Here’s one of the main things I’d urge you to think about when setting rules and laws and thinking about which rules and laws you support. Don’t set up rules as ambit claims, aspirations or “catch-all’s” for bad behavior. If we stopped doing this, a good 10 to 20% of social problems, maybe even more, would be avoided.
I have a friend with whom I’ve argued about the rules around lockdowns. We both support lockdowns, but I think the new rules that have been bought in removing the right of people to walk outside in groups larger than two are silly and potentially dangerous, whereas he supports them.
The other day, I was walking outside with him, when we ran into a family of four he knew. He started to walk and talk with them, so I walked ahead. When he caught up with me he asked why I’d walked ahead, to which I replied “Because walking with that family was against the rules, moreover rules that you’ve previously advocated for”. He looked staggered, he hadn’t even thought of it as rule-breaking “But that’s not the sort of thing they mean” he protested. “What did they mean then?” I asked. He struggled to articulate exactly what he thought they meant, and it gradually became clear that he had imagined the rules applying to an altogether different and more malicious sort of person but certainly not him.
I see this also online, outside the terrain of legal crime and punishment, and in the terrain of social punishment, especially in moralistically supercharged environments like Twitter. People articulate rules or norms of behavior and try to enforce them with punishments, with the primary consideration being “catching” everyone they dislike with the rule. As soon as the rule they had previously framed so very broadly threatens to apply to one of their own, they prefer a much narrower interpretation.
My view is that rules, of the sort which you give yourself the right to punish other people for breaking, should never represent aspirations, nor should they represent ambit claims intended to give you the right to punish anyone who makes you cranky. Rather, rules should represent an absolute minimum standard, the very least you would ever be willing to accept from anyone, with very few or no exceptions. You should be much more afraid of catching basically decent people with your rules than missing bad people.
There are a couple of very good reasons for taking this minimalist approach to framing rules.
The first is that setting rules up maximally rather than minimally will inevitably result in disproportionate punishment of the charmless, the powerless, and the disenfranchised.
The second is that setting up rules maximally will make a mockery of the rules precisely because practice and enforcement will be so inconsistent. This will encourage people to ignore the rules.
The third reason is that by throwing in behavior that is perhaps merely undesirable with behavior that absolutely should be banned, a maximal approach to rules can obscure real dangers. The confusion this leads to might make someone think they are “in the gray area” when really they are well out of line.
These factors are the reasons that changing the rules is often (though not always) a poor way to affect culture change. The rule-changer-as-culture-changer faces the following dilemma. Either the new rules represent something already basically forbidden by society, in which case there will be very little social reform achieved by the rule change, or the rules represent a kind of maximal claim that does not correspond to existing norms, in which case the new rule is likely to be selectively and hypocritically enforced, undermining the attempt at social change.
The section about Twitter-related rule enforcement (or lack thereof) reminded me of a point I’ve seen about the contrast between Rule of Law, and Rule of Power (that nonetheless disguises itself as Rule of Law).
In the former, we actually have rules that act as limits to behavior and are enforced, with that outside the Rules being consistently forbidden, and that within consistently allowed.
In the latter, there are two main modes of manifestation, the lax, and the strict. In the lax mode, there are not really any explicit rules, with the extent of articulation of norms often being on the level of “just don’t do anything bad”. In the strict mode, there are so many, overbroad rules, that pretty much everyone is breaking _some_ rule at a given time.
Both of these modes end up in largely the same place, however: punishment and reward function primarily at the whim of those in power, as (in the lax mode) the lack of restraining structure allows those in power to freely exert their power to punish those they oppose, or (in the strict mode) their power allows them to choose which rule breakers (of which everyone is one) are the okay sort, versus those who deserve having the full might of the Rules brought down upon them.
Ultimately, it requires a care with the rule making of the sort that this post encourages in order to make a set of rules that actually functions as such, rather than just being another avenue for the powerful to exert their will.
Interesting.
1) What do we have in the way of a comparative study of different rule structures? At first blush, it seems like every country follows the same gray area method, just with varying degrees of mercy. However, now that I think about it, Singapore had a hard, public line on chewing gum.
2) In theory, robot enforcement should solve all of us. However, we have a case study staring right at us: traffic-signal cameras. For ten years, they were in vogue. Then my neighbor got divorced because photos sent to his house showed him riding with someone other than his wife. And then similar stories came out, and then people sued cities, and then the conversation evolved into one about privacy. And now, at least in America, I haven't heard of any traffic camera enforcement for at least ten years.
The case study, combined with the fact that Singapore is the only country I can think of with such a hard line, doesn't bode well for a future with ideal rule parameters.