suggests that improving trust in the police should reduce crime. In fact that is the idea behind community policing, and there is evidence suggesting that it really works.

Let's focus on minorities for a second.

From https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/03/10-things-w... you can verify that over 80% of blacks believe that the police system is unfair to them. Over 60% of whites agree with that assessment. We had a bunch of protests last year over this issue.

Independent research has verified that the blacks are basically correct. This has lead to consequences including many successful lawsuits that put various police departments under outside control for particularly egregious behavior.

We should therefore predict that blacks should commit murder much more often than whites. And indeed, US blacks commit murder at about 6x the rate that US whites do.

Let's contrast to Germany. Germany does not have a large disenfranchised minority equivalent to US blacks. In fact you can see in https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/findings/ESS5_topl... that an absolute majority of every socioeconomic group in Germany believe that poor people there are treated fairly by the justice system. Which means that the top reason given by murderers for murder is much less likely to happen in Germany.

So you see, it isn't as simple as saying that both the USA and Germany are law and order systems. A significant minority of Americans believe that they don't have access to law and order. And that portion commits most of our murders. Therefore while we have a justice system and it works pretty well for you and me, inequitable access to justice is still a problem in the USA.

I'm not that interested in what Gates thinks a good book is. Being famous/successful/rich/humanitarian isn't super relevant to being able to identify a good book.

> interviews with convicted murderers

Accumulation of anecdotes != non-anecdotal evidence. It's interesting, but just anecdotal.

> where people feel that they do not have access to the justice system

A statement that is very hard to prove. I don't think you did, and I'm not sure if it's really possible given the general replication crisis within psychology.

> improving trust in the police should reduce crime

I think your evidence is once again insufficient to make the point, but I will agree that the conclusion seems more-or-less valid.

> We should therefore predict that blacks should commit murder much more often than whites.

You don't have to predict that, because it's already well-known. As such, a) you made a trivial prediction, b) you have to show a causal link, c) you have to show that your posited cause is in fact the dominant cause of the effect you're looking at, and d) you have to demonstrate the direction of the causality. You haven't done b, c or d. IIRC, there are a lot of persuasive alternative explanations for the difference in the black/white murder ratio, all of which would have to be addressed. Since I think this explanation of that ratio is much less persuasive than other potential causes, I don't think this point is tenable.

> every socioeconomic group in Germany believe that poor people there are treated fairly by the justice system

That's a really good bit of evidence, and interesting to think about. I will agree with you that as far as "extrajudicial death penalty vs. law and order society" goes, Germany seems decently representative of the latter. However, as I mentioned above, the US side of the comparison is far less apparent: the critical piece of the logic puzzle doesn't work.

After my first reading of your comment, I didn't really expect to find holes in most of the points you made, when I made my response. Thought I'd be agreeing with you more. But here we are. It was definitely interesting. Thanks.

However some of the successes of community policing (particularly when you have neighboring cities, one of which adopts it and another of which doesn't) do suggest a causal link with causality going the right way. Namely that activities on the part of police aimed at increasing trust within problem communities, result in those communities experiencing a decrease in violence and crime.

Yeah, though that just means it's harder to actually find out what's true. That's why the replication crisis in psychological sciences is a crisis. We can't treat gaps in our knowledge like supporting evidence.

> Namely that activities on the part of police aimed at increasing trust within problem communities, result in those communities experiencing a decrease in violence and crime.

That sounds great, and does seem like you're right about that specific item.

is definitely arguing for some kind of honor or strength system.

Utilitarianism is simplistic, but then again, so is "I'd feel morally obligated to do it, and I'd be a coward if I did otherwise." Point being, this is not a hard point to argue against, using almost any philosophical framework created in the last couple thousand years.

Edit: to expand, if (god forbid) someone did that to my daughter, my instinct would not be to kill them, it would be to find them, talk them, to understand why they did it. And to try somehow to make them truly understand the consequences of what they had done. I don't feel like killing them would achieve any of that.

> What good would come of such revenge?

One bad person less. And, yes, I'd feel a bit better. Not much maybe. I might even question it in the long run. But think about the alternative. In Germany it is not at all unheard of that murderers (who murdered for sexual desire or greed) get less than ten years of sentencing and are on day parole after a couple of years. How would you feel about that? What "good" comes from that? Do you maybe even wish that person a happy life?

> to expand, if (god forbid) someone did that to my daughter, my instinct would not be to kill them, it would be to find them, talk them, to understand why they did it.

You want to ask the guy "Why did you rape and kill my daughter?"? Are you kidding yourself? What would you expect for an answer? Also in this hypothetical situation you'd have to use force to even ask that question. You think you'd get an honest answer? "Sorry, didn't know it's your daughter." "I was just so horny - didn't know what else to do." What would you expect for an answer that even has the slightes potential of being meaningful to your pain?

> to make them truly understand the consequences of what they had done.

People who rape and kill don't tend to be the "understanding" type ... just think about how f'ed up someone has to be to do that.

> I don't feel like killing them would achieve any of that.

How about asking questions, then torturing, then killing. You'd get the cake and eat it, too.

Rather than give lectures about how stupid the German approach is, you should probably be asking questions about why their approach is working better in practice. If you're looking for the time to do so, I'd suggest reallocating the time you're currently spending imagining the pleasure of torturing an imaginary criminal in the aftermath of an imagined crime that hasn't actually happened.

Reform is better than revenge. Not only would society lose a bad person, we'd gain a good one.

> How about asking questions, then torturing, then killing. You'd get the cake and eat it, too.

This would serve only to turn good people into that which they condemn.

“This would serve only to turn good people into that which they condemn” How is the murder and rape of an innocent comparable to the punishment of a murderer and rapist?

How do you measure reform? Are their limits to what should be reformed? Do the risks of relapse ever outweigh the benefit of reform? An example to consider are the France Shooters or the Boston Marathon Bomber.

It doesn't work with everyone (that's why we have prisons), but AFAIK it's not that uncommon for people to tunr their lives aeound in this way. Most criminals are not inherently sadistic: they do care about other people. Their upbringing and circumstances just lead them to a bad place and they ended up taking that out on someone else.

That doesn't mean they aren't repsonsible for their actions or that they shouldn't be punished, but it doesn mean that they can often be rehabilitated with the right support. And that's generally a win-win scenario where it is possible.

But they can reform.

And then some relative of that person would kill you, and some your relative would kill your killler and so on. Hopefully, after several generations and few tens of dead such cycle of vendetta would end.