Social norms can be enforced formally or informally. That is, one can have either laws, or informal sanctions enforce by “mobs”. Both systems can discourage unwanted behaviors, and isolate unwanted people. So we usually face a choice: to discourage such things via law or via shunning (or both).
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.
)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..
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.
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.
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?)
“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.
)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..
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.
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.