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Sure. I think that law enforcement is necessarily there to keep us from doing things. That is enough for me to think it's not necessarily the same as benevolenc

by imh 10y ago

Sure. I think that law enforcement is necessarily there to keep us from doing things. That is enough for me to think it's not necessarily the same as benevolence. At the risk of flying my ultra-nerd flag, it's like the lawful-chaotic vs good-bad axes. To paraphrase the comment I was questioning, I think it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a lawful actor, but A) we aren't even there yet, and B) that is orthogonal to benevolence. The connection between lawfulness and benevolence is complicated by so much history and disagreement about what is actually "good" that I hesitate to just casually purpose them together like niftich's comment did. It might even be worse, that we ought to expect law enforcement to be agents of order above all, and that just makes kinda me nervous. I'm not sure how rational those feelings of nervousness are. (both of those "ought to" statements are in the sense niftich used it in). Maybe law enforcement is fundamentally just a necessary evil, in that they're going to prevent someone from doing what they think is ok. Hence the orthogonal axes, where this is just a statement about order. I don't really know how I feel about this, hence the terse question. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyways, I didn't want to put my own opinion directly in my question because of the risk of sidetracking discussion towards my own opinion and away from my curiosity about why niftich felt that it was true enough to state without justification.

niftich 10y ago
You raise some good points and it's helpful for me to understand how you arrived at them. I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I feel that law enforcement ought to be agents of societal order, where that benefit is to the good of society at large. They're the enforcers of a social contract -- one that we happen to write down and call 'laws' -- and only by willfully violating these laws would I incur the antagonism of the police. My rationale for using the construction "... law enforcement is a benevolent actor" does reveal my view that certain types of proactive policing result in tactics indistinguishable from a malicious actor: stalking suspected future offenders, aggressively policing minor offenses that in other circumstances would be excused, and creating an environment where proper etiquette to not end up detained, injured, or deceased is getting exceedingly difficult. See also, this comment [1] where I address the original question from the context of another reply. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12690543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12690543
solipsism 10y ago
I expect police to be good people. Guess we differ there. I expect police to not follow evil laws. That's a bit hyperbolic though. More importantly, I expect police to use their judgment to do the right thing. Police have an incredible amount of flexibility inherent in how they interpret laws. They choose when to put someone in jail and when to give them a break. They choose when pull their gun. The law doesn't provide adequate guidance here. It cannot. Laws are made to be interpreted by people. Police, prosecutors, judges, and juries all apply their humanity to the ridiculously coarse and simplistic letter of the law. I expect police to be the best of us. They need to be. It's an impossible goal but we could go a lot better than we do now. Are you a programmer? If so, I hope it wouldn't offend you to suggest that you might be thinking of the law as a computer program, and police as machines that run it. If we ever create a benevolent machine to serve as our lawbook, I'll agree with you that humans should simply put their judgment aside and be simple agents of its will.
- imh 10y ago
  I think that flexibility is what puts laws as they exist (imperfect, maybe even bad) right next to the "ideal" social contract (good) in their mandate. With both of those in the job description, yeah, they ought to be good. That flexibility in enforcement and the judiciary can have bad unintended consequences (leaving the door wide open for the same action being legal for people in power and illegal for everyone else, or for bias to creep in), but on the whole we need it. You're totally right. Thanks for the insight.

by imh 10y ago

niftich 10y ago

You raise some good points and it's helpful for me to understand how you arrived at them. I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I feel that law enforcement ought to be agents of societal order, where that benefit is to the good of society at large. They're the enforcers of a social contract -- one that we happen to write down and call 'laws' -- and only by willfully violating these laws would I incur the antagonism of the police. My rationale for using the construction "... law enforcement is a benevolent actor" does reveal my view that certain types of proactive policing result in tactics indistinguishable from a malicious actor: stalking suspected future offenders, aggressively policing minor offenses that in other circumstances would be excused, and creating an environment where proper etiquette to not end up detained, injured, or deceased is getting exceedingly difficult. See also, this comment [1] where I address the original question from the context of another reply. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12690543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12690543

solipsism 10y ago

I expect police to be good people. Guess we differ there. I expect police to not follow evil laws. That's a bit hyperbolic though. More importantly, I expect police to use their judgment to do the right thing. Police have an incredible amount of flexibility inherent in how they interpret laws. They choose when to put someone in jail and when to give them a break. They choose when pull their gun. The law doesn't provide adequate guidance here. It cannot. Laws are made to be interpreted by people. Police, prosecutors, judges, and juries all apply their humanity to the ridiculously coarse and simplistic letter of the law. I expect police to be the best of us. They need to be. It's an impossible goal but we could go a lot better than we do now. Are you a programmer? If so, I hope it wouldn't offend you to suggest that you might be thinking of the law as a computer program, and police as machines that run it. If we ever create a benevolent machine to serve as our lawbook, I'll agree with you that humans should simply put their judgment aside and be simple agents of its will.

imh 10y ago
I think that flexibility is what puts laws as they exist (imperfect, maybe even bad) right next to the "ideal" social contract (good) in their mandate. With both of those in the job description, yeah, they ought to be good. That flexibility in enforcement and the judiciary can have bad unintended consequences (leaving the door wide open for the same action being legal for people in power and illegal for everyone else, or for bias to creep in), but on the whole we need it. You're totally right. Thanks for the insight.