Rule Utilitarian Ethical Theory: The Monitoring Of Sex Offenders

From the viewpoint of the Rule Utilitarian ethical theory, the laws that require lifetime monitoring of some convicted sex offenders are not sensible public safety measures. By applying the Rule Utilitarian ethical theory, the moral rule would be: all sex offenders should be monitored for life. If this rule was actualized, overall happiness would not increase, which means the benefits would not outweigh the harms. The harms would be the privacy intrusion done to the sex offenders and increase of risk of re-offense.
If the convicted sex offenders were monitored for life, the police would know their whereabouts 24/7 due to the built-in GPS on their ankle monitors. This is privacy intrusion since the police can track the sex offenders in real time. Moreover, ankle monitors count as a violation of the Fourth Amendment in America because it counts as a search without a search warrant (Savage, 2015). By placing an ankle monitor on a sex offender for the purpose of tracking their movement, it counts as physical intrusion (Savage, 2015). Although, ankle
The reliability of the ankle monitor is questionable because even a fast turn on the monitor would cause the alarm to trigger (Ellis, 2015). Furthermore, replacement devices with another company continued to have flaws that allow the sex offenders to remove them without triggering alarms. This poses the question whether ankle monitors actually decrease the risk of re-offense. If sex offenders can easily disarm their monitor, this increases risk of re-offense since their whereabouts are now unknown. This defeats the purpose of an item that can track the sex offenders in real time to prevent re-offense (John, 2013). Since the ankle monitor’s reliability is questionable, the purpose for ankle monitors is no longer justifiable. Hence, the harms outweigh the