Law should only be used to stop behavior that is an initiation of force or fraud or inflicts physical harm imho. Government force via law should not be used against behavior that is merely disliked by the majority or some powerful faction.
Today there seems to be a widespread problem of over-sensitivity as a seemingly ever larger set of things are taken as offenses. So before we decide what to do about offensive behavior we had best start on more careful understanding of what sorts of offensive should be acted against in the first place and what thing we find offensive are rationally offensive. Of course there we have to be careful of rationalization of our biases.
Freedom of association is strongly tied to the value of shunning. If you don't enjoy someones company or don't get more value from interacting with them the pains of doing so then simply stop interacting with them where you have a choice.
I have seen shunning rather viciously weaponized during the COVID madness to shun and belittle those that went against the accepted (and heavily propagandized) narrative. This happened even to actual experts in relevant areas - sometimes to the degree of de-platforming and destroying their career and reputation. After these object lessons I believe we don't need to so much decide between law and shunning as to thing more deeply on whether the offense is really all that offensive and whether our reactions and subsequent actions are just and reasonable. Too much shunning is the dead of tolerance and open society.
It seems to me that the problem is that the fourth agenda is zero sum and pursued via highly destructive means, but pursuing that same agenda via law would be worse, unless the hope is that it would lead to people fighting back overtly (and presumably resistors shunning non-resistors?)
“To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “
The qualifier “enough” makes this hard to criticize, but I will try. The presumption seems to be that law consists entirely of the product of a centralized legislative process. Decentralized possibilities exist, with the common law providing an example.
The discussion raises an issue regarding standing. The common law is biased against cases raised by unaffected third parties (busybodies), as compared to legislation, because busybodies lack standing. This asymmetry might be relevant to the discussion.
Does the common law implicitly exclude all forms of busybody law by denying standing to busybodies? Maybe not, if the attitudes of busybodies is popular enough or somehow dominant. E.g. advocates of the drug war invoke second order harms created by drug use.
This might suggests the utility of distinguishing between laws intended primarily to punish antisocial behavior and laws intended to steer prosocial behavior. The former create a process that enables learning about justice, the later require that it be known in advance. Or perhaps learning occurs in both, but having a plaintiff seek recourse is more direct that having people notice that recourse is needed and spread the word until it becomes a political issue that can determine the outcome of an election and incentivize the elected officials to follow through on their campaign promises.
It should be easy for a public choice theorist to explain the dominance of legislation over common law since the progressive era.
I think I misread. I interpreted “To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “ as “To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree [with each other community] enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “, but probably “To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough [wi5in each specific jurisdiction] on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “ was intended.
I was unaware that de facto decriminalization (or legalization?) existed, much less that it caused the wrecking of the West Coast. I thought that wreckage had more to do with prosecutors that have decided to stop prosecuting anything except violent self defense.
Perhaps the “de facto” aspect is important. Portugal has had success with decriminalization, but it is not “de facto”. Even the best idea can be implemented badly by incompetent or disincentivized agents. But the west coast has not even implemented this idea.
The drug war has a long track record that in no way supports the idea that it has been justified, effective, or even convenient. Drug problems remain fairly constant, providing a source of corruption for police and politicians.
Drug use being a symptom of a more general collapse seems more plausible than blaming is as the major cause. Some problems would improve if all illegal drug users got arrested and imprisoned, but only at the cost of exacerbating others. And as we know from experience, such effective enforcement will never happen.or at least, the circumstances seem less emanable now and in the foreseeable future than at various times in the past.
)The downside of shunning is that social norms keeps changing.You might be embraced today and be shunned tomorrow while totally unaware of the offense you did. Bc your social norms are not the same .? Usually I think that also create a gap in generational social norms.
Shunning often happens for deeply unjust and unfair reasons. There's no process to determine the facts of whether the shunned party really is in the wrong or not. It's just a matter of wielding social clout against people who lack enough clout and thus can't fight back..
Freedom of association makes the possibility of shunning someone necessary. To complain that it is over-used seems identical to complaining that people have insufficient wisdom. We may wish for more wisdom, but finding a way to actually acquire it can be difficult; and finding a way to share it, perhaps even more difficult.
Not just that people have insufficient wisdom to determine who is in the wrong, but also that people may know exactly how unfair and unjust their shunning action is, but do it anyway because they want to hurt somebody or dominate over somebody. The combination of the two is the problem.
I think I was assuming that the wise are less likely to act unfairly or unjustly, less interested in domination or social status, but still willing to exert some effort to discourage others from engaging in antisocial activity.
Well, anyway, shunning is the tool of workplace bullies and other kinds of bullies. Think of someone saying, "I'll see that you'll never work in this industry again!" Is that likely to be a person with right on their side? Or a person retaliating because another person refused to be coerced into something?
Now think of a child in the classroom that has been shunned by their peers. Is it likely that the child did something terribly wrong deserving of punishment? Or is it likely that the child just is dissimilar to their peers, unattractive, poor, nerdy? Was shunning a force for good in the case of this child?
At least with lawsuits, there's some semblance of a process where evidence is presented and arguments from both sides are heard before a judgment is reached by a (supposedly) impartial third party. A properly designed system has the potential to improve on what you call "wisdom."
“shunning is the tool of workplace bullies and other kinds of bullies.”
So is language. And if the bullies in your workplace use only shunning, it could be a lot worse.
How would you deal with someone who is rude to you? Ignore it, complain to them? If they never stop, eventually you will shun them.
“you'll never work in this industry again!" Sounds like more than shunning. Blacklisting?
“think of a child in the classroom that has been shunned by their peers. Is it likely that the child did something terribly wrong deserving of punishment? “
Not necessarily. I would think it was unusual, though. When I was a child, my peers did not all get along. There were some I had no interest in, and others I would actively avoid. Some of them had done things I thought of as terrible, others were merely annoying. I don’t think any of them were shunned by everyone.
I think we attach a different meaning to shunning. If I avoid someone who annoys me, I think I am shunning them. Maybe that is not included for you.
You're talking about one person shunning one person, but in the context of Hanson's post, he's referring to *organized* shunning where a group of people refuse to talk to or give the normal level of courtesy to a shunned party. It's not one on one, it's many on one. Blacklisting is another name for it.
Shunning doesn't ever seem to be used to counteract behaviors that are seen, in retrospect, to actually be wrong. For example, the only reason to motivate this practice is when after other incentives for someone not to do the behavior in question don't exist, such as in the case of speech. Smaller communities that practice shunning often do so because there is a larger over-culture which approves of some behaviors not approved of by the smaller community. Because there will be incentives to do the behavior, shunning is introduced to counteract those positive incentives. If there are natural incentives against the behavior, that precludes the necessity of shunning. Thus it always seems to exist to counteract positive incentives, which imply that the behavior in question is either not as bad as it considered to be by a sub-community, or that it is bad, but the larger culture mistakenly rewards or incentivizes it for some reason.
Bad behavior often (usually?) has incentives that tempt us. Otherwise it would not be a problem!
Threats of shunning can perhaps counteract that. To say that it is never appropriate would amount to saying that jail time or fines are the only appropriate punishments for antisocial behavior or selfish violation of beneficial norms. But jail or fines are disproportionate in some cases. What is the alternative?
Perhaps we are not thinking of shunning in the same way. I see it as providing a spectrum, from the most extreme (no one in the community will communicate or transact with the shunned person) to the mildest (expressions of disapproval, gossip, criticism directed at the violator). People perhaps are too eager to use shunning, or tend to over use it, but we can’t get rid of it entirely, and would not necessarily be better off without it.
I am perhaps conflating shunning, ostracism, and disapproval. To the extent that they are distinct at all, they are closely related.
Shunning / ostracism are likely related. One reason they both seem highly disproportionate to me is that they compel people involved in doing it to believe that interactions with the person are wrong - so it imposes a new set of moral precepts, which require that some kind of deontological belief system has to be followed. Furthermore - e.g. in the treatment of 'apostates' - it also imposes the belief that one should not interact with the person for fear that they may convince you to listen to them. So, it's difficult to separate the practice of shunning / ostracism from belief systems that require profession-of-belief, as well as implicit acknowledgement that the belief system itself is vulnerable to argument or outside attack.
I grew up in a cult and, when I left, was shunned by all my then friends and family. My sin was no longer believing in the doctrine so I have felt firsthand the devastating social consequences of that. With woke ideology and cancel culture, shunning can also affect your career and social standing in the general public square. Our founding fathers were terrified of the mob, which is why they made making legislation so arduous and slow-moving.
Someone in the comments cites the fallout from decriminalization of drugs in West Coast cities (where I live so have seen that fallout firsthand too). But it's not that decriminalization doesn't work at all - it's only that poorly designed laws yield poor results. If you do not comport yourself in the public square, there should be consequences to that, but how does the lack of affordable housing or mental health care play into that too? All laws and policies touch all other laws and policies.
I think an important axis which contributes to risk of shuning going haywire is: are prosecutors standing to gain from shunning the convicted. In some non-zero game scenarios, like parents vs children or company vs employee I am more willing to let them setlle the issue without external supervision and formal rules because I expect that parents/employers don't really want to harm child/employee, as they have plans to do something great together. But when I see villagers with pitchforks proposing to get rid of a person from their village I suspect they might be interested in taking over their household and livestock. Thus looking at playoff matrix might be useful.
Morality is the predecessor of a written code of law. It originated as the rules of behavior made by a community to prevent internal conflict. A century ago, the words "norms," "morality" and "ethics" were fully interchangeable with each other, as elegant variations. Nowadays there is a hierarchy with the law of the land on top, then morality, then norms which are preferred modes of behavior. Morality is doing what the community thinks is right. Ethics is the individual doing what she thinks is right.
What I call a natural norm arises out of normal human interactions. But there are those who, having a platform, believe that their opinions are more moral than anyone else's, and attempt to create abnormal norms. I call these published norms. Often the purpose of a published norm is not to reduce internal conflict but to create it. It appears that the community regards malice as a noble virtue.
It is plausible that busybodies might sometimes improve things for a large number of persons by informally enforcing valuable norms. But it is also possible for them to make things worse, by enforcing norms that are not really beneficial. I am tempted to think that they have no business influencing formal law, which should be driven by the complaints of plaintiffs with standing (persons that plausibly claim to have been damaged directly).
Typo: "trail balloon"
Law should only be used to stop behavior that is an initiation of force or fraud or inflicts physical harm imho. Government force via law should not be used against behavior that is merely disliked by the majority or some powerful faction.
Today there seems to be a widespread problem of over-sensitivity as a seemingly ever larger set of things are taken as offenses. So before we decide what to do about offensive behavior we had best start on more careful understanding of what sorts of offensive should be acted against in the first place and what thing we find offensive are rationally offensive. Of course there we have to be careful of rationalization of our biases.
Freedom of association is strongly tied to the value of shunning. If you don't enjoy someones company or don't get more value from interacting with them the pains of doing so then simply stop interacting with them where you have a choice.
I have seen shunning rather viciously weaponized during the COVID madness to shun and belittle those that went against the accepted (and heavily propagandized) narrative. This happened even to actual experts in relevant areas - sometimes to the degree of de-platforming and destroying their career and reputation. After these object lessons I believe we don't need to so much decide between law and shunning as to thing more deeply on whether the offense is really all that offensive and whether our reactions and subsequent actions are just and reasonable. Too much shunning is the dead of tolerance and open society.
How would one use law in the fourth case?
It seems to me that the problem is that the fourth agenda is zero sum and pursued via highly destructive means, but pursuing that same agenda via law would be worse, unless the hope is that it would lead to people fighting back overtly (and presumably resistors shunning non-resistors?)
Yes, it is hard to pursue the 4th strategy via law, and it would still be destructive if one could do so.
“To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “
The qualifier “enough” makes this hard to criticize, but I will try. The presumption seems to be that law consists entirely of the product of a centralized legislative process. Decentralized possibilities exist, with the common law providing an example.
The discussion raises an issue regarding standing. The common law is biased against cases raised by unaffected third parties (busybodies), as compared to legislation, because busybodies lack standing. This asymmetry might be relevant to the discussion.
Does the common law implicitly exclude all forms of busybody law by denying standing to busybodies? Maybe not, if the attitudes of busybodies is popular enough or somehow dominant. E.g. advocates of the drug war invoke second order harms created by drug use.
This might suggests the utility of distinguishing between laws intended primarily to punish antisocial behavior and laws intended to steer prosocial behavior. The former create a process that enables learning about justice, the later require that it be known in advance. Or perhaps learning occurs in both, but having a plaintiff seek recourse is more direct that having people notice that recourse is needed and spread the word until it becomes a political issue that can determine the outcome of an election and incentivize the elected officials to follow through on their campaign promises.
It should be easy for a public choice theorist to explain the dominance of legislation over common law since the progressive era.
I don't at all get how you see my sentence as assuming "law consists entirely of the product of a centralized legislative process".
I think I misread. I interpreted “To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “ as “To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree [with each other community] enough on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “, but probably “To invoke law, our larger communities must formally agree enough [wi5in each specific jurisdiction] on how to specify what counts as a legal violation, “ was intended.
It's strange to see denigration of the war on drugs after the de facto decriminalization of drugs has wrecked US West Coast cities.
I was unaware that de facto decriminalization (or legalization?) existed, much less that it caused the wrecking of the West Coast. I thought that wreckage had more to do with prosecutors that have decided to stop prosecuting anything except violent self defense.
Perhaps the “de facto” aspect is important. Portugal has had success with decriminalization, but it is not “de facto”. Even the best idea can be implemented badly by incompetent or disincentivized agents. But the west coast has not even implemented this idea.
The drug war has a long track record that in no way supports the idea that it has been justified, effective, or even convenient. Drug problems remain fairly constant, providing a source of corruption for police and politicians.
Drug use being a symptom of a more general collapse seems more plausible than blaming is as the major cause. Some problems would improve if all illegal drug users got arrested and imprisoned, but only at the cost of exacerbating others. And as we know from experience, such effective enforcement will never happen.or at least, the circumstances seem less emanable now and in the foreseeable future than at various times in the past.
)The downside of shunning is that social norms keeps changing.You might be embraced today and be shunned tomorrow while totally unaware of the offense you did. Bc your social norms are not the same .? Usually I think that also create a gap in generational social norms.
Shunning often happens for deeply unjust and unfair reasons. There's no process to determine the facts of whether the shunned party really is in the wrong or not. It's just a matter of wielding social clout against people who lack enough clout and thus can't fight back..
Freedom of association makes the possibility of shunning someone necessary. To complain that it is over-used seems identical to complaining that people have insufficient wisdom. We may wish for more wisdom, but finding a way to actually acquire it can be difficult; and finding a way to share it, perhaps even more difficult.
Not just that people have insufficient wisdom to determine who is in the wrong, but also that people may know exactly how unfair and unjust their shunning action is, but do it anyway because they want to hurt somebody or dominate over somebody. The combination of the two is the problem.
I think I was assuming that the wise are less likely to act unfairly or unjustly, less interested in domination or social status, but still willing to exert some effort to discourage others from engaging in antisocial activity.
Well, anyway, shunning is the tool of workplace bullies and other kinds of bullies. Think of someone saying, "I'll see that you'll never work in this industry again!" Is that likely to be a person with right on their side? Or a person retaliating because another person refused to be coerced into something?
Now think of a child in the classroom that has been shunned by their peers. Is it likely that the child did something terribly wrong deserving of punishment? Or is it likely that the child just is dissimilar to their peers, unattractive, poor, nerdy? Was shunning a force for good in the case of this child?
At least with lawsuits, there's some semblance of a process where evidence is presented and arguments from both sides are heard before a judgment is reached by a (supposedly) impartial third party. A properly designed system has the potential to improve on what you call "wisdom."
“shunning is the tool of workplace bullies and other kinds of bullies.”
So is language. And if the bullies in your workplace use only shunning, it could be a lot worse.
How would you deal with someone who is rude to you? Ignore it, complain to them? If they never stop, eventually you will shun them.
“you'll never work in this industry again!" Sounds like more than shunning. Blacklisting?
“think of a child in the classroom that has been shunned by their peers. Is it likely that the child did something terribly wrong deserving of punishment? “
Not necessarily. I would think it was unusual, though. When I was a child, my peers did not all get along. There were some I had no interest in, and others I would actively avoid. Some of them had done things I thought of as terrible, others were merely annoying. I don’t think any of them were shunned by everyone.
I think we attach a different meaning to shunning. If I avoid someone who annoys me, I think I am shunning them. Maybe that is not included for you.
You're talking about one person shunning one person, but in the context of Hanson's post, he's referring to *organized* shunning where a group of people refuse to talk to or give the normal level of courtesy to a shunned party. It's not one on one, it's many on one. Blacklisting is another name for it.
Shunning doesn't ever seem to be used to counteract behaviors that are seen, in retrospect, to actually be wrong. For example, the only reason to motivate this practice is when after other incentives for someone not to do the behavior in question don't exist, such as in the case of speech. Smaller communities that practice shunning often do so because there is a larger over-culture which approves of some behaviors not approved of by the smaller community. Because there will be incentives to do the behavior, shunning is introduced to counteract those positive incentives. If there are natural incentives against the behavior, that precludes the necessity of shunning. Thus it always seems to exist to counteract positive incentives, which imply that the behavior in question is either not as bad as it considered to be by a sub-community, or that it is bad, but the larger culture mistakenly rewards or incentivizes it for some reason.
Bad behavior often (usually?) has incentives that tempt us. Otherwise it would not be a problem!
Threats of shunning can perhaps counteract that. To say that it is never appropriate would amount to saying that jail time or fines are the only appropriate punishments for antisocial behavior or selfish violation of beneficial norms. But jail or fines are disproportionate in some cases. What is the alternative?
Perhaps we are not thinking of shunning in the same way. I see it as providing a spectrum, from the most extreme (no one in the community will communicate or transact with the shunned person) to the mildest (expressions of disapproval, gossip, criticism directed at the violator). People perhaps are too eager to use shunning, or tend to over use it, but we can’t get rid of it entirely, and would not necessarily be better off without it.
I am perhaps conflating shunning, ostracism, and disapproval. To the extent that they are distinct at all, they are closely related.
Shunning / ostracism are likely related. One reason they both seem highly disproportionate to me is that they compel people involved in doing it to believe that interactions with the person are wrong - so it imposes a new set of moral precepts, which require that some kind of deontological belief system has to be followed. Furthermore - e.g. in the treatment of 'apostates' - it also imposes the belief that one should not interact with the person for fear that they may convince you to listen to them. So, it's difficult to separate the practice of shunning / ostracism from belief systems that require profession-of-belief, as well as implicit acknowledgement that the belief system itself is vulnerable to argument or outside attack.
I grew up in a cult and, when I left, was shunned by all my then friends and family. My sin was no longer believing in the doctrine so I have felt firsthand the devastating social consequences of that. With woke ideology and cancel culture, shunning can also affect your career and social standing in the general public square. Our founding fathers were terrified of the mob, which is why they made making legislation so arduous and slow-moving.
Someone in the comments cites the fallout from decriminalization of drugs in West Coast cities (where I live so have seen that fallout firsthand too). But it's not that decriminalization doesn't work at all - it's only that poorly designed laws yield poor results. If you do not comport yourself in the public square, there should be consequences to that, but how does the lack of affordable housing or mental health care play into that too? All laws and policies touch all other laws and policies.
I think an important axis which contributes to risk of shuning going haywire is: are prosecutors standing to gain from shunning the convicted. In some non-zero game scenarios, like parents vs children or company vs employee I am more willing to let them setlle the issue without external supervision and formal rules because I expect that parents/employers don't really want to harm child/employee, as they have plans to do something great together. But when I see villagers with pitchforks proposing to get rid of a person from their village I suspect they might be interested in taking over their household and livestock. Thus looking at playoff matrix might be useful.
Morality is the predecessor of a written code of law. It originated as the rules of behavior made by a community to prevent internal conflict. A century ago, the words "norms," "morality" and "ethics" were fully interchangeable with each other, as elegant variations. Nowadays there is a hierarchy with the law of the land on top, then morality, then norms which are preferred modes of behavior. Morality is doing what the community thinks is right. Ethics is the individual doing what she thinks is right.
What I call a natural norm arises out of normal human interactions. But there are those who, having a platform, believe that their opinions are more moral than anyone else's, and attempt to create abnormal norms. I call these published norms. Often the purpose of a published norm is not to reduce internal conflict but to create it. It appears that the community regards malice as a noble virtue.
It is plausible that busybodies might sometimes improve things for a large number of persons by informally enforcing valuable norms. But it is also possible for them to make things worse, by enforcing norms that are not really beneficial. I am tempted to think that they have no business influencing formal law, which should be driven by the complaints of plaintiffs with standing (persons that plausibly claim to have been damaged directly).