Ever heard of a neoliberal?

Not really. It is basically the concept of performance that is used to evaluate true positives, true negatives, false positives, and false negatives for things like predictive power and medicine efficacy. Here it's evaluating such effects of punishment through law or by the norms of agents of the state.

@WilyRickWiles With all due respect (and I'm not pulling your chain on this),
it's not logic, it's not even a relative value structure. It's not even a stab toward predictive value because sometime 100 people, innocent people, as a consequence of taking out a monster, will be lost.

But, it's important to understand that when a bad guy walks, it isn't yoked to the notion that, in doing so, 10 innocent lives will be spared. They're independent events, as the ball landing on the casino wheel.

@Terence57 Have you heard of the criminal justice system?

@WilyRickWiles
It's fine. We come from different perspectives. There will be other questions for us to ponder.

It's not worth, e.g. a 10% false conviction rate, to catch those 10.

@WilyRickWiles Actually, it is a reference to the effect of these two things - ten guilty persons escaping and one innocent person suffering - upon the concept of justice. One innocent person condemned would cause more damage to the delivery of justice than ten persons escaping. Both will damage the concept of justice but an injustice imposed upon an innocent person is 10 times more damaging.

@FrankZeleniuk Basically.

@WilyRickWiles Yes. So it seems your position is that guilty persons escaping justice is perfectly fine but conservatives have it backward when in fact both are injustices and neither should occur.

@FrankZeleniuk
As you surmise, the events are independent of each other.

Because they insist on the inverse!

@WilyRickWiles I assume you have an example in mind?

Inverse probably isn't correct--what I mean is they believe that it is better for 10 innocent people to suffer than 1 guilty person escape.

@WilyRickWiles Again - do you have any examples of this kind of belief among conservatives?

@DaveO276 Support for US voter ID laws, for starters.

@DaveO276 Also support for anti-immigrant racial profiling laws and stop-and-frisk policing.

@DaveO276 It gets to the heart of conservative "law and order" vs. liberal rule of law.

@WilyRickWiles Ok, you've given me two alleged examples - we're getting somewhere! Now, pick one and tell me how it makes innocent people suffer. Remember, I'm not American, so I may have some ignorance on the intricate details of the laws and policies in your country.

@DaveO276 Also in the US: voter purges.

All of these policies cast a wide net to prevent things that are low likelihood. E.g., the voter fraud rate in the us is 0.00006%. Some estimate that voter suppression efforts prevent at least 2% of eligible voters from casting a ballot. That's the equivalent of 33,333 innocent people suffering to catch every 1 guilty person (who inherently do not affect election results).

@WilyRickWiles How can you possibly have reliable figures on the rate of voter fraud when you don't have remotely sufficient common sense measures in place (such as mandatory voter ID) in order to detect voter fraud?

@DaveO276
Therein lies "the snag."