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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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You appear to be approaching the question from a context of laws and other highly legible systems of formal rules. If I'm understanding you correctly, the idea would be that there's a clear separation between the legal rules and the justice system, and the various sorts of informal social consequences for lesser transgressions, with the idea being that the latter are perhaps less important and can more or less be ignored. If someone's not breaking the law, they should be left alone to do as they please, and we should in fact maintain a broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live.

I don't think you understood me correctly, I made no such distinction.

My point applies equally to informal social punishment: You should punish bad actions, not "bad people". At its basis, that's an ethical principle. No one deserves punishment for existing.

It is not obvious to me that this is actually true. I know that libertarians and Enlightenment idealists of the first water think it's true, and even desperately want it to be true, but many of the arguments they present seem to me to cash out in various forms of just-world fallacy. Censoring people doesn't seem to lead to you getting censored in any sort of causal fashion.

There seems to be another misunderstanding here. By "honest people" I'm not referring to the people who want to oppress scoundrels, in fact I believe these people are very often not honest. I'm thinking people who are minding their own business, innocent people.

My point is not that oppression is shortsighted due to risk of backfiring, but ethically fraught due to risk of hurting innocent people (as well as on its own merits in a vacuum). And it does seem obviously, trivially true that if you cut down the law (or non-law principle), it can't protect people anymore.

That said, the risk of backfiring is higher than you believe. Purity spirals, the revolution eating its own children. You talk about the soviets, but "the soviets" includes many people who did not in fact win in the end. Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin, and suddenly Trotskyists were considered scoundrel. Yezhov led the great purge and fell to it himself. Not everyone gets to be Stalin, so even the person who doesn't care about hurting innocents might consider self-interest.

What protects honest people is a cohesive society of other honest people who share their values and their understanding of who is and is not a scoundrel, and are willing and able to punish defectors appropriately. Lacking that, all the laws in the world will not save them.

You can't sustain an understanding of who is scoundrel. As you say yourself:

The distinction does not seem sustainable at our present social scale.

The issue is that if you go after bad people and aren't fair to them, it becomes hard for supposed scoundrel to defend themselves.

This also means dishonest people gain power, because they can falsely accuse honest people of being scoundrel. The solution is to go after bad actions, and fairly, so the accused gets a chance to correct potential mistakes.

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