> To think that this turns out well displays either staggering ignorance or the naïvete of an infant.
Unfortunately, so does thinking that the alternative, trying to have governments spell out everything in advance and dictate outcomes from the top down without being able to take into account the circumstances of individual cases, turns out well.
The unpleasant truth is that if you live in a community whose members are not good people, you won't have good outcomes, no matter what kind of system you design.
The unpleasant truth is that if you live in a community whose members are not good people, you won't have good outcomes
Again, the quandary is that if you live in a community whose members are "good" people, you also won't have good outcomes. That's the nature of people. They are not "bad" or "good". They are just humans. Their actions are sometimes "bad", sometimes "good", but rarely are their actions consistently the one or the other. That's just the nature of being human. In fact, it's the entire reason we talk about "justice" in the first place.
> if you live in a community whose members are "good" people, you also won't have good outcomes
I disagree. Historically there are plenty of examples of communities that have managed to get along for extended periods with reasonably good outcomes. What we humans don't (yet) have a good handle on is how to protect such communities against invasion from outside--other people outside the communities just won't leave them alone, but insist on trying to make them part of some larger social experiment.
There is definitely such a thing as moral virtue or character. Maybe "bad" and "good" are too simplistic but there are definitely more virtuous and less virtuous humans
Well, the original meaning of casuistry is "the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions; sophistry", which seems apt to this article.
We have another name for what the article is describing, vigilantism.
"Under casuistry, communities themselves deal with those accused of disturbing the community’s peace or of harming some of its members."
I can think of few things more terrifying than a community seeking to impose 'justice' emboldened by the absence of law.
> Well, the original meaning of casuistry is "the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions; sophistry", which seems apt to this article.
That is not the original meaning of casuistry. It is the meaning given to the word by casuistry's critics, or rather probably the critics of the Jesuits, as they used the technique a lot in the past.
A 'fuller' defintion:
> Casuistry (/ˈkæzjuɪstri/) is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances.[1] This method occurs in applied ethics and jurisprudence. The term is also commonly used as a pejorative to criticize the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions (as in sophistry).[2] The word casuistry derives from the Latin noun casus ("case" or "occurrence").
[…]
> Certain kinds of casuistry were criticized by early Protestant theologians, because it was used in order to justify many of the abuses that they sought to reform. It was famously attacked by the Catholic and Jansenist philosopher Pascal, during the formulary controversy against the Jesuits, in his Provincial Letters as the use of rhetorics to justify moral laxity, which became identified by the public with Jesuitism; hence the everyday use of the term to mean complex and sophistic reasoning to justify moral laxity.[14] By the mid-18th century, "casuistry" had become a synonym for specious moral reasoning.[15] However, Puritans were known for their own development of casuistry.[citation needed]
> I can think of few things more terrifying than a community seeking to impose 'justice' emboldened by the absence of law.
I can think of few things more terrifying than "law" being imposed on citizens by legislators and bureaucrats who themselves have no skin in the game and suffer no consequences if the laws they impose are bad. We have another name for this too: tyranny.
This is a good observation. There needs to be some kind of feedback loop to suppress the tyrannical bureaucratizing tendency of the modern state. It is obvious that our own society does not have any such feedback loop.
However, the answer is not some kind of local unaccountable justice system where a judge basically rules based either on the will of the crowd or his own personal interests, and then calls it "community reconciliation" or some such bullshit. It's like the person who wrote the article literally never contemplated the reason for written law to exist in the first place.
> The unpleasant truth is that if you live in a community whose members are not good people, you won't have good outcomes, no matter what kind of system you design.
I think this is also basically undeniably true. But across all of history, I really don't know of any politcal system that had a noticable positive effect on the moral quality of the individual humans it ruled over. So this just leaves me with a sense of metahistorical pessimism.
> the answer is not some kind of local unaccountable justice system
There is no reason why a local justice system can't be accountable to the people who live in the community. But, as I said in another comment upthread, if the people in the community aren't good people, you aren't going to have good outcomes no matter what kind of system you set up, or what kind of laws you write.
> It's like the person who wrote the article literally never contemplated the reason for written law to exist in the first place.
Sure they did; they just recognize that written laws are attempts to achieve an unachievable ideal. It is impossible to capture "fairness" and "justice" in any written set of rules. There will always be human judgment required in individual cases, and human judgment is (a) subjective, and (b) depends on the humans doing the judging. If you have corrupt humans, you will get corrupt outcomes, and you can't fix that by writing laws, because corrupt people will just figure out loopholes in the laws, and writing guaranteed loophole-free laws is impossible.
Again, the flaw is that local people can be as corrupt as non-local people. I'm having a difficult time ascertaining a difference. In either case, a man is obliged to live under the tyranny of potentially corrupt people.
In fact, given the people, local or non-local, have power, it is a virtual certainty that there will be some level of corruption among them.
> given the people, local or non-local, have power
That's not a given. Governments only have power to the extent that citizens agree to abide by the government's laws. If enough citizens get fed up with the laws, they stop abiding by them. Sometimes it's open revolution, as happened for instance in the United States in the late 1700s. Sometimes it's just selective noncompliance when people know a law is unenforceable, as for instance the way most Americans today treat speed limits and many other traffic laws.
A more difficult situation is when a society at large is split between two very different views of what kinds of laws are good social policy. IMO, in such cases neither side should have the power to get their preferred laws passed; laws affecting entire societies should only be passed when there is a broad consensus that they are good laws, or at least acceptable.
If a corrupt government is given power to decide any punishment it pleases for not abiding by its laws, and given the power technical and legal to preclude non-local actors from interfering with its actions, then good luck with your non-compliance. Personally, my experience has been that such circumstances only yield busier gulags, but your mileage may vary.
And I mean really, social policy? So what if people in Mississipi decide they still want slavery or jim crow? Those are binary choices. There is no way to implement your "neither side should have the power to get their preferred laws passed" legislative scheme. What I mean in practice is that you either have slavery, or you do not have slavery. There is no state that a free portion of society can be in where they both have and don't have slavery. At some point, you have to choose. What I'm asking, is what happens when the inevitably corrupt government officials choose to infringe on the freedoms of the citizens? Of course, we hope that they will never make choices that infringe on the freedoms of citizens. But humor me, what happens if they do?
> If a corrupt government is given power to decide any punishment it pleases for not abiding by its laws, and given the power technical and legal to preclude non-local actors from interfering with its actions
Who is giving the corrupt local government that power? The answer, historically, has always been: a higher-level government. And that's also the answer with corrupt localities today. They only survive because they have political friends in higher places.
> my experience has been that such circumstances only yield busier gulags
Which places with gulags have you lived in? (That's a serious question, btw: we have had posters on here who are from the former Soviet Union or one of its satellites and who have had direct personal experience of such things.)
> So what if people in Mississipi decide they still want slavery
They can't just decide they want slavery: they would have to get people in the same community to become slaves. Historically, that's never happened. Slavery has never been a local process; it's never that some people in a particular community just decide to enslave the others. It always happens as a result of non-local invasions (usually wars of conquest). Maintaining slavery as an institution also has never, historically, been done locally; it has always needed higher level non-local enforcement. For example, slavery only survived in the antebellum US South because both State and Federal governments enforced it. And even then they couldn't really enforce it; purposeful non-compliance by many people in the North with things like fugitive slave laws was common and almost never punished.
> What I'm asking, is what happens when the inevitably corrupt government officials choose to infringe on the freedoms of the citizens?
I've already answered this: citizens start finding ways not to comply, because enforcement can never be perfect; and eventually, if things get bad enough, they revolt.
The worst case is something like the Soviet Union or China, where a high-level central government is willing to use enough force even to put down open revolt. However, first, this is obviously not a local government doing this--no local government in history has had that much force at its disposal--and second, even that won't last: the Soviet Union fell apart, and if history is any indication, China will eventually do the same if its government continues with the level of repression it has shown thus far.
> the flaw is that local people can be as corrupt as non-local people
Sure, but at least local people have some skin in the game; they have to live locally with the consequences of their actions. Non-local people don't.
> In either case, a man is obliged to live under the tyranny of potentially corrupt people.
But the tyranny is much more limited in scope if it's only local people; they will have limited resources at their command, and worst case I can always move. If the entire planet is a tyranny, I'm screwed.
Sure, but at least local people have some skin in the game; they have to live locally with the consequences of their actions
The purpose of their corruption is precisely so that they don't have to live with the consequences of their actions.
I can always move
Not if the local people with power disallow it. Or are you saying you always want non-local people to have power over the local people so that the locals are compelled to allow you to leave?
> The purpose of their corruption is precisely so that they don't have to live with the consequences of their actions.
If they're local, they live there, so they can't avoid the consequences. The law of unintended consequences applies to corrupt officials just like it applies to everybody else. The reason corrupt officials in our current system can avoid those consequences is that they don't have to live in the places they govern. That's true even of many so-called "local" officials: mayors and city council members often don't live in the cities they govern.
> Not if the local people with power disallow it.
How are they going to prevent people from leaving? If the only resources they can draw on are local, their power will be too limited.
Basically, your picture of "local" seems to be the way "local" works in our current society, which allows localities that are politically favored by higher level governments to draw on resources from those governments. But that's not actaully local; it's the higher level, non-local governments using the lower-level governments as political tools.
consequences applies to corrupt officials just like it applies to everybody else
But consequences may not apply to everyone else. What if local bosses make a law that firearms holders have to turn in their firearms? What if local bosses make a law that blacks have to be slaves? What are the consequences that the local bosses are living with? (Assuming no interference by non local authorities.)
How are they going to prevent people from leaving? If the only resources they can draw on are local
Local bosses make law that it's illegal for anyone other than his henchmen and women to have firearms. Local bosses also make law that leaving town is illegal. Local bosses also orders searches of homes to confiscate firearms. Finally, local bosses authorize deadly force to deal with law breakers.
In this scenario, no outside help is necessary for the local bosses. (I suppose the factory they buy their guns from might be from outside the locality, but that's about it.) Heck, the bosses might even have the support of many of the pearl clutching local citizens. Some of whom might even, gasp, sell me out to the local bosses.
This example is contrived, but has happened often enough in human history for me to want to know how the local citizens can leave before I would concede to living under such a system. There has never been an example of such a system in modern history where non-local powers were not involved in liberating the local citizenry. So if you can outline a credible method for the unarmed citizenry to exercise the freedom to move away, I'd certainly be interested in hearing it.
> What if local bosses make a law that firearms holders have to turn in their firearms?
How are they going to enforce such a law? (Same question for your other examples.)
> (Assuming no interference by non local authorities.)
You must be joking. Without support from non-local authorities, local bosses would simply be laughed at if they tried such things. Where you see such things going on in localities, it's because of support from non-local authorities.
> This example is contrived, but has happened often enough in human history
Please give specific examples. I'm not aware of any case where local bosses got away with such things without any support from a non-local, higher-level government.
> if you can outline a credible method for the unarmed citizenry...
In the historically default situation, the citizenry is not unarmed. Having large numbers of citizens unarmed is a recent and historically aberrant situation, and requires a huge level of support from higher level governments to even make possible. Local authorities in a society where higher level governments do not exist or do not provide such huge support for disarming citizens simply won't have unarmed citizens to play with.
> Well, the original meaning of casuistry is "the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions; sophistry", which seems apt to this article.
Yeah very true. Before I clicked it I thought it would be about something like scholasticism, angels dancing on the head of a pin etc, but really the article itself was the casuistry all along. Kind of funny.
> We have another name for what the article is describing, vigilantism.
Vigilantism is essentially a meaner word of describing what the article describes in weirdly positive language. Russell conjugation and all that. Your vigilantism is my case-based community justice!
As can local justice. Those too anxious to deal out their own interpretation of "justice" are generally deadly whether they live on the other side of a continent, or next door.
To think that this turns out well displays either staggering ignorance or the naïvete of an infant. This is how you get lynchings, folks.