QAs

Strategies for Answering Discussion and Essay Questions

Chapter 7

VII: Strategies for selected Discussion and Essay Questions in Chapter 7 (see pages 225-

226 in the textbook)

A. Strategies for Selected Discussion Questions in Chapter 7

1. In one important way, the Internet entrapment case illustrates the classic tension between

utilitarians and non-consequentilists that can be found in a wide range of contemporary

debates involving the means-ends distinction, which we considered above. (See, for example,

the strategy for resolving Question 3 in Chapter 5.) Utilitarians would argue that the end

(catching the pedophile) justifies the means used (entrapment on the Internet). Clearly, there

is something desirable in being able to catch pedophiles. But is the use of any means

whatsoever acceptable? Consider that we could have inspectors constantly monitoring

conversations between Internet users to catch pedophiles. Is that the kind of society in which

we want to live?

Recall the example of computerized matching of electronic records that we discussed in

Chapter 5. There we saw that the prospect of catching welfare cheats and deadbeat parents

was desirable, but that the means used were highly questionable and very controversial. Non-

consequentialists, such as deontologists, argue that we cannot base an adequate moral system

solely on the goal of achieving desirable consequences, as utilitarians do.

3. Both the critics and proponents of Clipper believed that the central issue in that 1990s’

controversy would arise again in a different guise. At issue is whether the government can be

trusted to hold one of the keys (in a public-key encryption system) in escrow. In the post-

September 11 era, however, there seems to be much more sympathy for the view that the

government should be able to have a technology such as Clipper. On the contrary, it is not

clear how external market forces will respond to American electronics products that have

embedded in them an encryption device similar to Clipper.

4. Drafting specific laws to handle certain kinds of crimes can be useful in helping to

understand the nuances of certain crimes and in helping to prosecute a crime as a crime of a

particular type. For example, we have general crimes involving homicide, and specific crimes

involving vehicular homicide. In this case, it is believed that a separate crime for homicides

resulting from the use of motor vehicles is useful both in understanding and prosecuting such

crimes. Analogously, having cybercrime statutes can help us both to understand and prosecute

certain crimes involving cybertechnology is useful. However, attempting to understand and

prosecute every crime involving the use of cybertechnology under that category could also be

problematic and confusing. Hence, separating crimes that depend solely on cybertechnology

from those that happen merely to involve the use of that technology to some degree would

seem to be useful.

B. Strategies for Selected Essay Questions in Chapter 7

1. The use of biometric technologies in large public places such as airports and sports

stadiums would seem to be justified. Although this technique also is a form of computerized

matching, it differs in significant respects from the kinds of matching operations used to track

down deadbeat parents and welfare cheats. In those cases, databases containing the names of

individuals presumed to be innocent were cross-referenced in the hope of obtaining one or

more “hits,” which identified individuals whose names reside in two incompatible databases

(e.g., the database of federal employees and the database of welfare recipients). In the case of

biometric matching, however, one of the databases used contains a list of names and photos of

known or suspected criminals and terrorists.