Total Consequentialism

Despite the efforts at fairness in courtrooms, judges are subject to exhaustion, sickness, and other external influences that could potentially alter their decisions. It has been proposed that the judges’ lives be carefully regimented and regulated to minimize such influences. While such procedure may improve the fairness of a judiciary decision, ethical concerns over the rights of the judges themselves have been raised. Total consequentialism is an ethical framework that examines the “total net good” of one’s actions to determine whether an action is right or wrong (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2015). Under this framework, this paper will argue that the overall outcome of implementing the proposed intervention is positive. This paper will first argue

Personal autonomy is defined as self-rule with two conditions: agency and liberty. Agency encompasses the patient’s ability to properly formulate a decision while liberty describes the freedom from coercive influences (Varelius, 2006). External influences such as medication, lack of sleep, and tiredness impairs the judges’ ability to reason properly, diminishing their agency. For instance, one research has demonstrated a correlation between the number of hours a judge has been working and decreased likelihood of favorable sentences for the defendant (“I think it’s time we broke for lunch…", 2011). Managing the court cases are mentally tiring, and the findings report that judges are more likely to arrive at less mentally taxing decisions, such as keeping a prisoner in jail, when exhausted. In effect, the fatigue is diminishing the judge’s ability to consider the court cases more thoroughly and consequently his agency. Ensuring that the judges be well rested or healthy will eliminate such impairments in their agency and prevent decisions they would have normally avoided. While the proposed intervention could be argued to improve one’s agency, there appears to be something problematic regarding one’s liberty. One could potentially argue that by enforcing certain lifestyles upon the judge, we are effectively

Thus, unless the magnitude of the benefits exceeds that of the imposed discomfort, the intervention would not be justified. Here, one could potentially argue that the benefits are limited as there are legal boundaries to a court sentence. For instance, for class A misdemeanor such as assault, a judge can only assign a maximum of one year in prison (Norman-Eady). If the judiciary decisions are within these boundaries, it appears that there is already enough legal regulation to correct discrepancies in judiciary decisions; however, even within these legal boundaries, there are sometimes large discrepancy. For instance, for class A felony such as murder, a judge can order the minimum sentence of 25- years or the maximum sentence of 60-years in prison (Norman-Eady). The difference between two extremes constitute much of a person’s lifetime and would be a significant matter for the defendant. Moreover, one report indicates that there are discrepancies between the judges’ rulings. In similar drug-related cases, where the median sentence was 24-months, some judges were found to order a light 12-month sentence while another was found to order a harsh 64-month sentence. With countless court cases each year, even if the majority were to arrive at similar decisions, there are bound to be extreme cases, where the defendants