I Know What You Did Next Summer

First things first, let’s set aside the “Living in an Unjust Society” discussion. Whether you have the right to violate unjust laws is itself an interesting discussion topic. For now, let’s focus on more mundane crimes. For example: Do you have the right to murder your neighbor because you don’t like him? That seems like a really easy question to answer.

In the world of “Minority Report,” society has managed to eliminate all such crime by the simple expedient of arresting people before they commit the crimes. Accused of precrime, you will be incarcerated before you actually murder your neighbor. Best of both worlds, right? Your neighbor lives and you are punished for the fact that you would have killed him had society not arrested you before you did so.

The idea of punishments for precrime sends a chill down everyone’s spine—with one exception. Most people are quite happy with the idea of arresting people for plotting to commit a terrorist attack. In that case however, we could describe the crime as plotting to do something. What about arresting people for the precrime that they were going to plot a terrorist attack in the future? Can we arrest people before they actually start plotting? Can we arrest them before they have even thought about joining the plot?

The problem with precrime that you instantly realized is that it seems impossible to know that someone is going to commit a crime in the future. Sure, you may know that someone is violent and hates his neighbor, but is that the same thing as knowing that the neighbor is about to be murdered? Of course not.

The world of “Minority Report” has people who are born with the ability to see the future. Dubbed “precogs,” they are used by the Precrime Division to alert the police that a crime is going to be committed. The police then sweep in and arrest the person before the crime happens. Crime vanishes. Everyone is happy.

Imagine living in that world for a moment. Imagine there was a zero percent chance that any crime would be committed ever again. You can go anywhere you want, never lock your house or your car, and even leave your laptop on the ground next to a park bench and come back later and pick it up. Perfect safety all the time. Sounds nice, right?

It is indeed nice, until you get accused of a precrime. You can protest all you want that you didn’t commit a crime. That is, after all the point. Of course you didn’t commit a crime. You were arrested before you did so. Good luck proving your innocence; how do you prove you would not have committed a crime if you had not been arrested?

“Minority Report” goes one step further. Precogs do not all have simultaneous revelations of the future. So, there are three of them attached to the Precrime Division. An arrest is only made when two of them alert the authorities about an impeding crime. That feature creates the potential for a fascinating puzzle.

Suppose Precog 1 foresees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. Charlie had no idea that he would ever even think about killing Bob. Charlie is alerted to Precog 1’s knowledge of the impending murder, so Charlie immediately decides to leave town so that there is no chance that he will kill Bob. After all, Precog’s 1’s statement about the future does not prevent Charlie from leaving town to make it impossible for the statement to become true.

Precog 2 now sees the future and predicts that Charlie will not kill Bob. After all, since they will be in different places, there is no way for Charlie to kill Bob. Charlie then learns that Precog 2 has seen that he will not kill Bob. This is great news. Since Charlie won’t kill Bob, there is no longer a need to leave town. After all, if Charlie was really going to kill Bob, then Precog 2 would have foreseen it.

Now that Charlie no longer needs to leave town, Precog 3 comes along and sees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. So, two of the three precogs have now seen that Charlie will kill Bob on Tuesday, and Charlie is arrested.

The questions:
1. Is this fair?
2. Can we legitimately say that any of the precogs have actually seen the future when the future can change depending on Charlie’s decision about whether or not to leave town?
3. Did Precog 1 and Precog 3 actually see the same future?

All of those questions are nice little puzzles set up by the story, but you probably did not have a very difficult time answering any of those questions. Why not? You believe in human agency. You believe that Charlie really does have a decision about whether to kill Bob or not, and that up until the moment of the murder, Charlie could decide not to do so. Because Charlie can decide not to murder Bob, it seems unjust to arrest Charlie for precrime based on some precog’s vision of an unsettled future. Indeed, you think of the world of “Minority Report” as a dystopia. Sure, there is no crime, but the cost to liberty of eliminating that crime is simply too high.

Now, make the problem harder. The reason you don’t like the world of “Minority Report” is because you do not believe your future actions are predetermined. As of now, the future is still not predictable by humans: we do not know the mind of God and we do not have the ability to track all the chemical reactions which will occur in every brain on the planet. So, even if the future is potentially predictable, we cannot do so now. But, what if that changed? Just for a moment, imagine that the future is predictable. What if we could know that if Charlie is not arrested first, he will kill Bob next Tuesday? Absolute certainty; no margin for error at all. Now, can we arrest Charlie for the pre-crime of killing Bob in the future?

Saying “yes” seems wrong. We still have that same aversion to arresting Charlie before he has actually killed Bob. But, saying “No” means that we are consenting to the death of Bob simply because we are too squeamish to arrest Charlie before it happens. Does Charlie have the right to murder Bob before we can arrest Charlie? Do you have the right to commit a crime?

In a world in which the future was perfectly predictable, arresting someone for precrime seems like a moral obligation. Surely it is wrong to stand by and let Bob be murdered if we know with absolute certainty that he will be murdered. On the flip side, if we do not know that Bob will be murdered, it is surely wrong to arrest Charlie because we think he might murder Bob. But, where is the point at which this flips? Is it only in cases of perfect certainty that we are willing to arrest Charlie before he kills Bob? What if we are 99.999% certain that Charlie is going to kill Bob unless we arrest him? Does Charlie have the right to kill Bob because there is a 0.001% chance he won’t do it?

These sorts of puzzles about statistical probability are all around us, by the way. We literally could not act in society without forming guesses about what people might do in the future. “Minority Report” may seem like a pleasant story to read about the problems in a fictional dystopia, but sorting out what precisely is right or wrong in this story has intriguing implications for a whole host of problems in the world both now and in the near future. As the ability to sort through Big Data rises, as you volunteer an endless array of information about your life to Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple, your future is getting a lot more predictable.