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Philosophy warning: I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I

Philosophy warning: I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. This scenario is a great example of this phenomenon. Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. I really don't like the way this is going, because the end result is a world where limitations are hardwired into the environment, while at the same time you have zero ethical expectations of your fellow humans. It's very Hunger Games / Battle Royale, at a less hostile level. Edit: just to clarify a point here. I'm not saying that there was no theft in the past, or that having ethical expectations instead of laws will somehow reduce all theft. I'm commenting more on the fact that the "new method" results in a different kind of world than the previous one (see the paragraph before this one.) It's a subtle point, but hopefully one I communicated well enough.

sokoloff 3y ago
What would "enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms" look like in a society that used those methods to effectively prevent the exploitation of vehicle owners by car thieves?
- keiferski 3y ago
  The obvious answer would be to harshly punish theft via jail time/etc., but that's sort of not my point, and I don't think that's actually the root issue. Because it's more that stealing cars is apparently an acceptable activity for a lot of people to do. By acceptable, I mean socially, to friends, to family members, to themselves. That seems like a major societal failing to me, much moreso than "this car isn't designed with the optimal security system."
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I get that, but given the observed existence of a subset of the population where this is currently acceptable, what does "enforcing [] religious or ethical norms" to fix the problem look like? I agree with you there's a societal or communal failure here. I don't see what the solution is (other than jail time/etc).
    - keiferski 3y ago
      My immediate answer is to say something like "we need more ethical education" but that's obviously kind of a weak response. The long, slow answer might be that society may re-organize itself into sub-units that do enforce ethical behaviors, and those sub-units eventually prevail over those that don't.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        >and those sub-units eventually prevail over those that don't. Why do you believe this?
        keiferski 3y ago
        I don't know if it's necessarily going to be the case, but I do think one can look at contemporary society and see that certain groups with "rigid" ethical systems are prevailing over those that don't. Economically, sometimes, but even moreso in a reproductive sense. I'm thinking of groups like the Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews, and so forth.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    That makes zero sense to me. Theft is not acceptable by any means. People that steal do so by several motives, most commonly because they feel like they have to due to poverty, addiction, etc. You also already get punished for it with harsh penalties. But no matter how dystopian a government gets, it can't guarantee 100% enforcement of any law. To fix that, we'd have to create a society that takes care of those motives that drive theft, so it doesn't happen anymore. Unfortunately that will never exist in our current society.
nulbyte 3y ago
> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. There are already laws against theft. They apply to vehicles, secure and insecure alike. A law mandating a minimum level of security, as GP suggests, seems to me to fit the suggestion, that auto manufacturers have a minimum standard to ethically sell a vehicle which buyers would, presumably, expect to have locking mechanisms suitable to prevent theft.
- katbyte 3y ago
  And Canada already did this with immobilizes. We also used to do bait cars. Both these things helped a ton, until the new wave of weak car security Iirc the Kai stealing spree didn’t hit Canada as hard because of said immobilizer law too
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. We had police catch 12 and 13 year olds (Kia Boyz) this weekend in a car with guns, and they are out already. They will get some restorative justice, but no real correction in behavior and I’m sure they will do it again. Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      If someone is stealing cars at 12 or 13 years old, they're already well on their way down the path towards irredeemability. Society has to do something or they will turn into a lifelong criminal. A multi-year prison sentence is probably not going to help them, but counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. You have to do something besides "catch and release" which has been the default in the USA for some time.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
This is a very interesting point, but it is genuinely easier to simply ban flipper zeros, or insecure vehicles, then to try to change the Judiciary and prosecution system wholesale. It might very well take longer than the remaining lifespan of most folks reading this, so it's a moot point for anyone that wants to not have their car stolen.
eunos 3y ago
>My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. Uhh noo, this philosophy already there as old as Chinese Legalism ca 400 BC
- engineer_22 3y ago
  OP is talking about western culture - there is no Chinese Legalism tradition in Western Culture so yours is a red herring.
LunaSea 3y ago
> Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. I would disagree and have the inverse position. If you look at the laws regarding removing Supreme Court Justices, senators and other representatives trading, removing misbehaving countries from the EU and Nato, etc. I would say that overall they are mostly optimistic in the sense that they aren't prepared for such worst case scenarios.
- immibis 3y ago
  So, laws for the rich assume good faith. Laws for the poor and middle-class - e.g. "go to jail if you have a flipper zero" - do not.
nonameiguess 3y ago
Frankly, regardless of anything else, I think it's going to be a result of the sheer size of human communities. Internalizing and enforcing ethical norms without state action is one thing when communities are roughly Dunbar number sized and loosely related to each other. It's another thing entirely when the global population approaches 10 billion and a normal metro area has 20 million people who are overwhelmingly total strangers to each other. You're never going to achieve 100% adherence to "don't steal" no matter what, but whatever residual percentage will always do it becomes more and more people as there simply are more and more people. Like it or not, unethical behavior is going to happen and not for the pet cause reason you think, post-structuralism and cultural Marxism or whatever. Arguably, there was more theft when western people were more religious a few centuries ago, just the theft itself was normalized. Whether outright chattel slavery or serfdom, most people had no claim to the fruits of their own labor and aristocrats simply took whatever they wanted.
scotty79 3y ago
> the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws That's literally what the law itself is, since the dawn of time.
2024throwaway 3y ago
> religious or ethical norms Truly confused why `religious` norms come into play here.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Because the modern Western world is in a "religion hangover" where it wants to reject all outwardly religious ideas, while simultaneously denying that a) religions have been the foundation of pretty much all ethical behavior since the beginning of civilization and b) many supposedly secular belief systems are really just extensions of religious ones with the "I believe in..." statement cut off.
  - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    I think the important distinction is not similarity/distance as a vector of meaning, but the ability to update those vectors in response to new data.
  - 2024throwaway 3y ago
    > religions have been the foundation of pretty much all ethical behavior since the beginning of civilization I reject this statement wholeheartedly, and find it a pretty disgusting stance. The idea that the only reason not to kill someone (or otherwise act ethically) is due to religion is horrendous, especially given most religions historical track record on murdering others and other ethical violations.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I think you'd have a pretty difficult time constructing a history of morality that doesn't involve what we refer to as "religion." Certainly that doesn't mean that all religious beliefs are good or justifiable, but that isn't what I claimed, either. I just claimed they were the foundation.
      - 2024throwaway 3y ago
        I would argue it's the opposite. "Maybe killing people is bad. How do we get people to not do that? Tell them god said not to!" It starts from the ethical perspective, and uses religion as the blunt hammer to drive it into the masses.
ytx 3y ago
I think it's partially a size/scale problem. If 1000 people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of an unethical actor might be low, and normative ethics may be enough. But if 1 million people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of at least 1 bad actor is high, and laws/enforcement/deterrents must be enacted, even if the baseline ethical rate is still high.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  And the crux of the argument is whether you believe the law will prevent the bad actor from acquiring one or not. Or if the law will only prevent the other 999 law abiding ones. Personally, my take/view on it is that (deeply) unethical people are going to break the laws regardless of what society says or encodes. This probably is a commentary on the failures of policing to enact what we've encoded in law. Part of it being a problem that many laws are overstated (eg It's illegal to own a flipper zero vs It's illegal to use a flipper zero on someone else's car without permission) ...
- Teever 3y ago
  The problem isn't the million people with flippers, the problem is the million+ people profiting in an industry that produces defective products like cars that are trivial to steal. People sign contracts to buy very expensive automobiles because they reasonably believe that they are safe and secure to own and operate. If car manufacturers are selling a product that they know to be unsafe and they're not telling prospective buyers that and that's fraud.
aidenn0 3y ago
> Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. This is a necessary consequence of civilization. If you have a city of 8 million people, then you have 80,000 people in the bottom percentile of behavior by normative ethics. If some behavior is so outre that only 1 in a million people would do it, then there are 300 people in the US about to do it.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Sure, but it seems like enforce these ethical behaviors and punish the bottom 1% that goes against them is just as much of a solution as redesign society and the environment so that everyone can't act like that 1%.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    People don't want their cars stolen. Punishing the thieves doesn't undo their actions.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Great - and how is that different from the law again?
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Because the law is only punishing people that break the rules, not teaching them what ethical behavior is in the first place. It’s fundamentally a reactive process. In other words, you want people that don’t steal cars because they feel bad about it. You don’t want them to not steal cars because they’re afraid of the law.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        Sorry - you edited your comment substantially, the process you initially described was identical to the law.
fellerts 3y ago
English law often refers to "the man on the Clapham omnibus". Quote from Wikipedia: > The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would – for example, in a civil action for negligence. The character is a reasonably educated, intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured. He would fit your description of "normative ethics". I think the trend you describe mostly (?) applies to the US.
MikeSchurman 3y ago
Ishmael or My Ishmael touches on this subject. Thank you for reminding me. I forget exactly, but, the basic idea is primitive people didn't have all these laws about what to do. They expected you to behave, and if you did not, the tribe did not necessarily punish you, they taught you and made it right somehow (justice). Any MY description does not give this idea justice, so I need to go back and find the reference in the books.
- nativeit 3y ago
  Good pull. I used to obsess over Daniel Quinn’s novels. They’re kind of perfect for the college kid finding philosophy for the first time.
- nativeit 3y ago
  Do you remember the guy who took hostages at the Discovery Channel offices in Washington DC, and tried to force them to promote his Ishmael-based manifesto on television? He was part of a MySpace group that I frequented where we discussed Quinn’s work. I remember having pretty strong disagreements with him in the forums, before he took up arms anyway…
  - MikeSchurman 3y ago
    I don't remember that happening, I think I wasn't watching the news much during that period in my life. But I did hear about it in past year after reading Quinn's books and following some mental threads afterwards. Wild that you had conversations with him! Unfortunate people take ideas so far... we are so sure we are right.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  That works at the scale of a tribe. We do the same thing with kids in a family: punishment (should) only happens after multiple attempts at "teaching" have failed and it's clear that what's happening is disobedience.
eruci 3y ago
You can say the same thing about banning guns (although I just realized that's a bit of a stretch) If people acted responsibly we would not need to ban guns.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  > If people acted responsibly we would not need to ban guns. Nearly everyone that does own a gun acts responsibly with it. The very few that don't do cause damage however. But the same with cars and many other things. Nearly everyone is a responsible driver but there are some that choose to drive too fast, while intoxicated, not paying attention, etc.
thinkingtoilet 3y ago
The problem with this is all it takes is one bad actor to cause a lot of chaos and destruction. The laws are needed.
- samtho 3y ago
  This is a dangerous road to travel, as the exact same thing can be said about most other tools that can be abused. Knee-jerk reactions like this are shortsightedly ignorant and do nothing to mitigate actual harm being done. Flipper zero’s capability is not based on some super advanced technology, it can be replicated. Banning stuff is an easy way to cover the problem up but instead of actually fixing anything, it is sent out of view of the mainstream and into shallow obscurity. People who steal cars already break the law, breaking an extra one by possessing the tool is not going to be a deterrent. Researchers and security auditors who stay above board will no longer have access to this tool if they expect to exist in a professional capacity, effectively kneecapping their ability as our allies to help us create more secure systems.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
I think one word you might be looking for is "technocracy" [0] Although the Wikipedia definition focuses on the appointment of experts to political power, there is an attendant dehumanisation where technical and legal approaches to everything replace human values. Another important term might be "instrumental reason" [1]. This goes beyond simple quantitative utilitarianism to declare all areas of human discourse and relations as quantifiable, measurable and logically decidable. My personal opinion is that way beyond Neil Postman's "Technopoly" we actually have a fully fledged new religion in which technological values have not _replaced_ ethical discourse, they are the new ethical discourse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/
solardev 3y ago
That may be a slight oversimplification? I think there's whole fields dedicated to these questions, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_law?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_law?wprov=sfla1 or the overarching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics?wprov=sfla1, with overlaps into sociology and anthropology. Not all societies are so law-heavy, especially the ones that are more shame-driven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe.... As a random example, Japan during the pandemic had a really high mask wearing rate despite it not being a legal requirement; there was just a strong social expectation for it. That's not to say that their approach was better or worse than the West's, just that different societies will naturally evolve different means to regulate group behavior. Families, villages, cities, states, nations, cults, religions, companies, departments, teams... every community has their own framework for defining and moderating acceptable behavior, and sometimes they can be more important than the national laws, or may be just one variable in a complex algorithm of behavior. It just depends.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yes I think the shame and guilt discussion is probably relevant here. Although Japan has a shame culture, and the West supposedly has a guilt-based one, I'm not convinced that guilt is all that widespread anymore.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I think that specific subquestion is an interesting one for sure (whether guilt has been replaced by strong authority, like it's not wrong unless you're caught and punished). I'd love to see how it trends with factors like responsiveness in the political system (Canada vs the USA vs Russia or whatever), wealth inequality and social mobility (both between and within classes), softer things like expectations of "honor", etc.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      The idea that guilt has been replaced by a strong authority sounds like a more precise framing of what I'm talking about, definitely.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
You see the exact same thing in programming, where tooling is made to enforce everything because somehow we can't trust devs to do anything right so we need to hard-wire as many restraints in as possible. And yet, somehow, that hasn't solved the Software Problem at all.
zecaurubu 3y ago
Sounds like the idea of "obedience to the unenforceable" - the unwritten rules of society that we comply by personal choice. This Econtalk episode has a nice discussion about it - https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-unenforceable/ https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-...
quatrefoil 3y ago
Religious norms and laws were the same for much of history. You could get stoned for adultery for a good while... The decoupling of the two is a pretty recent phenomenon. For a while after, religious and secular norms still provided a fairly rigid template for how you're supposed to behave, but we dismantled a lot of that too. For good reasons, just with a lot of unforeseen consequences. I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a matter of replacing the old system with something completely different. The laws we're passing are a consequence of belief systems too. One of the beliefs is that businesses are inherently greedy / immoral / destructive. Another is that individuals are. For people who see the world that way, these beliefs are unfalsifiable, just like the belief in an adultery-hating god.
- mbork_pl 3y ago
  > For good reasons I wouldn't be so sure... > just with a lot of unforeseen consequences. Exactly, a classical case of Chesterton's fence. > The laws we're passing are a consequence of belief systems too. Some of them are (and you're making a very good point here!), but some of them may be just pragmatic. > For people who see the world that way, these beliefs are unfalsifiable Again, very true. > just like the belief in an adultery-hating god. As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be more nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some arbitrary rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual for some device that says under what conditions the device works properly and under what conditions it may break, only for humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up unhappy; you have been warned". (Cf. 1 Corinthians 12, 6 – https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/6#54006012 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/6#54006012) Although IANTP ("I am not the pope";-)), of course, and neither am I a theologian, so take this with a grain of salt.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    > As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be more nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some arbitrary rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual for some device that says under what conditions the device works properly and under what conditions it may break, only for humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up unhappy; you have been warned". Forewords: I was raised in a Catholic family, in a Catholic environment and I was a practicing Catholic up to almost 18yo. Then, I changed my mind through reading and experiencing the world as a young adult, and now I 'm probably biased the other way round (just like smoke quitters). No offenses intended, don't feel attacked. I really struggle to understand how nowadays we are still somehow blind to the fact that religions were always basically a way to pass ethical behaviors to the population, playing the "almighty divine being" card. Just like you would tell a child that Santa Claus is bringing their gifts and he and his assistants are watching you all the time, and know if you are good or naughty, and bring presents accordingly. Our society has - or should have - grown up by now, and we should be able to teach a shared ethical background without the need to use the God device. There is no need for a God that will give you his love Heaven or Hell to treat someone that is just like you, the same way you would like to be treated.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Why put all Western countries into the same bucket? Car theft is much more prevalent in the US than Germany, for example.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Fair point. It may have more to do with Anglo or American culture than with the West at large, although I think the same deeper trends are still at play.
  - electriclove 3y ago
    There is little or no consequence in America to breaking the law - especially for those who have nothing to lose
- gnarbarian 3y ago
  Which country is more diverse culturally? the answer to that feeds directly into op's argument.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Italy also has a high rate, so have, for example, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden. Not sure that is all that supportive (and how do you define cultural diversity?).
whimsicalism 3y ago
The reality is that if you can’t deploy force in support of your ‘ethical norms’ and you live in a pluralistic society, both of which are true of the US and Canada - then you have to resort to the law. > Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. …okay? I am still left with the question of “what do we do” and how do we do it without leveraging a legal apparatus. Surprised this is the top comment, it seems sort of inane and faux-deep.
madeofpalk 3y ago
> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior What's to discuss? Is there any ambiguity about whether stealing cars is unethical? What are you bringing to that conversation that moves us forward?
- keiferski 3y ago
  I am pointing out that the response to this problem isn’t, “Hey, there is a cultural problem with society finding this acceptable” and is instead “how can we re-engineer things to prevent this?”
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    I don't think society finds stealing cars acceptable. That's why stealing illegal, that's why they're trying to outlaw a device that makes stealing cars easier, and why this article is trying to make it illegal to have easy-to-steal cars. Outliers stealing cars is not a demonstration that some part of society finds that ethetical.
    - slingnow 3y ago
      Society largely finds marijuana use acceptable, and yet it remains a federal crime. When someone cuts me in line at the store, I don't see that as ethical or acceptable, but we don't have laws against it. So your argument that unacceptable == illegal isn't set in stone. We may have laws for things that we don't bother to enforce as a society. It's easy to see the possibility that society just views car theft as a normal occurrence ("insurance will cover it"), or perhaps too burdensome to enforce, and therefore society just accepts some amount of it without blinking an eye.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        > It's easy to see the possibility that society just views car theft as a normal occurrence ("insurance will cover it"), or perhaps too burdensome to enforce Does society believe it's acceptable behavior though? I haven't seen any evidence to support the theory that we do. After all, if we did, we'd be out there stealing cars.
crandycodes 3y ago
I disagree. If just expecting good outcomes worked, why would we have any laws at all? Before we had laws on child labor, we had children working and falling into heavy machinery. Before we had laws on food quality, you had to guess which milk provider was going to give you the least amount of formaldehyde poison. Before we had laws enforcing civil rights, over half the adult population in the US was disenfranchised. Was Western society exhausted at enforcing religious/ethical norms back then or is it just a recent thing? Using the "social contract" theory for why governments and countries exist, you could say that we don't need laws until we do. Once an undocumented part of the social contract (e.g. ethical or religious norm) is no longer sufficient to maintain the integrity of the contract, it must be written down and enforced via government as a last measure. I do expect my car manufacturer to sell me a car which is relatively secure. If they are failing to meet that expectation from society, then it falls to that last measure to enforce compliance with that norm. Laws are also often used to add clarify where there is ambiguity. Different cultures and religions have different norms. If those norms conflict (does the gender of my partner matter in a marriage?), it falls to law to clarify. It's a fair debate about how much guardrails should we put in. There's likely value in allow kids to hurt themselves as long as they aren't at risk of being permanently maimed or dying. It's a fair debate to discuss the root causes of criminal behavior, be it the issues with modern religion or systemic issues which prevent people from successfully participating in mainstream society and the economic opportunity therein. However, there is no value in allowing easily stolen vehicles (a good which has been regulated for almost a century) to be sold, where they can then be used to enable other crimes.
- Lockranor 3y ago
  Governments are formed by single cultures with a shared value set, and a set of ethics that they believe in. Your statement that laws aren't needed until they are is accurate. As those shared values are lost, the ethics built upon them erode, more laws are constructed. However, there comes a point where this system of check and balance can no longer function properly, and eventually, the system either becomes too unwieldy to function, or else the system is destroyed due to rebellion or anarchy. Why? Because law is an attempt to encode ethics based on shared values. No culture which does not share values can long endure when attempting to solve the problem through increasingly complex rules with no underlying theme.
Szpadel 3y ago
I observed the same, especially with recent abortion movements (from what I heard those were also in USA and I'm assuming from what I saw on internet, it look similar to what is happening in my country) I believe that car thieft could be exactly the same. basically people behave like legal abortion means that women will have to perform it and that's bad. especially I hear that from religious people that they don't approve such actions in their religion. the thing that I don't get is that religious people should not perform abortion even when it's legal, so they should not care about legalizing this is the same, you can buy knife in any store and it's legal, but this could be used to murder someone isn't that basically the same?
- mp05 3y ago
  > basically people behave like legal abortion means that women will have to perform it and that's bad So let me get this straight: you're suggesting that because abortion may be legalized at a federal level that religious people are upset because women will "have to perform it"? And this is your broad stroke assumption of why people are upset? Not to derail the thread but you just made a wild statement to me and I want to ensure you're saying what I think you're saying.
  - Szpadel 3y ago
    Sorry I had very little spare time to write that comment and communicated pourly what I had in mind. Let me rephrase it: When I hear arguments against legalized abortion from religious people their argumentation is basing that women will "have to perform it" what is of course very false. They are ignoring fact that because something is legal it only means that people can do it but they are still able to decide that it's against their belives and resign from doing that procedure. In my country they passed laws that forbid such procedures unconditionally even if that means that women might not survive it. So we had cases when women and unborn died because they could not remove deformed unborn.
throwaway240221 3y ago
Theology warning: > "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws" There are two things that are simultaneously true. 1) This law is not a replacement of ethical expectations, but a poor attempt to codify them. 2) This law is bad on it's own right, and the website is correct. But I would like to discuss point 1. In an interesting way, you are making the precisely the same error of the people who are proposing to ban Flipper Zero's, just on the other side of the coin. The anti-F0 people think "If we do away with this tool, car thieves will cease to exist! Since car thieves are otherwise good people, when we remove the tools, they will cease to be thieves!" You think, "Such people will still exist, we just need to make sure they understand our ethical expectations! Since car thieves are otherwise good people, when we teach them not to steal, they will cease to be thieves!" > we tend to assume they [people] will behave in the worst way possible Because they do. The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable fact, and they most intellectually resisted. If you make F0's illegal to own, criminals will still own them. If you "educate" them that this is bad behavior, they will laugh and nod their head. "Why do you think we do this at night?" Now, your attribution to relativism and cultural exhaustion with regards to religious and ethical norms is SPOT ON! I absolutely agree. But what you will find, if you return to religious instruction, is that Christianity teaches that people behave in the worst way possible. Regardless of education, regardless of law: the human nature is sinful from birth. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? - Jeremiah 17:9
ajross 3y ago
> a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." That seems silly. Previous generations were far more likely to ban random things they didn't like vs. trusting to "ethical expectations". Prohibition? Sedition laws? Segregation? "Papers please"? Even something as comparatively benign as the Steve Jackson Games raid wouldn't happen today. Things are getting inexorably better and not worse in essentially every democracy in the world. In fact, a noticeable trend I've noticed is one where sheltered geeks in privileged careers tend to take infringement on their personal hobbies as a general problem with society and not just a minor blip in the forest of liberty.
yayitswei 3y ago
Ethical norms are sufficient in a homogeneous society, but the "trustless" trend has enabled collaboration with ever larger groups of people with reduced need for trust. I'm thinking blockchains, cryptography, the stock market, the concept of limited liability, and law itself.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Ah yes, I completely forgot about blockchain. Trustless is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Limited liability is more trusting than trustless. Blockchain and crypto are great examples of the true value of trust, and the true cost of not having it - in fact, Bitcoin gives a way to measure trust in physical unit of kilowatt hours, that is the amount of energy you need to keep burning to replace trust in a system.
Nursie 3y ago
> My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. Because prior to this period of decay in the west, we don’t have a rich history of theft and violence going back as long as there has even been civilisation? These “ethical expectations” have always been weak, and always been ignored to a greater or lesser extent. There’s never been a golden age that was crime-less due to societal ethics and you won’t find such a thing outside of the west either.
- fasthands9 3y ago
  It also seems like a straightforward resource coordination problem. If a city has 10 car thieves and all cars are relatively hard to steal, the city can manage the police resources to investigate the crimes. If a city has 10 car thieves and half of all cars are very simple to steal, the city needs to devote a lot more police resources to investigate the crimes. Of course the worst fear is the number of car thieves has gone up. This is probably true in some specific cities. But even if it hasn't, other people owning an easy to steal car hurts everyone since it drains resources.
mhh__ 3y ago
McGilchrist on left vs right brain will interest you.
jcims 3y ago
The same phenomenon can apply to organizations as well. Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective trades. They instead must operate in compliance with an ever-growing number of runbooks prescribed to them by their relative authorities. This is likely driven in part to raise the floor in outcomes but it simultaneously lowers the ceiling.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective trades. Mostly that is good. Discretion implies different results for different people and if you are on the bad end of that because you got a bad teacher/doctor that is a bad thing. Most people need the standard treatment in both education and medicine. Learning styles has been debunked in the literature, kids don't need a teacher who believes in that. Likewise most people have the same thing as everyone else - but there are a few one in a million exceptions that mean we need to go through the entire checklist before giving the regular treatment even though odds are the doctor will never see the exception. (sometimes that is give the regular treatment but see you again in 2 weeks to see if it is working which is annoying when the doctor normally says all is well) There is a time for discretion. However that time is when you are a proper researcher looking for other treatments (under the watch of an ethics board), or when you have clearly exhausted all the normal things and they don't work (sometimes the checklist even says we don't know what to do here, try something and if it works we will adjust the checklist for next time. The above is how flying got to be so safe. Decades of examining everything that went wrong - including near misses - and figuring out how to prevent them. Some doctors still struggle to remember to properly wash their hands by contrast.
gnarbarian 3y ago
postulate: the less people share culturally/ideologically/morally with their countrymen the more numerous and specific (micromanaged) the laws will become. this is a direct result of people not being able to navigate or predict expectations, or empathize with each other.
snarfy 3y ago
I remember thinking about something similar many years ago. I saw ever increasing safety mechanisms in automobiles. Instead of training to be better drives that don't crash, we add seat belts, crumple zones, multiple air bags, anti lock brake, etc. It's an arms race to mediocrity. It seemed like the end game would be cars made out of nerf. At the time, I thought the solution was to go in the opposite direction. Add more metal, spikes, and other sharp things. Make them more dangerous, like something Sauron would drive.
- basil-rash 3y ago
  Yes. This is why I disabled my car’s airbags: nothing will keep you more alert and defensive when driving than an awareness that any accident will result in near certain death.
  - snarfy 3y ago
    I didn't say it was a good idea. It's more an observation about incentives which I did feel was relevant about gp's comment on philosophy.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Drivers have not gotten more dangerous because of all those things though - they have stayed the same. (Larger cars are more dangerous - but this is about drivers) We should be training drivers more, but I don't know how to get nearly every adult to agree to spend several weeks a year in a classroom.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
You just described the “rule of law” and this is the basis for how modern governments are formed and function A constitution is written and codifies the process for making ratifying and enforcing laws. That then is the common standard for some subset of behaviors as defined by the constitution which defines who it does and does not apply to. Different constitutions outline different processes but the structure of the “Rule of Law” is the same. This is in contrast to other structures like pure monarchies (unlike constitutional monarchies) which have a “divine” process for defining the structure of the governed land. What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated in favor of common law, but that simply kicks the can and doesn’t actuall solve the problem. What’s actually happening right now is that society at large is questioning the foundational assumptions of society. To Wit this is a perfect example of effectively questioning the foundational function of governance in the post World War II world while also not being aware of it apparently.
- zaphar 3y ago
  I think what he actually described is why the rule of law is not a replacement for a good ethical framework that is shared culturally. I didn't read his post as advocating for no laws or replacing the legal framework. I read it as advocating for rebuilding a shared ethical framework for the culture.
- keiferski 3y ago
  That's an interesting thought, but I would say instead that I'm in favor of culture being the "first line of defense" and not the law. In other words, I can leave my door unlocked because I am a part of a culture where that sort of thing doesn't happen. Not because there is a law written down somewhere. This has functionally been my experience in a number of spaces, including private workspaces (i.e., you don't expect your co-workers to steal your stuff), Japan, Poland, and a few other countries, and many others. If that's a definition of "common law" then sure, but it seems like a different thing to me.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    The reason the rule of law exists at the scale it does is precisely because what you describe, has not shown to create functional long term societies that are resilient to exogenous threats. The rule of law is literally humanity’s best attempt so far to explicitly codify human desires into a common set of descriptions. This is why the UN exists and the LON before it etc…
newaccount7g 3y ago
Really this a good IQ test for people. If you think anyone will be negatively affected by this you have a low IQ. If you can see this just a ploy to raise awareness of the Flipper Zero you have average intelligence. We get a “product is being made illegal OMG!” post every single hour on this site. Use context clues
bee_rider 3y ago
> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. I’m a bit off-track from your point here, but to some extent I think it is just because there isn’t anything interesting to say about car theft being unethical. It is, but what do we want to discuss? Flipper Zero is interesting to talk about because it’s a new device and there’s a bit of perceived grey-area around the ethics of selling it. > My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. > I really don't like the way this is going, because the end result is a world where limitations are hardwired into the environment, while at the same time you have zero ethical expectations of your fellow humans. It's very Hunger Games / Battle Royale, at a less hostile level. We’ve always had a strain of ruthless FYGM capitalism in the US (including when the country was more religious). I think that is what those stories are mostly criticizing? Lack of ethics is a competitive advantage to be exploited by some. You would think there’d be strong norms like “don’t dump toxic waste in the river” but here we are with an EPA. So I think this isn’t new. What might be new is the “I’m going to exploit the rules to maximum advantage” mindset becoming so widespread? This doesn’t seem that surprising; it is the default mindset of powerful people after all, and as communication tech has gotten better everybody can see that.
trabant00 3y ago
We know a lot of people will behave in bad ways. We don't have to assume anything. We have thousands of years of experience. Under every possible form of ethical and religious setting imaginable. And then what does this have to do with the Western society? There's no stealing in East? Or anywhere on this planet? At this time or any other? And you think religious morals are better for a society than secular laws? Like we haven't already tried that and don't know how it goes. And what the hell does any of this have to do with some pretty stupid movies?
necovek 3y ago
I think you have a great point, but I still subtly disagree. One thing free market dynamics have not established is proper responsibilities for failing to build stuff to specification. Tools are simply tools, and tools like Flipper Zero are fundamentally usable in legal scenarios. Other tools like cars come with locks that advertise providing some level of security: if cars fail to meet that, it is manufacturers' responsibility for the theft (nobody would claim that if a truck came by and simply towed the car away). Now, neither the buyers have effective means to choose secure products themselves (it requires deep knowledge or possibly open protocola and source code for cars), nor do the manufacturers worry enough about it. When markwt does not make things happen, you make it happen with legislation.
verisimi 3y ago
> I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." > Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. Imo, this is part of a long-running de-individualisation process imo, in reverse, the 'making people governable' process. One writes rules that cohere with reality, more or less. Then one encourages others to refer to the laws rather to conscience. This enables what I call the 'externalisation of morality' as someone is now deferential to some set of laws that can and are changed to confer advantage to whoever is paying for the rules. (Eg the work done via paid lobbyists.) In this case, I assume it is easier, cheaper for car companies to 'illegalise' a tool, rather than take responsibility for their fragile product.
hostyle 3y ago
Perhaps. Or perhaps we are just seeing push back against the long tail of effective corporate lobbying, where every problem is caused by somebody else. See: Coca Colas campaigns to undermine plastic recycling efforts; or Big Oil hiding their own research about climate change since the 1970s; or Monsanto spending millions trying to legally bury the long term effects of the chemicals in their products; or Big Tobacco doing what big corps do. The problem was never Flipper Zero. The problem was always insecure cars (and other devices). Shareholders don't care about security defects, they only care about the bottom line. Therefore spending a relatively small amount of money on propaganda denying all responsibility and foisting it upon other innocent parties is deemed a success, rather than spending a larger sum on fixing the real issues. Its not FUD, but its something similar.
samstave 3y ago
Philosophy warning, also: (my comment is martial arts related, my experience, no flames, please) Your comment lit gave me goosebumps... This is fundamentally, what is being taught in my experience in martial arts. I've been in Budo since a teen... I have trained with incredible people whose understanding of movement was without compare. (bjj is not a martial art, its a marketing fraud - there is no soul in anything bjj - only idiots do bjj) If you expect a behavior from the other, youre charging that behavior with energy... expect is a gravity-pull. (gravity is thought) instead of pulling, direct - but as a gravity well, direction only as it applies to the flow of the other persons intent (their push) or expectations (their pull)... (deception is planting both the others' expectations (fear) & intentions (desire) for the resultant outcome (action). Thats where nothingness comes from, like a black hole - you bend light (thought) around you - only choosing to join, direct (push (add energy)) when it reflects your desire (vision of outcome)... This doesnt happen in some slow, flowy fashion, like a kata, mantra, or Sarah McLaughlin song... This can happen at planck scale... directed by awareness (the owner of thought) (the owner of the owner of thought, is the YOU)... (THINK) (the planck scale of awareness is what you're looking for, not the profundities in the universal scale -- the universe of awareness is available if you think like a quark) so take that to the macro, and you can easily see the imbalance of consciousness we have in general society - those that think they THINK, and those that THINK. Those that think they think, are the ones disconnected and controlled easily by those that think. (common masonic, esscenes, mayan, rosicruician concepts)
cubefox 3y ago
This is rarely talked about explicitly, but if the population of a country (or substantial subpopulation) has a high propensity for crime, for cultural or other reasons, the country needs harsher and more pro-active crime laws. In countries where this is not the case, like Japan, Switzerland or Finland, the crime laws can be much more liberal, because people can readily trust each other in a society with a low propensity for crime.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Unfortunately, without some kind of laws or regulations it appears I may not be able to buy a secure car. I suppose we can all go back to installing The Club on our steering wheels and adding an alarm that cycles through a half-dozen tired sounds.
demondemidi 3y ago
> It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. This basis makes enormous assumptions about humans. As we've seen in the past 4 years during the pandemic, adults are already "broken" ethically, and there will be generations of Americans born who think they don't have ANY responsibility, and parents and leaders who refuse to teach them responsibility. It is a US cultural cancer that I fear cannot be excised. Some people simply refuse to behave with the accountability necessary for a society to exist, that it is their natural born entitlement to ignore they live in a society.
nostrademons 3y ago
It falls out naturally from game theory and the increasing population and complexity of society. Model these sort of interactions as multi-party sometimes-repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas. Everybody is better off if society functions in a high-trust way: you don't need to spend expensive resources ensuring compliance, and yet nobody takes unfair advantage of other parties. However, if somebody is going to defect and take the pot unfairly anyway, it's better that it's you, because otherwise you don't get to play another round. Under these scenarios it makes sense to cooperate if you have reasonable confidence that nobody else is going to defect. How do you get reasonable confidence? Well, one way is to simply have a small number of other players and play with them repeatedly. If you have 4-5 competitors, it's a pretty good bet that you will know who all of them are, and you can shut them out of further deals if they screw you over. Everybody knows this condition, and so they cooperate to preserve future payouts rather than defect to take the pot now. But if you have a million competitors, you know somebody is going to defect, just through sheer numbers. And knowing this, your incentive is to have it be you, because the pot will disappear, there will be no future interactions, and there's hence there's a higher payoff to defecting than cooperating. Same dynamic plays out in markets over and over again. If you have an oligopoly, you can cooperate on things like holding wages down or copying competitors' moves. If you're an unskilled laborer, you know somebody else is going to come in and underbid you, so all you can bargain for is subsistence wages. If you're buying a house and are the only buyer, you can name your price. If there are 4-6 other offers, you can afford to offer a "reasonable" price (similar to comps) and have a reasonable expectation nobody else will offer better. If you've got 13 other offers, you better bring everything you got because somebody else will. The phenomena is usually self-limiting, because the act of defecting usually destroys the trade pathways that led to the transaction becoming possible in the first place. If the Internet becomes filled with scammers, nobody will do business on the Internet. If all your mail is junk solicitations, you'll throw it all in the trash immediately. If the roads are filled with bandits and criminals, nobody will be able to haul goods to market. If war starts, productive capacity will be destroyed. And then little pockets of high-trust areas arise from people just trying to get things done in the post-collapse landscape, they become more successful than the low-trust wasteland surrounding them, their communications & commerce systems spread, and the cycle repeats. But this is why we can't have nice things.
tomrod 3y ago
Oh man, I'm getting echos of political philosophy and The City of God vs The City of Man. One reason I became an economist is because it explained things to me quite well. It is reasonable within economic frameworks to assume everyone is self interested. I've found I'm rarely disappointed working with that assumption.
graemep 3y ago
You need both. You need the majority of people to do the right thing, and the law to deal with the minority. The problem is that you do need to take precautions against the minority for some things - especially high reward (e.g. car theft) or high harm (assaults) in public spaces. I think there is a another problem here. How can car companies sell insecure vehicles? Why do people buy cars from companies with a track record or bad security, why do they buy cars with high risk systems (e.g. keyless entry), and why are those selling insecure cars not being made to compensate their customers? The problem should be fixed by the markets or the normal operation of the courts.
dfxm12 3y ago
I think in the general case you're describing, it seems like law enforcement & strong arm politicians are generally leading the charge. Others pick it up from there, top down in fancy slogans, like law & order, tough on crime, or scare tactics etc. It's part of the prison industrial complex - make many things illegal, jail who you want, get a kickback, bonus if you end up disenfranchising them in the process. This specific case is closer to outlawing encryption - the government doesn't fully understand or care about this product's uses but suspects it could make it harder for them to do what they want.
lucideer 3y ago
I'm glad you're starting to question things & definitely the wisdom of the "rule of law" is an interesting question to delve into for many reasons. However, none of what you're exploring is remotely relevant in this particular instance, as the op isn't considering a yes/no comparison (to have a ban or not to have a ban), but is rather comparing & contrasting two alternate approaches to banning (cars vs flippers). Implicit in the discussion is an assumption that a ban is being advocated for in one direction or another. > I really don't like the way this is going The rule of law is many thousands of years old; it's not a recent phenomenon. There's an entire industry built around it - a very lucrative one - it's called the legal profession.
electriclove 3y ago
It is sad that this is where our society is at. You are right, many do not want to discuss how car theft is fundamentally unethical. Many want to think that simply passing laws is a solution. Many laws that do not get enforced. Many do not want consequences or punishment for those who do unethical things. Unethical behavior will only change if there is a consequence. In the US, there is no consequence for many people for unethical behavior. Implementing consequences here is frowned upon.
krisoft 3y ago
> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, Discuss it if you want to. Do you think you will find many who disagrees with you? What new outcome or insight do you hope from that discussion? > we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible We don't assume anything. We observe what is happening. People do steal cares. If you want to change that you have to change something. > the "new method" results in a different kind of world Is it a new method? We use locks and gates and etc since before history began. How is this suddenly a "new method"?
- keiferski 3y ago
  It's not about "disagreeing with me." The point I'm making is that the discussion is not about how to change this unethical behavior, it's merely about changing the environment to prevent the behavior from being possible. And yes, it is a "new method" because it's a self-reinforcing one. Not too long ago, it was common for people to leave their doors unlocked, as the idea of car theft was simply not a thing that happened in that community. It's still largely a think in many places; e.g., rural Japan.
latexr 3y ago
> we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. It seems to be a fairer assessment to say “when we see a concerning amount of them behaving in the worst way possible, we then pass laws to attempt to prevent that behavior from manifesting”. > It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. Which is a great philosophy in theory, as well as in practice like (so I’ve heard from multiple sources) in Japan you being able to comfortably leave your belongings unattended in public space. It would be great if everywhere were like that, but we have to work with the society we live in and changing behaviour on a mass scale is a gargantuan task. > the "new method" results in a different kind of world than the previous one You described an ideal, not a method. If you have specific suggestions on how to collectively educate people to act for the greater good in any given matter, I’m genuinely interested. We need some of that fast (e.g. regarding climate change). I’m skeptical we can achieve those necessary urgent goals without any policies, but I’d welcome being wrong.
gumby 3y ago
We have long operated this way. Banks have security guards even though there are laws against theft. Greengrocers often have fresh fruit outside with no way to stop people from grabbing some and running off. It's simply the way of the world. I don't believe it's change materially, except to the degree that the ability to self defend (e.g. better locks) and to identify miscreants (e.g. cameras) has improved. I do feel that there are more private security guards than there used to be but when I watch old movies I'm not sure my impression is correct.
strangattractor 3y ago
Another way to frame it (IMHO) might be not to think of laws as a deterrent - especially because people break them anyway. The law codifies what circumstances the government can and cannot restrict your rights. Codifying this serves 2 primary purposes. It informs people in advance what is allowable so people cannot be arbitrarily arrested for doing things they don't know is illegal. Secondly it prescribes the penalty for that behavior so that in extreme cases we can remove a person that insists on that behavior. If there is no law prohibiting a behavior the gov't effectively cannot do anything about it. I see laws as only being useful after the crime has occurred. Yes this system gets gamed and abused. Curbing that requires constant effort just as deciding what laws need to be codified is a ongoing process.
- petsfed 3y ago
  And one of the core questions to be answered when prescribing how and when the government can restrict your rights is "which is the worse outcome for society as a whole?" The question of abortion really crystallizes this question perfectly for me: Which is worse? That a small number of people use infanticide in lieu of pro-active birth control? Or that a small number of people are forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term (even at the cost of their own life), or carry and raise a reminder of their rape (up to and including providing visitation/custody to their rapist)? There's a reason this is so controversial, and its because people (rightly) can't agree on which outcome society must necessarily be an accessory to.
Levitating 3y ago
If crime is economically possible, it will exist. With a society large enough, statistically some people will fit the persona needed to be a criminal.
darepublic 3y ago
Thank you for this comment. I've had some similar thoughts and it's comforting to know that some people out there at least think like mindedly. Recently on my city they have been rolling out myriad automated speed cameras and red light cameras and my feeling about them is quite mixed. I feel like it's trying to create a world in which all infractions are flagged automatically without need for subjective judgement. Many people laud this kind of so called justice but I am quite concerned about it.
nostromo 3y ago
This is related to high-trust and low-trust societies. In a high-trust society, norms prevail and in general you can expect a certain level of treatment from everyone: your government, your employer, your neighbor, and the person next to you on the train. In a low-trust society there is no guarantee of norms being universal, so you rely on physical security, contracts, lawyers, and law enforcement to enforce standards of behavior. Low-trust societies are very taxing. Every transaction is an opportunity to be scammed. Every unlocked door is an opportunity to be robbed. It forces everyone to be highly defensive about everything. The US has always been somewhere in the middle, compared to high-trust countries like Japan, and low trust countries like South Africa -- but it definitely has regressed to lower-trust. And part of that regression means that more norms have to be encoded as actual laws to maintain order.
- WWLink 3y ago
  I'd argue that it went higher trust? If you look back at labor law history, for example... or read a book like the grapes of wrath.... There are interesting localized extremes. Like you can find small family farms that have 'self service shops' on a shed next to the road they're on. They rely totally on the honor system and afaik theft is minimal enough that they don't worry about it. Then you have places where you can park a car and someone will immediately break into it to steal 50 cents out of the cupholder lol.
golemiprague 3y ago
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toss1 3y ago
Great concept. But the reality is that there IS, and likely always will be (short of wholesale genetic engineering of the race), a significant portion of the population that WILL act as you describe — i.e., have zero ethical boundaries and will behave according to whatever they can get away with. The prevalence of psychopathy in the general population is about 4.5% [0], so about one in 20 will be entirely immune to any ethical expectations. Moreover, up to 30% [1] have significant tendencies including low empathy and remorse, grandiosity, impulsivity, and/or aggressive or violent behavior. So, the large majority, around 70-85% of the population will indeed be subject to, and indeed welcome a society primarily based on high ethical expectations. However, a far too large minority will be immune to ethical expectations and will relentlessly prey on that majority. Simply put, your idea is wonderful, but does not match reality, and would fail badly in practice. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/ [1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy

sokoloff 3y ago

What would "enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms" look like in a society that used those methods to effectively prevent the exploitation of vehicle owners by car thieves?

keiferski 3y ago
The obvious answer would be to harshly punish theft via jail time/etc., but that's sort of not my point, and I don't think that's actually the root issue. Because it's more that stealing cars is apparently an acceptable activity for a lot of people to do. By acceptable, I mean socially, to friends, to family members, to themselves. That seems like a major societal failing to me, much moreso than "this car isn't designed with the optimal security system."
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I get that, but given the observed existence of a subset of the population where this is currently acceptable, what does "enforcing [] religious or ethical norms" to fix the problem look like? I agree with you there's a societal or communal failure here. I don't see what the solution is (other than jail time/etc).
  - keiferski 3y ago
    My immediate answer is to say something like "we need more ethical education" but that's obviously kind of a weak response. The long, slow answer might be that society may re-organize itself into sub-units that do enforce ethical behaviors, and those sub-units eventually prevail over those that don't.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >and those sub-units eventually prevail over those that don't. Why do you believe this?
      - keiferski 3y ago
        I don't know if it's necessarily going to be the case, but I do think one can look at contemporary society and see that certain groups with "rigid" ethical systems are prevailing over those that don't. Economically, sometimes, but even moreso in a reproductive sense. I'm thinking of groups like the Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews, and so forth.
- Draiken 3y ago
  That makes zero sense to me. Theft is not acceptable by any means. People that steal do so by several motives, most commonly because they feel like they have to due to poverty, addiction, etc. You also already get punished for it with harsh penalties. But no matter how dystopian a government gets, it can't guarantee 100% enforcement of any law. To fix that, we'd have to create a society that takes care of those motives that drive theft, so it doesn't happen anymore. Unfortunately that will never exist in our current society.

nulbyte 3y ago

> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. There are already laws against theft. They apply to vehicles, secure and insecure alike. A law mandating a minimum level of security, as GP suggests, seems to me to fit the suggestion, that auto manufacturers have a minimum standard to ethically sell a vehicle which buyers would, presumably, expect to have locking mechanisms suitable to prevent theft.

katbyte 3y ago
And Canada already did this with immobilizes. We also used to do bait cars. Both these things helped a ton, until the new wave of weak car security Iirc the Kai stealing spree didn’t hit Canada as hard because of said immobilizer law too
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. We had police catch 12 and 13 year olds (Kia Boyz) this weekend in a car with guns, and they are out already. They will get some restorative justice, but no real correction in behavior and I’m sure they will do it again. Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    If someone is stealing cars at 12 or 13 years old, they're already well on their way down the path towards irredeemability. Society has to do something or they will turn into a lifelong criminal. A multi-year prison sentence is probably not going to help them, but counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. You have to do something besides "catch and release" which has been the default in the USA for some time.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

This is a very interesting point, but it is genuinely easier to simply ban flipper zeros, or insecure vehicles, then to try to change the Judiciary and prosecution system wholesale. It might very well take longer than the remaining lifespan of most folks reading this, so it's a moot point for anyone that wants to not have their car stolen.

eunos 3y ago

>My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. Uhh noo, this philosophy already there as old as Chinese Legalism ca 400 BC

engineer_22 3y ago
OP is talking about western culture - there is no Chinese Legalism tradition in Western Culture so yours is a red herring.

LunaSea 3y ago

> Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. I would disagree and have the inverse position. If you look at the laws regarding removing Supreme Court Justices, senators and other representatives trading, removing misbehaving countries from the EU and Nato, etc. I would say that overall they are mostly optimistic in the sense that they aren't prepared for such worst case scenarios.

immibis 3y ago
So, laws for the rich assume good faith. Laws for the poor and middle-class - e.g. "go to jail if you have a flipper zero" - do not.

nonameiguess 3y ago

Frankly, regardless of anything else, I think it's going to be a result of the sheer size of human communities. Internalizing and enforcing ethical norms without state action is one thing when communities are roughly Dunbar number sized and loosely related to each other. It's another thing entirely when the global population approaches 10 billion and a normal metro area has 20 million people who are overwhelmingly total strangers to each other. You're never going to achieve 100% adherence to "don't steal" no matter what, but whatever residual percentage will always do it becomes more and more people as there simply are more and more people. Like it or not, unethical behavior is going to happen and not for the pet cause reason you think, post-structuralism and cultural Marxism or whatever. Arguably, there was more theft when western people were more religious a few centuries ago, just the theft itself was normalized. Whether outright chattel slavery or serfdom, most people had no claim to the fruits of their own labor and aristocrats simply took whatever they wanted.

scotty79 3y ago

> the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws That's literally what the law itself is, since the dawn of time.

2024throwaway 3y ago

> religious or ethical norms Truly confused why `religious` norms come into play here.

keiferski 3y ago
Because the modern Western world is in a "religion hangover" where it wants to reject all outwardly religious ideas, while simultaneously denying that a) religions have been the foundation of pretty much all ethical behavior since the beginning of civilization and b) many supposedly secular belief systems are really just extensions of religious ones with the "I believe in..." statement cut off.
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  I think the important distinction is not similarity/distance as a vector of meaning, but the ability to update those vectors in response to new data.
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  > religions have been the foundation of pretty much all ethical behavior since the beginning of civilization I reject this statement wholeheartedly, and find it a pretty disgusting stance. The idea that the only reason not to kill someone (or otherwise act ethically) is due to religion is horrendous, especially given most religions historical track record on murdering others and other ethical violations.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I think you'd have a pretty difficult time constructing a history of morality that doesn't involve what we refer to as "religion." Certainly that doesn't mean that all religious beliefs are good or justifiable, but that isn't what I claimed, either. I just claimed they were the foundation.
    - 2024throwaway 3y ago
      I would argue it's the opposite. "Maybe killing people is bad. How do we get people to not do that? Tell them god said not to!" It starts from the ethical perspective, and uses religion as the blunt hammer to drive it into the masses.

ytx 3y ago

I think it's partially a size/scale problem. If 1000 people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of an unethical actor might be low, and normative ethics may be enough. But if 1 million people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of at least 1 bad actor is high, and laws/enforcement/deterrents must be enacted, even if the baseline ethical rate is still high.

maerF0x0 3y ago
And the crux of the argument is whether you believe the law will prevent the bad actor from acquiring one or not. Or if the law will only prevent the other 999 law abiding ones. Personally, my take/view on it is that (deeply) unethical people are going to break the laws regardless of what society says or encodes. This probably is a commentary on the failures of policing to enact what we've encoded in law. Part of it being a problem that many laws are overstated (eg It's illegal to own a flipper zero vs It's illegal to use a flipper zero on someone else's car without permission) ...
Teever 3y ago
The problem isn't the million people with flippers, the problem is the million+ people profiting in an industry that produces defective products like cars that are trivial to steal. People sign contracts to buy very expensive automobiles because they reasonably believe that they are safe and secure to own and operate. If car manufacturers are selling a product that they know to be unsafe and they're not telling prospective buyers that and that's fraud.

aidenn0 3y ago

> Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. This is a necessary consequence of civilization. If you have a city of 8 million people, then you have 80,000 people in the bottom percentile of behavior by normative ethics. If some behavior is so outre that only 1 in a million people would do it, then there are 300 people in the US about to do it.

keiferski 3y ago
Sure, but it seems like enforce these ethical behaviors and punish the bottom 1% that goes against them is just as much of a solution as redesign society and the environment so that everyone can't act like that 1%.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  People don't want their cars stolen. Punishing the thieves doesn't undo their actions.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Great - and how is that different from the law again?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Because the law is only punishing people that break the rules, not teaching them what ethical behavior is in the first place. It’s fundamentally a reactive process. In other words, you want people that don’t steal cars because they feel bad about it. You don’t want them to not steal cars because they’re afraid of the law.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      Sorry - you edited your comment substantially, the process you initially described was identical to the law.

fellerts 3y ago

English law often refers to "the man on the Clapham omnibus". Quote from Wikipedia: > The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would – for example, in a civil action for negligence. The character is a reasonably educated, intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured. He would fit your description of "normative ethics". I think the trend you describe mostly (?) applies to the US.

MikeSchurman 3y ago

Ishmael or My Ishmael touches on this subject. Thank you for reminding me. I forget exactly, but, the basic idea is primitive people didn't have all these laws about what to do. They expected you to behave, and if you did not, the tribe did not necessarily punish you, they taught you and made it right somehow (justice). Any MY description does not give this idea justice, so I need to go back and find the reference in the books.

nativeit 3y ago
Good pull. I used to obsess over Daniel Quinn’s novels. They’re kind of perfect for the college kid finding philosophy for the first time.
nativeit 3y ago
Do you remember the guy who took hostages at the Discovery Channel offices in Washington DC, and tried to force them to promote his Ishmael-based manifesto on television? He was part of a MySpace group that I frequented where we discussed Quinn’s work. I remember having pretty strong disagreements with him in the forums, before he took up arms anyway…
- MikeSchurman 3y ago
  I don't remember that happening, I think I wasn't watching the news much during that period in my life. But I did hear about it in past year after reading Quinn's books and following some mental threads afterwards. Wild that you had conversations with him! Unfortunate people take ideas so far... we are so sure we are right.
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
That works at the scale of a tribe. We do the same thing with kids in a family: punishment (should) only happens after multiple attempts at "teaching" have failed and it's clear that what's happening is disobedience.

eruci 3y ago

You can say the same thing about banning guns (although I just realized that's a bit of a stretch) If people acted responsibly we would not need to ban guns.

nemo44x 3y ago
> If people acted responsibly we would not need to ban guns. Nearly everyone that does own a gun acts responsibly with it. The very few that don't do cause damage however. But the same with cars and many other things. Nearly everyone is a responsible driver but there are some that choose to drive too fast, while intoxicated, not paying attention, etc.

thinkingtoilet 3y ago

The problem with this is all it takes is one bad actor to cause a lot of chaos and destruction. The laws are needed.

samtho 3y ago
This is a dangerous road to travel, as the exact same thing can be said about most other tools that can be abused. Knee-jerk reactions like this are shortsightedly ignorant and do nothing to mitigate actual harm being done. Flipper zero’s capability is not based on some super advanced technology, it can be replicated. Banning stuff is an easy way to cover the problem up but instead of actually fixing anything, it is sent out of view of the mainstream and into shallow obscurity. People who steal cars already break the law, breaking an extra one by possessing the tool is not going to be a deterrent. Researchers and security auditors who stay above board will no longer have access to this tool if they expect to exist in a professional capacity, effectively kneecapping their ability as our allies to help us create more secure systems.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

I think one word you might be looking for is "technocracy" [0] Although the Wikipedia definition focuses on the appointment of experts to political power, there is an attendant dehumanisation where technical and legal approaches to everything replace human values. Another important term might be "instrumental reason" [1]. This goes beyond simple quantitative utilitarianism to declare all areas of human discourse and relations as quantifiable, measurable and logically decidable. My personal opinion is that way beyond Neil Postman's "Technopoly" we actually have a fully fledged new religion in which technological values have not _replaced_ ethical discourse, they are the new ethical discourse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/

solardev 3y ago

That may be a slight oversimplification? I think there's whole fields dedicated to these questions, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_law?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_law?wprov=sfla1 or the overarching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics?wprov=sfla1, with overlaps into sociology and anthropology. Not all societies are so law-heavy, especially the ones that are more shame-driven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe.... As a random example, Japan during the pandemic had a really high mask wearing rate despite it not being a legal requirement; there was just a strong social expectation for it. That's not to say that their approach was better or worse than the West's, just that different societies will naturally evolve different means to regulate group behavior. Families, villages, cities, states, nations, cults, religions, companies, departments, teams... every community has their own framework for defining and moderating acceptable behavior, and sometimes they can be more important than the national laws, or may be just one variable in a complex algorithm of behavior. It just depends.

keiferski 3y ago
Yes I think the shame and guilt discussion is probably relevant here. Although Japan has a shame culture, and the West supposedly has a guilt-based one, I'm not convinced that guilt is all that widespread anymore.
- solardev 3y ago
  I think that specific subquestion is an interesting one for sure (whether guilt has been replaced by strong authority, like it's not wrong unless you're caught and punished). I'd love to see how it trends with factors like responsiveness in the political system (Canada vs the USA vs Russia or whatever), wealth inequality and social mobility (both between and within classes), softer things like expectations of "honor", etc.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    The idea that guilt has been replaced by a strong authority sounds like a more precise framing of what I'm talking about, definitely.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

You see the exact same thing in programming, where tooling is made to enforce everything because somehow we can't trust devs to do anything right so we need to hard-wire as many restraints in as possible. And yet, somehow, that hasn't solved the Software Problem at all.

zecaurubu 3y ago

Sounds like the idea of "obedience to the unenforceable" - the unwritten rules of society that we comply by personal choice. This Econtalk episode has a nice discussion about it - https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-unenforceable/ https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-...

quatrefoil 3y ago

Religious norms and laws were the same for much of history. You could get stoned for adultery for a good while... The decoupling of the two is a pretty recent phenomenon. For a while after, religious and secular norms still provided a fairly rigid template for how you're supposed to behave, but we dismantled a lot of that too. For good reasons, just with a lot of unforeseen consequences. I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a matter of replacing the old system with something completely different. The laws we're passing are a consequence of belief systems too. One of the beliefs is that businesses are inherently greedy / immoral / destructive. Another is that individuals are. For people who see the world that way, these beliefs are unfalsifiable, just like the belief in an adultery-hating god.

mbork_pl 3y ago
> For good reasons I wouldn't be so sure... > just with a lot of unforeseen consequences. Exactly, a classical case of Chesterton's fence. > The laws we're passing are a consequence of belief systems too. Some of them are (and you're making a very good point here!), but some of them may be just pragmatic. > For people who see the world that way, these beliefs are unfalsifiable Again, very true. > just like the belief in an adultery-hating god. As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be more nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some arbitrary rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual for some device that says under what conditions the device works properly and under what conditions it may break, only for humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up unhappy; you have been warned". (Cf. 1 Corinthians 12, 6 – https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/6#54006012 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/6#54006012) Although IANTP ("I am not the pope";-)), of course, and neither am I a theologian, so take this with a grain of salt.
- darkwater 3y ago
  > As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be more nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some arbitrary rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual for some device that says under what conditions the device works properly and under what conditions it may break, only for humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up unhappy; you have been warned". Forewords: I was raised in a Catholic family, in a Catholic environment and I was a practicing Catholic up to almost 18yo. Then, I changed my mind through reading and experiencing the world as a young adult, and now I 'm probably biased the other way round (just like smoke quitters). No offenses intended, don't feel attacked. I really struggle to understand how nowadays we are still somehow blind to the fact that religions were always basically a way to pass ethical behaviors to the population, playing the "almighty divine being" card. Just like you would tell a child that Santa Claus is bringing their gifts and he and his assistants are watching you all the time, and know if you are good or naughty, and bring presents accordingly. Our society has - or should have - grown up by now, and we should be able to teach a shared ethical background without the need to use the God device. There is no need for a God that will give you his love Heaven or Hell to treat someone that is just like you, the same way you would like to be treated.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Why put all Western countries into the same bucket? Car theft is much more prevalent in the US than Germany, for example.

keiferski 3y ago
Fair point. It may have more to do with Anglo or American culture than with the West at large, although I think the same deeper trends are still at play.
- electriclove 3y ago
  There is little or no consequence in America to breaking the law - especially for those who have nothing to lose
gnarbarian 3y ago
Which country is more diverse culturally? the answer to that feeds directly into op's argument.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Italy also has a high rate, so have, for example, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden. Not sure that is all that supportive (and how do you define cultural diversity?).

whimsicalism 3y ago

The reality is that if you can’t deploy force in support of your ‘ethical norms’ and you live in a pluralistic society, both of which are true of the US and Canada - then you have to resort to the law. > Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. …okay? I am still left with the question of “what do we do” and how do we do it without leveraging a legal apparatus. Surprised this is the top comment, it seems sort of inane and faux-deep.

madeofpalk 3y ago

> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior What's to discuss? Is there any ambiguity about whether stealing cars is unethical? What are you bringing to that conversation that moves us forward?

keiferski 3y ago
I am pointing out that the response to this problem isn’t, “Hey, there is a cultural problem with society finding this acceptable” and is instead “how can we re-engineer things to prevent this?”
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  I don't think society finds stealing cars acceptable. That's why stealing illegal, that's why they're trying to outlaw a device that makes stealing cars easier, and why this article is trying to make it illegal to have easy-to-steal cars. Outliers stealing cars is not a demonstration that some part of society finds that ethetical.
  - slingnow 3y ago
    Society largely finds marijuana use acceptable, and yet it remains a federal crime. When someone cuts me in line at the store, I don't see that as ethical or acceptable, but we don't have laws against it. So your argument that unacceptable == illegal isn't set in stone. We may have laws for things that we don't bother to enforce as a society. It's easy to see the possibility that society just views car theft as a normal occurrence ("insurance will cover it"), or perhaps too burdensome to enforce, and therefore society just accepts some amount of it without blinking an eye.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      > It's easy to see the possibility that society just views car theft as a normal occurrence ("insurance will cover it"), or perhaps too burdensome to enforce Does society believe it's acceptable behavior though? I haven't seen any evidence to support the theory that we do. After all, if we did, we'd be out there stealing cars.

crandycodes 3y ago

I disagree. If just expecting good outcomes worked, why would we have any laws at all? Before we had laws on child labor, we had children working and falling into heavy machinery. Before we had laws on food quality, you had to guess which milk provider was going to give you the least amount of formaldehyde poison. Before we had laws enforcing civil rights, over half the adult population in the US was disenfranchised. Was Western society exhausted at enforcing religious/ethical norms back then or is it just a recent thing? Using the "social contract" theory for why governments and countries exist, you could say that we don't need laws until we do. Once an undocumented part of the social contract (e.g. ethical or religious norm) is no longer sufficient to maintain the integrity of the contract, it must be written down and enforced via government as a last measure. I do expect my car manufacturer to sell me a car which is relatively secure. If they are failing to meet that expectation from society, then it falls to that last measure to enforce compliance with that norm. Laws are also often used to add clarify where there is ambiguity. Different cultures and religions have different norms. If those norms conflict (does the gender of my partner matter in a marriage?), it falls to law to clarify. It's a fair debate about how much guardrails should we put in. There's likely value in allow kids to hurt themselves as long as they aren't at risk of being permanently maimed or dying. It's a fair debate to discuss the root causes of criminal behavior, be it the issues with modern religion or systemic issues which prevent people from successfully participating in mainstream society and the economic opportunity therein. However, there is no value in allowing easily stolen vehicles (a good which has been regulated for almost a century) to be sold, where they can then be used to enable other crimes.

Lockranor 3y ago
Governments are formed by single cultures with a shared value set, and a set of ethics that they believe in. Your statement that laws aren't needed until they are is accurate. As those shared values are lost, the ethics built upon them erode, more laws are constructed. However, there comes a point where this system of check and balance can no longer function properly, and eventually, the system either becomes too unwieldy to function, or else the system is destroyed due to rebellion or anarchy. Why? Because law is an attempt to encode ethics based on shared values. No culture which does not share values can long endure when attempting to solve the problem through increasingly complex rules with no underlying theme.

Szpadel 3y ago

I observed the same, especially with recent abortion movements (from what I heard those were also in USA and I'm assuming from what I saw on internet, it look similar to what is happening in my country) I believe that car thieft could be exactly the same. basically people behave like legal abortion means that women will have to perform it and that's bad. especially I hear that from religious people that they don't approve such actions in their religion. the thing that I don't get is that religious people should not perform abortion even when it's legal, so they should not care about legalizing this is the same, you can buy knife in any store and it's legal, but this could be used to murder someone isn't that basically the same?

mp05 3y ago
> basically people behave like legal abortion means that women will have to perform it and that's bad So let me get this straight: you're suggesting that because abortion may be legalized at a federal level that religious people are upset because women will "have to perform it"? And this is your broad stroke assumption of why people are upset? Not to derail the thread but you just made a wild statement to me and I want to ensure you're saying what I think you're saying.
- Szpadel 3y ago
  Sorry I had very little spare time to write that comment and communicated pourly what I had in mind. Let me rephrase it: When I hear arguments against legalized abortion from religious people their argumentation is basing that women will "have to perform it" what is of course very false. They are ignoring fact that because something is legal it only means that people can do it but they are still able to decide that it's against their belives and resign from doing that procedure. In my country they passed laws that forbid such procedures unconditionally even if that means that women might not survive it. So we had cases when women and unborn died because they could not remove deformed unborn.

throwaway240221 3y ago

Theology warning: > "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws" There are two things that are simultaneously true. 1) This law is not a replacement of ethical expectations, but a poor attempt to codify them. 2) This law is bad on it's own right, and the website is correct. But I would like to discuss point 1. In an interesting way, you are making the precisely the same error of the people who are proposing to ban Flipper Zero's, just on the other side of the coin. The anti-F0 people think "If we do away with this tool, car thieves will cease to exist! Since car thieves are otherwise good people, when we remove the tools, they will cease to be thieves!" You think, "Such people will still exist, we just need to make sure they understand our ethical expectations! Since car thieves are otherwise good people, when we teach them not to steal, they will cease to be thieves!" > we tend to assume they [people] will behave in the worst way possible Because they do. The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable fact, and they most intellectually resisted. If you make F0's illegal to own, criminals will still own them. If you "educate" them that this is bad behavior, they will laugh and nod their head. "Why do you think we do this at night?" Now, your attribution to relativism and cultural exhaustion with regards to religious and ethical norms is SPOT ON! I absolutely agree. But what you will find, if you return to religious instruction, is that Christianity teaches that people behave in the worst way possible. Regardless of education, regardless of law: the human nature is sinful from birth. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? - Jeremiah 17:9

ajross 3y ago

> a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." That seems silly. Previous generations were far more likely to ban random things they didn't like vs. trusting to "ethical expectations". Prohibition? Sedition laws? Segregation? "Papers please"? Even something as comparatively benign as the Steve Jackson Games raid wouldn't happen today. Things are getting inexorably better and not worse in essentially every democracy in the world. In fact, a noticeable trend I've noticed is one where sheltered geeks in privileged careers tend to take infringement on their personal hobbies as a general problem with society and not just a minor blip in the forest of liberty.

yayitswei 3y ago

Ethical norms are sufficient in a homogeneous society, but the "trustless" trend has enabled collaboration with ever larger groups of people with reduced need for trust. I'm thinking blockchains, cryptography, the stock market, the concept of limited liability, and law itself.

keiferski 3y ago
Ah yes, I completely forgot about blockchain. Trustless is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Limited liability is more trusting than trustless. Blockchain and crypto are great examples of the true value of trust, and the true cost of not having it - in fact, Bitcoin gives a way to measure trust in physical unit of kilowatt hours, that is the amount of energy you need to keep burning to replace trust in a system.

Nursie 3y ago

> My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. Because prior to this period of decay in the west, we don’t have a rich history of theft and violence going back as long as there has even been civilisation? These “ethical expectations” have always been weak, and always been ignored to a greater or lesser extent. There’s never been a golden age that was crime-less due to societal ethics and you won’t find such a thing outside of the west either.

fasthands9 3y ago
It also seems like a straightforward resource coordination problem. If a city has 10 car thieves and all cars are relatively hard to steal, the city can manage the police resources to investigate the crimes. If a city has 10 car thieves and half of all cars are very simple to steal, the city needs to devote a lot more police resources to investigate the crimes. Of course the worst fear is the number of car thieves has gone up. This is probably true in some specific cities. But even if it hasn't, other people owning an easy to steal car hurts everyone since it drains resources.

mhh__ 3y ago

McGilchrist on left vs right brain will interest you.

jcims 3y ago

The same phenomenon can apply to organizations as well. Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective trades. They instead must operate in compliance with an ever-growing number of runbooks prescribed to them by their relative authorities. This is likely driven in part to raise the floor in outcomes but it simultaneously lowers the ceiling.

bluGill 3y ago
> Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective trades. Mostly that is good. Discretion implies different results for different people and if you are on the bad end of that because you got a bad teacher/doctor that is a bad thing. Most people need the standard treatment in both education and medicine. Learning styles has been debunked in the literature, kids don't need a teacher who believes in that. Likewise most people have the same thing as everyone else - but there are a few one in a million exceptions that mean we need to go through the entire checklist before giving the regular treatment even though odds are the doctor will never see the exception. (sometimes that is give the regular treatment but see you again in 2 weeks to see if it is working which is annoying when the doctor normally says all is well) There is a time for discretion. However that time is when you are a proper researcher looking for other treatments (under the watch of an ethics board), or when you have clearly exhausted all the normal things and they don't work (sometimes the checklist even says we don't know what to do here, try something and if it works we will adjust the checklist for next time. The above is how flying got to be so safe. Decades of examining everything that went wrong - including near misses - and figuring out how to prevent them. Some doctors still struggle to remember to properly wash their hands by contrast.

gnarbarian 3y ago

postulate: the less people share culturally/ideologically/morally with their countrymen the more numerous and specific (micromanaged) the laws will become. this is a direct result of people not being able to navigate or predict expectations, or empathize with each other.

snarfy 3y ago

I remember thinking about something similar many years ago. I saw ever increasing safety mechanisms in automobiles. Instead of training to be better drives that don't crash, we add seat belts, crumple zones, multiple air bags, anti lock brake, etc. It's an arms race to mediocrity. It seemed like the end game would be cars made out of nerf. At the time, I thought the solution was to go in the opposite direction. Add more metal, spikes, and other sharp things. Make them more dangerous, like something Sauron would drive.

basil-rash 3y ago
Yes. This is why I disabled my car’s airbags: nothing will keep you more alert and defensive when driving than an awareness that any accident will result in near certain death.
- snarfy 3y ago
  I didn't say it was a good idea. It's more an observation about incentives which I did feel was relevant about gp's comment on philosophy.
bluGill 3y ago
Drivers have not gotten more dangerous because of all those things though - they have stayed the same. (Larger cars are more dangerous - but this is about drivers) We should be training drivers more, but I don't know how to get nearly every adult to agree to spend several weeks a year in a classroom.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

You just described the “rule of law” and this is the basis for how modern governments are formed and function A constitution is written and codifies the process for making ratifying and enforcing laws. That then is the common standard for some subset of behaviors as defined by the constitution which defines who it does and does not apply to. Different constitutions outline different processes but the structure of the “Rule of Law” is the same. This is in contrast to other structures like pure monarchies (unlike constitutional monarchies) which have a “divine” process for defining the structure of the governed land. What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated in favor of common law, but that simply kicks the can and doesn’t actuall solve the problem. What’s actually happening right now is that society at large is questioning the foundational assumptions of society. To Wit this is a perfect example of effectively questioning the foundational function of governance in the post World War II world while also not being aware of it apparently.

zaphar 3y ago
I think what he actually described is why the rule of law is not a replacement for a good ethical framework that is shared culturally. I didn't read his post as advocating for no laws or replacing the legal framework. I read it as advocating for rebuilding a shared ethical framework for the culture.
keiferski 3y ago
That's an interesting thought, but I would say instead that I'm in favor of culture being the "first line of defense" and not the law. In other words, I can leave my door unlocked because I am a part of a culture where that sort of thing doesn't happen. Not because there is a law written down somewhere. This has functionally been my experience in a number of spaces, including private workspaces (i.e., you don't expect your co-workers to steal your stuff), Japan, Poland, and a few other countries, and many others. If that's a definition of "common law" then sure, but it seems like a different thing to me.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  The reason the rule of law exists at the scale it does is precisely because what you describe, has not shown to create functional long term societies that are resilient to exogenous threats. The rule of law is literally humanity’s best attempt so far to explicitly codify human desires into a common set of descriptions. This is why the UN exists and the LON before it etc…

newaccount7g 3y ago

Really this a good IQ test for people. If you think anyone will be negatively affected by this you have a low IQ. If you can see this just a ploy to raise awareness of the Flipper Zero you have average intelligence. We get a “product is being made illegal OMG!” post every single hour on this site. Use context clues

bee_rider 3y ago

> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. I’m a bit off-track from your point here, but to some extent I think it is just because there isn’t anything interesting to say about car theft being unethical. It is, but what do we want to discuss? Flipper Zero is interesting to talk about because it’s a new device and there’s a bit of perceived grey-area around the ethics of selling it. > My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms. > I really don't like the way this is going, because the end result is a world where limitations are hardwired into the environment, while at the same time you have zero ethical expectations of your fellow humans. It's very Hunger Games / Battle Royale, at a less hostile level. We’ve always had a strain of ruthless FYGM capitalism in the US (including when the country was more religious). I think that is what those stories are mostly criticizing? Lack of ethics is a competitive advantage to be exploited by some. You would think there’d be strong norms like “don’t dump toxic waste in the river” but here we are with an EPA. So I think this isn’t new. What might be new is the “I’m going to exploit the rules to maximum advantage” mindset becoming so widespread? This doesn’t seem that surprising; it is the default mindset of powerful people after all, and as communication tech has gotten better everybody can see that.

trabant00 3y ago

We know a lot of people will behave in bad ways. We don't have to assume anything. We have thousands of years of experience. Under every possible form of ethical and religious setting imaginable. And then what does this have to do with the Western society? There's no stealing in East? Or anywhere on this planet? At this time or any other? And you think religious morals are better for a society than secular laws? Like we haven't already tried that and don't know how it goes. And what the hell does any of this have to do with some pretty stupid movies?

necovek 3y ago

I think you have a great point, but I still subtly disagree. One thing free market dynamics have not established is proper responsibilities for failing to build stuff to specification. Tools are simply tools, and tools like Flipper Zero are fundamentally usable in legal scenarios. Other tools like cars come with locks that advertise providing some level of security: if cars fail to meet that, it is manufacturers' responsibility for the theft (nobody would claim that if a truck came by and simply towed the car away). Now, neither the buyers have effective means to choose secure products themselves (it requires deep knowledge or possibly open protocola and source code for cars), nor do the manufacturers worry enough about it. When markwt does not make things happen, you make it happen with legislation.

verisimi 3y ago

> I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." > Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. Imo, this is part of a long-running de-individualisation process imo, in reverse, the 'making people governable' process. One writes rules that cohere with reality, more or less. Then one encourages others to refer to the laws rather to conscience. This enables what I call the 'externalisation of morality' as someone is now deferential to some set of laws that can and are changed to confer advantage to whoever is paying for the rules. (Eg the work done via paid lobbyists.) In this case, I assume it is easier, cheaper for car companies to 'illegalise' a tool, rather than take responsibility for their fragile product.

hostyle 3y ago

Perhaps. Or perhaps we are just seeing push back against the long tail of effective corporate lobbying, where every problem is caused by somebody else. See: Coca Colas campaigns to undermine plastic recycling efforts; or Big Oil hiding their own research about climate change since the 1970s; or Monsanto spending millions trying to legally bury the long term effects of the chemicals in their products; or Big Tobacco doing what big corps do. The problem was never Flipper Zero. The problem was always insecure cars (and other devices). Shareholders don't care about security defects, they only care about the bottom line. Therefore spending a relatively small amount of money on propaganda denying all responsibility and foisting it upon other innocent parties is deemed a success, rather than spending a larger sum on fixing the real issues. Its not FUD, but its something similar.

samstave 3y ago

Philosophy warning, also: (my comment is martial arts related, my experience, no flames, please) Your comment lit gave me goosebumps... This is fundamentally, what is being taught in my experience in martial arts. I've been in Budo since a teen... I have trained with incredible people whose understanding of movement was without compare. (bjj is not a martial art, its a marketing fraud - there is no soul in anything bjj - only idiots do bjj) If you expect a behavior from the other, youre charging that behavior with energy... expect is a gravity-pull. (gravity is thought) instead of pulling, direct - but as a gravity well, direction only as it applies to the flow of the other persons intent (their push) or expectations (their pull)... (deception is planting both the others' expectations (fear) & intentions (desire) for the resultant outcome (action). Thats where nothingness comes from, like a black hole - you bend light (thought) around you - only choosing to join, direct (push (add energy)) when it reflects your desire (vision of outcome)... This doesnt happen in some slow, flowy fashion, like a kata, mantra, or Sarah McLaughlin song... This can happen at planck scale... directed by awareness (the owner of thought) (the owner of the owner of thought, is the YOU)... (THINK) (the planck scale of awareness is what you're looking for, not the profundities in the universal scale -- the universe of awareness is available if you think like a quark) so take that to the macro, and you can easily see the imbalance of consciousness we have in general society - those that think they THINK, and those that THINK. Those that think they think, are the ones disconnected and controlled easily by those that think. (common masonic, esscenes, mayan, rosicruician concepts)

cubefox 3y ago

This is rarely talked about explicitly, but if the population of a country (or substantial subpopulation) has a high propensity for crime, for cultural or other reasons, the country needs harsher and more pro-active crime laws. In countries where this is not the case, like Japan, Switzerland or Finland, the crime laws can be much more liberal, because people can readily trust each other in a society with a low propensity for crime.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Unfortunately, without some kind of laws or regulations it appears I may not be able to buy a secure car. I suppose we can all go back to installing The Club on our steering wheels and adding an alarm that cycles through a half-dozen tired sounds.

demondemidi 3y ago

> It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. This basis makes enormous assumptions about humans. As we've seen in the past 4 years during the pandemic, adults are already "broken" ethically, and there will be generations of Americans born who think they don't have ANY responsibility, and parents and leaders who refuse to teach them responsibility. It is a US cultural cancer that I fear cannot be excised. Some people simply refuse to behave with the accountability necessary for a society to exist, that it is their natural born entitlement to ignore they live in a society.

nostrademons 3y ago

It falls out naturally from game theory and the increasing population and complexity of society. Model these sort of interactions as multi-party sometimes-repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas. Everybody is better off if society functions in a high-trust way: you don't need to spend expensive resources ensuring compliance, and yet nobody takes unfair advantage of other parties. However, if somebody is going to defect and take the pot unfairly anyway, it's better that it's you, because otherwise you don't get to play another round. Under these scenarios it makes sense to cooperate if you have reasonable confidence that nobody else is going to defect. How do you get reasonable confidence? Well, one way is to simply have a small number of other players and play with them repeatedly. If you have 4-5 competitors, it's a pretty good bet that you will know who all of them are, and you can shut them out of further deals if they screw you over. Everybody knows this condition, and so they cooperate to preserve future payouts rather than defect to take the pot now. But if you have a million competitors, you know somebody is going to defect, just through sheer numbers. And knowing this, your incentive is to have it be you, because the pot will disappear, there will be no future interactions, and there's hence there's a higher payoff to defecting than cooperating. Same dynamic plays out in markets over and over again. If you have an oligopoly, you can cooperate on things like holding wages down or copying competitors' moves. If you're an unskilled laborer, you know somebody else is going to come in and underbid you, so all you can bargain for is subsistence wages. If you're buying a house and are the only buyer, you can name your price. If there are 4-6 other offers, you can afford to offer a "reasonable" price (similar to comps) and have a reasonable expectation nobody else will offer better. If you've got 13 other offers, you better bring everything you got because somebody else will. The phenomena is usually self-limiting, because the act of defecting usually destroys the trade pathways that led to the transaction becoming possible in the first place. If the Internet becomes filled with scammers, nobody will do business on the Internet. If all your mail is junk solicitations, you'll throw it all in the trash immediately. If the roads are filled with bandits and criminals, nobody will be able to haul goods to market. If war starts, productive capacity will be destroyed. And then little pockets of high-trust areas arise from people just trying to get things done in the post-collapse landscape, they become more successful than the low-trust wasteland surrounding them, their communications & commerce systems spread, and the cycle repeats. But this is why we can't have nice things.

tomrod 3y ago

Oh man, I'm getting echos of political philosophy and The City of God vs The City of Man. One reason I became an economist is because it explained things to me quite well. It is reasonable within economic frameworks to assume everyone is self interested. I've found I'm rarely disappointed working with that assumption.

graemep 3y ago

You need both. You need the majority of people to do the right thing, and the law to deal with the minority. The problem is that you do need to take precautions against the minority for some things - especially high reward (e.g. car theft) or high harm (assaults) in public spaces. I think there is a another problem here. How can car companies sell insecure vehicles? Why do people buy cars from companies with a track record or bad security, why do they buy cars with high risk systems (e.g. keyless entry), and why are those selling insecure cars not being made to compensate their customers? The problem should be fixed by the markets or the normal operation of the courts.

dfxm12 3y ago

I think in the general case you're describing, it seems like law enforcement & strong arm politicians are generally leading the charge. Others pick it up from there, top down in fancy slogans, like law & order, tough on crime, or scare tactics etc. It's part of the prison industrial complex - make many things illegal, jail who you want, get a kickback, bonus if you end up disenfranchising them in the process. This specific case is closer to outlawing encryption - the government doesn't fully understand or care about this product's uses but suspects it could make it harder for them to do what they want.

lucideer 3y ago

I'm glad you're starting to question things & definitely the wisdom of the "rule of law" is an interesting question to delve into for many reasons. However, none of what you're exploring is remotely relevant in this particular instance, as the op isn't considering a yes/no comparison (to have a ban or not to have a ban), but is rather comparing & contrasting two alternate approaches to banning (cars vs flippers). Implicit in the discussion is an assumption that a ban is being advocated for in one direction or another. > I really don't like the way this is going The rule of law is many thousands of years old; it's not a recent phenomenon. There's an entire industry built around it - a very lucrative one - it's called the legal profession.

electriclove 3y ago

It is sad that this is where our society is at. You are right, many do not want to discuss how car theft is fundamentally unethical. Many want to think that simply passing laws is a solution. Many laws that do not get enforced. Many do not want consequences or punishment for those who do unethical things. Unethical behavior will only change if there is a consequence. In the US, there is no consequence for many people for unethical behavior. Implementing consequences here is frowned upon.

krisoft 3y ago

> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, Discuss it if you want to. Do you think you will find many who disagrees with you? What new outcome or insight do you hope from that discussion? > we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible We don't assume anything. We observe what is happening. People do steal cares. If you want to change that you have to change something. > the "new method" results in a different kind of world Is it a new method? We use locks and gates and etc since before history began. How is this suddenly a "new method"?

keiferski 3y ago
It's not about "disagreeing with me." The point I'm making is that the discussion is not about how to change this unethical behavior, it's merely about changing the environment to prevent the behavior from being possible. And yes, it is a "new method" because it's a self-reinforcing one. Not too long ago, it was common for people to leave their doors unlocked, as the idea of car theft was simply not a thing that happened in that community. It's still largely a think in many places; e.g., rural Japan.

latexr 3y ago

> we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting. It seems to be a fairer assessment to say “when we see a concerning amount of them behaving in the worst way possible, we then pass laws to attempt to prevent that behavior from manifesting”. > It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play responsibly. Which is a great philosophy in theory, as well as in practice like (so I’ve heard from multiple sources) in Japan you being able to comfortably leave your belongings unattended in public space. It would be great if everywhere were like that, but we have to work with the society we live in and changing behaviour on a mass scale is a gargantuan task. > the "new method" results in a different kind of world than the previous one You described an ideal, not a method. If you have specific suggestions on how to collectively educate people to act for the greater good in any given matter, I’m genuinely interested. We need some of that fast (e.g. regarding climate change). I’m skeptical we can achieve those necessary urgent goals without any policies, but I’d welcome being wrong.

gumby 3y ago

We have long operated this way. Banks have security guards even though there are laws against theft. Greengrocers often have fresh fruit outside with no way to stop people from grabbing some and running off. It's simply the way of the world. I don't believe it's change materially, except to the degree that the ability to self defend (e.g. better locks) and to identify miscreants (e.g. cameras) has improved. I do feel that there are more private security guards than there used to be but when I watch old movies I'm not sure my impression is correct.

strangattractor 3y ago

Another way to frame it (IMHO) might be not to think of laws as a deterrent - especially because people break them anyway. The law codifies what circumstances the government can and cannot restrict your rights. Codifying this serves 2 primary purposes. It informs people in advance what is allowable so people cannot be arbitrarily arrested for doing things they don't know is illegal. Secondly it prescribes the penalty for that behavior so that in extreme cases we can remove a person that insists on that behavior. If there is no law prohibiting a behavior the gov't effectively cannot do anything about it. I see laws as only being useful after the crime has occurred. Yes this system gets gamed and abused. Curbing that requires constant effort just as deciding what laws need to be codified is a ongoing process.

petsfed 3y ago
And one of the core questions to be answered when prescribing how and when the government can restrict your rights is "which is the worse outcome for society as a whole?" The question of abortion really crystallizes this question perfectly for me: Which is worse? That a small number of people use infanticide in lieu of pro-active birth control? Or that a small number of people are forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term (even at the cost of their own life), or carry and raise a reminder of their rape (up to and including providing visitation/custody to their rapist)? There's a reason this is so controversial, and its because people (rightly) can't agree on which outcome society must necessarily be an accessory to.

Levitating 3y ago

If crime is economically possible, it will exist. With a society large enough, statistically some people will fit the persona needed to be a criminal.

darepublic 3y ago

Thank you for this comment. I've had some similar thoughts and it's comforting to know that some people out there at least think like mindedly. Recently on my city they have been rolling out myriad automated speed cameras and red light cameras and my feeling about them is quite mixed. I feel like it's trying to create a world in which all infractions are flagged automatically without need for subjective judgement. Many people laud this kind of so called justice but I am quite concerned about it.

nostromo 3y ago

This is related to high-trust and low-trust societies. In a high-trust society, norms prevail and in general you can expect a certain level of treatment from everyone: your government, your employer, your neighbor, and the person next to you on the train. In a low-trust society there is no guarantee of norms being universal, so you rely on physical security, contracts, lawyers, and law enforcement to enforce standards of behavior. Low-trust societies are very taxing. Every transaction is an opportunity to be scammed. Every unlocked door is an opportunity to be robbed. It forces everyone to be highly defensive about everything. The US has always been somewhere in the middle, compared to high-trust countries like Japan, and low trust countries like South Africa -- but it definitely has regressed to lower-trust. And part of that regression means that more norms have to be encoded as actual laws to maintain order.

WWLink 3y ago
I'd argue that it went higher trust? If you look back at labor law history, for example... or read a book like the grapes of wrath.... There are interesting localized extremes. Like you can find small family farms that have 'self service shops' on a shed next to the road they're on. They rely totally on the honor system and afaik theft is minimal enough that they don't worry about it. Then you have places where you can park a car and someone will immediately break into it to steal 50 cents out of the cupholder lol.

golemiprague 3y ago

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toss1 3y ago

Great concept. But the reality is that there IS, and likely always will be (short of wholesale genetic engineering of the race), a significant portion of the population that WILL act as you describe — i.e., have zero ethical boundaries and will behave according to whatever they can get away with. The prevalence of psychopathy in the general population is about 4.5% [0], so about one in 20 will be entirely immune to any ethical expectations. Moreover, up to 30% [1] have significant tendencies including low empathy and remorse, grandiosity, impulsivity, and/or aggressive or violent behavior. So, the large majority, around 70-85% of the population will indeed be subject to, and indeed welcome a society primarily based on high ethical expectations. However, a far too large minority will be immune to ethical expectations and will relentlessly prey on that majority. Simply put, your idea is wonderful, but does not match reality, and would fail badly in practice. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/ [1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy