Compatibilism In Minority Report

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The movie Minority Report begins by introducing the audience to a world where murders are essentially nonexistent in Washington DC. A system called PreCrime is used which consists of a group of three mutated humans called Precogs that are able to predict murders before they occur. This information would, in turn, be provided to the PreCrime police, where they would then arrest the suspect and place them in a virtual reality. However, though this system seems fairly accurate, there are specific assumptions that are made about humans and their capabilities, specifically involving the concept of free will that will inevitably lead to PreCrime’s downfall.
With the system of PreCrime, the main assumption it operates on is that the actions of humans
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Consider the following scenario: you are at a horse race and you wish to place a bet on the horses. The horses and jockeys in this race are all evenly matched in skill and capability, therefore making it near impossible to determine a clear winner before the race. The rules for betting are that if you win a bet, you will receive double the amount you betted. However, if you lose a bet, you will only lose the amount you bet. Logically, if you wanted the highest chance to win a bet, you would bet on every horse in the race, since one of them must win the race. You decide to bet one-hundred dollars on each horse. The race occurs and, as predicted, one of the horses win. Therefore, you win your bet. However, the other horse you bet on did not win, therefore you lose your bet. You end up in the precarious situation that you not only win, but you lose as well. This scenario is very similar with what the PreCrime system deals with. When the PreCrime system creates the main report and the minority report with a prediction, it essential is the betting on all horses. In each scenario, the PreCrime system will not only be correct but incorrect at the same time with its predictions, which seems logically impossible. However, there is a bigger problem at work here. Since it is possible that the PreCrime system is incorrect with its predictions, it is unable to accomplish its one task: to correctly predict every murder before they occur. Since the system is unable to be completely correct in each instance, it can be deduced that it would be morally incorrect to arrest people before they commit a murder since the PreCrime system is unable to accurately predict future events every time, and arrest someone that will not commit a murder, therefore leading to the imprisonment of innocent people. The only way to justify the PreCrime system then is if society completely changed the fundamentals of justice,

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