[merakses]

Part of being a police officer in a country like modern America (or my own country of Canada) is the need to make tough judgement calls sometimes. Sometimes police officers have to try to ascertain if what they're seeing is likely to turn into a crime.

Logically speaking, why would Person A be pointing a gun at Person B? Well, in all likelihood, it's one of these three reasons:

1. Person A intends to shoot and kill (or at least maim) Person B.

2. Person A is threatening Person B, and using the gun to add credibility to his threat. For this, keep in mind that even the act of simply threatening a person can be criminal if you take it to a certain extreme.

3. Person A is out of his mind. Perhaps he's drunk, or on heavy drugs, and isn't fully cognizant of what he is doing. So you have a man out of control, wielding a gun.

In either of these three cases, the police should intervene if they're in a position to effectively do so. I'm fairly confident that everybody here would agree with that.

This is exactly the point I am making. Vallen's argument that you have absolutely no right to act against a person before he has committed a harmful action is absurd. This is what I'm trying to show.

You don't see anything philosophically troubling about punishing a man for a crime he never committed based purely on some predictive method? For me, that greatly undermines the concepts of justice or fairness. I think you send human society down a very dark path if you embrace a system that dispenses entirely with both of those concepts.

I mean, what about the principle of innocent until proven guilty? This is a principle that our criminal justice system is rooted in. I think it's a principle that most people agree with.

Why would it undermine the concepts of justice or fairness? As we said, if the predictive system is very accurate, we will have more innocent victims if we don't use it, than if we use it.
Do you see anything philosophically troubling with allowing innocent people to die violent, meaningless deaths every day - deaths which could have been avoided, had we utilized such a system - so that we can cater to the general public's opinion of 'justice' or 'fairness'? And if one of these meaningless deaths is someone close to you?

The principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' would remain basically the same. It's just that we would conceivably be able to prove 'future guilt'. The dominator's readings (or whatever we're using) could hold large legal power in court, for example.

With this in mind, suppose a police officer sees one man pointing a gun at another, and reacts quickly by tackling the gun-pointer to the ground. The police officer is then informed that the two were actually filming a student movie, and this was part of an action scene. The gun isn't even loaded. The police officer made a honest but very understandable mistake.

Well, the police officer will feel sheepish, hopefully apologize, and the gun-pointer isn't arrested. He was never proven guilty of anything.

Suppose the police officer pointed a Dominator at the gun-pointer's head, while the police officer was off to the side out of the gun-pointer's field of vision. The gun-pointer tries to think like a criminal in order to perfect his acting performance. The Dominator misreads that as him actually being a criminal.

BANG! The actor gets exploded. So much for innocent until proven guilty...

Once again, we are devolving into a dispute on the accuracy of the system. We have already been there, so there is no need to repeat what has already been said.
Also, even if the police is equipped with Dominators, it doesn't mean that they won't try and take suspects into custody first.

On the other hand, Sybil is the one who determines is most suited to becoming the bureaucrats that run society. And the bureaucrats that Sybil has appointed so far, seems like they might not be the most capable when it comes to defending society.

Of course they wouldn't be - after all, they would all believe that society has a perfect defense net in the form of Sybil It is incredibly ironic - Sybil's need for people to think that it is a perfect system in order to be able to keep the public safety actually leaves the nation with large holes in the actual internal security, which Sybil either doesn't know about or lacks the funding to close. I like this explanation because it is a picture perfect example of Makishima's words in episode 14: "People have been mislead by Sybil and have become unable to properly evaluate the danger in front of them". I think it ties in to the world better than simply 'Sybil is stupid/extremely arrogant and short-sighted'