Years ago, when I was at Marine Corps boot camp, one of the main focuses of instruction was learning about the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The UCMJ is the basis of military law. Violations of the UCMJ can result in a military tribunal known as a court martial. But there was also a smaller, more watered-down version of court-martial that we heard about: non-judicial punishment, or NJP.
Being subject to NJP involves certain trade-offs. On the other hand, the amount of punishment the NJP could hand down was more limited. For the same offense, a court martial can impose far more severe penalties than an NJP. In the NJP, on the other hand, commanders were judge and jury and were not limited by the same types of procedures that might be required for a court-martial trial.
For example, if a CO executes an NJP, he or she may decide to accept hearsay as evidence against the defendant, but hearsay is not admissible in a court martial. In reality, the conviction in New Japan Soldiers is essentially a foregone conclusion. During my time in the military, I saw or knew hundreds of recruits, and there was only one case where someone was released. Being brought before NJP essentially serves the same purpose as a plea bargain. Accepting a procedure that almost guarantees a conviction also reduces the range of penalties you could receive, and having an NJP on your record is less damaging than a court-martial conviction.
Of particular note is the fact that military personnel have a legal right to refuse the NJP. This means that if NJP charges are brought against him, he can refuse them and instead request to be court-martialed. Now, why would someone make a move like that? Well, keep in mind that the consequences of a court-martial are much harsher, but the legal requirements for a court-martial are also much stronger.
Martial courts have the same safeguards as civil trials, including jury trials, defendants receiving the benefit of the doubt by being presumed innocent by default, legal limits on the admissibility of evidence, and the burden of proof on the prosecution. Therefore, if you think your command may not actually be able to prove your wrongdoing according to its higher standards, it may be worth disavowing the NJP and requesting a court-martial instead.
This puts people in the position of acting out Gary Becker’s economic economic analysis of crime, which I have discussed previously. Becker modeled decisions about crime as a form of rational choice. The relevant variable was the expected benefit of the crime committed compared to the combination of probability and severity of punishment. A criminal believes a crime is worth committing if he or she judges that the expected benefits of the crime outweigh the downsides of the odds and the severity of the punishment. In this case, instead of considering the expected benefits of the crime, one attempts to compare the likelihood of conviction and the severity of the sentence if convicted, and to take the course of action that results in the lowest expected costs. Masu. NJP increased the random variable to virtually 100% while simultaneously decreasing the severity variable.
Therefore, the decision to decline the New Japan Court-Martial in favor of a court-martial was an attempt to find a way to overcome this choice. If they sentenced you to death, the best you can hope for is to accept the NJP and adjust the weight, since the chances of you being punished in either situation were very high. That was it. But if you believe that their ability to actually prove the case against you is shaky, the higher standard of evidence required in a court-martial may be enough to offset the increased severity dial. The odds dial could be lowered. And actually, that’s what happened sometimes. I have seen several cases where someone refused NJP and requested a court martial, but the charges were dropped because the investigating authorities determined there was not enough evidence to secure a conviction in court martial. know.
What’s the result? I think this shows that rational choice theory is more applicable to real-world decision-making than people realize. In his book Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, the late Jeffrey Friedman was highly critical of rational choice theory, arguing that people in the real world do not perform sophisticated mathematical calculations when making choices. insisted. I explained his position in a review of his book as follows:
He also seems to apply much stricter standards when evaluating rival behavioral models than he does his own. For example, in criticizing the idea of rational ignorance articulated by Ilya Somin in his book Democracy and Political Ignorance, Friedman presents a complex mathematical formula for calculating the costs and benefits of political information and argues that “billions of “Can we really trust the policies of citizen technocrats?” he asks. They explicitly use the following calculations to decide whether to vote and whether to obtain political information… even though these calculations did not appear in print until 2013. Despite (“Somin’s Democracy” and “Somin’s Democracy”) political ignorance). ”
Friedman points out that writers like Somin and Jason Brennan suggest that voters don’t need to do complex math, just implicitly understand that the odds of voting to break a tie are low. Although he briefly admits that he does, he denies this idea. However, as Friedman develops his theories, he often explains them in terms of tacit understandings, implicit assumptions, unconscious biases, and thought processes, none of which are true of his rival theories. It does not require an explicit attitude to be embodied. For example, when constructing a theory about citizens that holds a simple social ontology, he says, “none of these elements typically operate at an explicit or conscious level.” He also said that people who act according to a naive, pragmatic worldview “may not understand that they are doing it, and probably most of the time they do not,” adding, “They may not even be aware that they agree with the view,” he said. It seems to me that if Friedman allows this kind of implicitly understood reasoning to work in his model, he should be willing to allow it in other theories as well. .
The same is true here. I have witnessed many Marines find themselves in the situation described above. It is highly doubtful that any of them are “explicitly calculating”, reflecting the very complex mathematical modeling in formal studies of rational choice theory. But despite this, they still made such calculations. Implicitly rather than explicitly in advanced mathematical terms, we use more vague judgments and estimates rather than precise mathematical variables. Friedman sold rational choice theory a little short. By taking it too literally (people explicitly run complex mathematical formulas when it comes to decision-making!) he failed to take it seriously enough. But rational choice theory, properly understood, is worth taking seriously. Because its explanatory power is everywhere.
