Comment by hamburglar
5 years ago
I think a huge part of the difference is people's perspective on which is worse: false positives or false negatives.
Warning: opinions follow
To reduce scope to something like welfare for illustrative purposes, there's actually pretty broad agreement from both sides that some people just need help through no fault of their own and that at some level, there should be some kind of program to provide that help. And there's similar agreement that people who don't have such a need should be prevented from intentionally gaming/milking a system (getting benefits without a legitimate need). The interesting parts come in two other scenarios: 1) someone who legitimately needs help and doesn't get it, and 2) someone who doesn't need help but does get it. Those are both wasteful and unjust and we'd all like to reduce those cases to as close to zero as possible. But the left and the right disagree about which case is more unjust. The right would like to focus on efficiency and self-sufficiency, so the greater injustice is fostering an environment where you can get assistance without deserving it (which perpetuates and/or deepens the dependence), and you're willing to concede that this means some people who need help won't get it. The left, on the other hand, would like to focus on covering everyone who needs help, and anyone slipping through the cracks is an injustice, but this means that you have to accept the inefficiency of allowing some people who don't need/deserve assistance to get it, and you just shrug and say that's the cost of providing a good safety net.
I think this is basically true. although there are some issues that are so polarizing that they take precedence over the false positive vs false negative preference. the examples that immediately come to mind involve enforcement and punishment. the right generally seems to accept policies like stop-and-frisk or demanding ID from brown people near the border, regardless of how many of those targeted turn out to be doing nothing wrong. the left pretty much takes the same position on campus sexual assault cases, although it at least asserts that false positives are very rare.
False positive and false negative rates also have a relation to the injustice of a false positive. Having to provide ID and get frisked sucks but being falsely accused of a crime and having your entirely life destroyed even if rare is a massive injustice. This is the entire premise of Blackstone's Ratio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
For what it's worth I'm libertarian and lean towards having false positives for any of those three scenarios.
Yeah, I think false-positive and false-negative aren't exactly the right construct to consider for some scenarios. It's more like "whose suffering bothers you more?" People in need or those whose contribution is wasted? The racially-profiled or those who may be harmed by criminals if we aren't diligent? Wrongly-accused rapists or rape victims?