Is Precrime ethical? That is to say, would it be ethical to replace an established system of punishing offenders for crimes they have committed with a system that imprisons future offenders before they have committed their crime? In discussing this, I shall refer to the Precrime system as set out in the book, not as in the film – as you can see from the differences section of this website, there are a number of fundamental discrepancies in the film’s interpretation of the idea, which I intend to put aside for the purposes of discussing the ethics of Dick’s original novel. Please note that a comprehensive explanation of the concept and usage of Precrime can be found here.
• The Founding Principle of Precrime
Precrime is founded on the acceptance of the concept of determinism: the idea that every action is part of an unbroken chain of events, where each event is determined by the events preceding it. There is no choice or randomness: every action in the future is going to happen, no matter how free the choice seems. For example, a week ago I sat at home, an hour before I was due to be at work, and contemplated that I couldn’t really be bothered with going out to work that evening. It seemed at the time that I had the choice of either going to work, or abstaining from it and doing something else – despite the obvious problems that not going to work would have caused, there would be no overriding force that would disable me from making such a choice. Eventually, I ended up going to work, reasoning that if I didn’t, I would end up short of money the next week and/or unemployed. Looking back on that evening, I can see that my thoughts, from the time I began contemplating not going to work up until the moment I left the house to walk there, followed a pattern: one thought would flow into another, and that thought into yet another, all of them making up a continuous stream of conscious thought with no interruptions. Thus, I reason that my train of thought is somewhat similar to a line of dominoes being knocked over: one will cause another, which will cause another, et cetera, and looking back on it one can pick a definite starting and finishing point and identify all the processes leading from one to the other. Determinism essentially attributes the characteristics of said dominoes to human thought and action: that, just as the dominoes have no choice in whether they knock the next one over or not, so too do we have no control over what we will decide to think about or act upon. As I said earlier, then, Precrime is founded on the principle that determinism is applicable to each and every person living in the world, and thus that it is possible to predict the future with absolute certainty.
• The Possibility of Flaws?
The main issue surrounding whether Precrime is truly ethical or not is whether it could ever be wrong – is there any possibility that it could be taken advantage of, tampered with, or simply wrong about accusing someone of committing a crime? The main issue prompting this is the fact that John Anderton, the man who created and has run Precrime for 30 years, immediately begins to doubt the system when he discovers the report that he is going to kill Kaplan; he asserts that someone could have planted the card, and that he is determined to find out whom. If a system that relies entirely on the assumption that all predictions of the future are correct can be tampered with, then the system is flawed and can be taken advantage of. Thus, the viability of the punchcards as evidence is severely called into question, and the ethics of using such a system to imprison people who have committed no crime is slightly dubious. It is never truly established as to how tamper-proof the system is, but if Anderton can be suspicious of being set up, there must be some plausibility to the claim.
A further possibility for flaws is raised in that, should someone be able to see their predicted future, is it not possible that they would be able to alter it? Well, as delved into in the final chapter of the book, it is explained that the system of sequential reports - where one Precog will have a vision of the future, a second will make a further prediction with the previous vision taken into account, and the third will then make an composite prediction taking the second’s prediction into account - still managed to successfully predict John’s actions, despite his attempts to avoid committing a murder. It is somewhat reminicent of an old episode of The Twilight Zone, in which seeing one's own future meant that that future was immediately negated and a new path created. Here, though, the first two reports created were quite clearly wrong, as they didn't take into account. However, it is also important to remember that without Precrime, the murder would not have happened - not because of the chain of events set off by John reading the report that incriminated him, but because the entire IVL plot (which culminated in Kaplan's murder) centred around the abolition of Precrime. It is this factor which, as John says during the epilogue, ensures that a case of this nature would have been a one-of-a-kind occurrence, and thus suggests that there should be no further cases where there could be any kind of doubt as to the certainty of the events predicted.
• The Ethics of Precrime
In essence, then, John's adventure was entirely determined - he was meant to see the first report, he was meant to question it, and ultimately he was meant to kill Leopold Kaplan. Whether Precrime works or not is essentially dependent on whether one accepts determinism as true or false, but given that Minority Report is a fictional sequence of events, it is easy enough to accept that (at the least) Anderton's world is one in which determinism is fully applicable, as proven by the ability of the precogs to predict the future. The true question that arises from this is whether the workings of Precrime are truly ethical - i.e., is it morally acceptable to punish people for crimes they have not yet committed? Certainly it can be seen as beneficial to society to prevent murders from happening, however an important point of debate is this: if the murders can be prevented before they happen, what justification can there be for punishing those people who would have committed the crime? The general idea behind imprisoning murderers is that they are a danger to society, and must be segregated away from it to prevent them killing again - however, if no-one in the society (save the director of Precrime) is able to physically commit the action of murder, then society is in no actual danger and the justifiability of imprisoning would-be murderers is somewhat lessened. Anderton acknowledges this issue himself in the opening chapter of the story, when discussing the mechanics of Precrime with Witwer:
"You've probably grasped the basic legalistic drawback to precrime methodology. We're taking in individuals who have broken no law."
"But they surely will."
"Happily they don't - because we get them first, before they can commit an act of violence. So the commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. We claim they're culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they're innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent."
Hence, Anderton admits that, in the process of saving the lives of innocent people, he is at the same time destroying the lives of others - a serious ethical poser. The only real solution to this would be to replace the system of imprisoning future criminals with one of education and rehabilitation, to condition those people so that they could be released back into society without ever succombing to the impulse to murder again. Of course, it is quite likely that, having been arrested once for a crime they were about to commit, most people wouldn't be stupid enough to try anything of a similar nature again anway - it could be argued that Precrime is in itself enough to prevent murders, and prison is as such no longer necessary.
All in all, Minority Report is a nice little study into how our moral values as a society could be altered following the discovery that everything is pre-determined by fate. The world in which it is set is one in which everyone's path is already set, and in effect no-one has any real choice over the actions they will commit - this is exemplified by Precog Mike's report, which shows that the path that John would take to murdering Kaplan was already set out for him, and despite his attempts to escape from it, everything that he did was already meant to happen. The issues it raises can effectively be summarised thus: If we do live in a world where choice is not applicable, can punishment of any kind ever be considered morally acceptable? Indeed, if choice is non-existent, is there any point in having morals at all? Well, considering that morals are effectively maxims that govern how we should make choices, the negation of choice effectively destroys the notion of morality completely. In the world of Minority Report, fate determines everything, and thus the issue of ethical accountability can no longer exist: it is, in essence, impossible to determine whether Precrime is ethical or not, as it exists in a world where morals cannot be applied.
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