This blog post examines the issue of ‘justice based on a predicted future’ raised by the film Minority Report, deeply exploring free will, causality, and whether justice created by technology can truly be just.
Minority Report is a science fiction film set in the future society of 2054. The protagonist, Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), is the team leader of the Pre-crime unit, a special police force that uses the abilities of mysterious ‘precogs’ to foresee murders before they occur and arrest suspects before the crimes happen. The film begins when Anderton and other Pre-Crime detectives arrest a husband who, enraged after witnessing his wife’s affair, attempts murder. The husband later cries out, “I didn’t mean to kill her,” but is ultimately sentenced to a punishment where he is confined in a capsule, stripped of all freedom of movement and basic necessities.
Personally, this scene of the husband’s wailing left the most intense impression throughout the entire film and provoked the most thought. It was precisely this scene that first sparked the question: ‘Is the Pre-crime system truly justified as the standard for imposing a punishment that takes away a person’s entire life?’
There’s a legal maxim: “Let a thousand guilty go free rather than convict one innocent.” This means that because the human-made system of law cannot guarantee perfection, we must always acknowledge and guard against its imperfections to prevent the harm of the innocent. However, the unprecedented Pre-crime system, under the justification of being highly efficient in reducing crime, completely rejects the system’s inherent imperfections. Protagonist Anderton struggles to prove his innocence by exposing the system’s flaws, and the conflict and friction revealed in this process become the film’s central theme.
Of course, the Pre-crime system is fictional. To dilute the discomfort with its somewhat unscientific premise—a system driven by three prophets—the film sets its backdrop in the 2050s. Nevertheless, even as a fictional construct, this system holds significant scientific and philosophical implications. Therefore, this article aims to scientifically analyze the question of the Pre-crime system’s validity and present an independent perspective.
To state the conclusion upfront: the Pre-crime system depicted in the film is flawed. As seen in the scene where Detective Anderton, identified as a suspect, ultimately does not commit murder, the system clearly exhibits imperfections. While it would be meaningful to pinpoint exactly which fundamental characteristic of the system causes this flaw, this article instead aims to demonstrate, in principle, that the Pre-crime system can never be perfect. It seeks to challenge the film’s portrayal of a public order that fully embraces and relies on this system.
The Uncertainty Principle proposed in quantum mechanics states that when measuring two specific physical quantities, the measurement of one inevitably alters the other, making it impossible to know both values precisely. While this uncertainty doesn’t exist between all physical quantities, the two core values in Minority Report—present time and future time—appear unable to escape the Uncertainty Principle. That is, when we consider the act of the prophets in the film foreseeing the future as a measurement, the present can change during this measurement process. The cases of Anderton, who, upon learning of his future as a murderer, reverses the murder, and Lama Burgess, the director of the Pre-crime system, clearly demonstrate that this uncertainty exists between the variables of present and future.
In any situation where uncertainty about the future exists, even slightly, it seems extremely dangerous to prejudge this and impose extreme punishment on suspects. Consider this hypothetical case: A father, driven mad by rage over a gang that murdered his family, tracks down and kills one gang member, only to be killed himself by another gang member. In this case, three murder incidents are causally intertwined. According to the Pre-crime system, planned crimes can be predicted four days in advance, while spontaneous crimes can be detected a few tens of minutes beforehand. Therefore, in this scenario, only the father’s killing of one gang member is considered a planned crime. Consequently, before the gang’s attack on the family is predicted, the father ends up on the list of killers and is arrested. This is clearly wrong.
Such errors occur because the system fails to properly consider, or even consider at all, the causal relationships between events. A system that only predicts murder situations and prevents them cannot grasp the myriad variables that constitute the cause of an incident. Even without such an extreme case, the process of predicting incidents through the Pre-crime system and arresting suspects inevitably affects people, buildings, and the surrounding environment near the crime scene to some degree. If another murder were scheduled to occur around the same time and location, the environmental changes caused by the first incident would undoubtedly affect the new one to some degree. The Pre-crime system appears to ignore or underestimate this influence, but whether that’s truly the case is worth considering. In fact, even a single change in any variable within the entire causal chain could easily reverse the outcome of an event. Chaos theory, epitomized by the butterfly effect, can explain this.
The butterfly effect refers to the theory that the small flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the Earth, as it travels halfway around the globe, can influence multiple variables, and this influence can grow exponentially, potentially even causing a typhoon. In reality, predicting the outcome of a single event is extremely difficult because it involves far too many variables, and calculating their full impact is technically and theoretically impossible. In other words, a small change in a variable during the intermediate steps leading to the event could potentially produce an entirely different result.
In the case of the Pre-crime system, throughout the entire process of measuring (predicting) the future (a murder) and dispatching to prevent it, changes in variables occur that diverge from the originally forecasted future. For example, during the dispatch of Pre-crime detectives, changes in traffic may occur, and a suspect who would have reached a situation where they might have committed murder impulsively could end up avoiding that situation altogether. Accidental murder occurs when a separate variable significantly influencing the murder emerges. If changes occur that could alter the emergence of this variable, the possibility of avoiding the murder exists. For a Pre-crime system dealing with human rights, which should be treated with the utmost respect, overlooking this possibility seems highly undesirable.
Therefore, the Pre-crime system is flawed. Predicting an event in the present and the actual occurrence of that event in the future exist in a relationship of mutual uncertainty, where current predictions can influence future outcomes. The causal chain leading to an event’s outcome is critically important, as the numerous variables constituting this chain retain the potential to change after measurement. Consequently, the very occurrence of the event—that is, the conclusion that murder will definitely happen—can also be altered. While the Pre-crime system undoubtedly has areas where it can contribute to crime prevention, its role was fundamentally flawed in being designed to arrest and punish perpetrators in advance. As mentioned at the outset, to ‘not punish an innocent person,’ the Pre-crime system must be used differently. While there is no need to entirely abandon its crime prevention function, it must be used in a way that clearly recognizes the system’s limitations and proactively prevents malfunctions arising from them.
