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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
USA crime is still very low compared to pretty much the entire 20th century, it seems early to proclaim certain approaches as a failure.
FWIW, catalytic converter theft was recently a big problem in the US and the classic approach of getting the FBI involved, identifying the high-level fencers and arresting, was incredibly effective and cat thefts have plummeted.
I suspect disrupting the organized crime in Canada would work similarly well at reducing car theft.
It's only the case if people don't deny that the crimes exist, and Canada might suffer a bit from that lack of recognition.
In France as well, if you mention that there is criminality, people will frown upon you.
"No it's 100% safe country, it is a feeling of being unsafe".
I am someone you would label a ‘crime denier’ because I feel the problem is definitely smaller than in the past and it is generally overstated in the media. That is precisely why I think we should focus on organized crime and the driving clearing houses rather than individual street-level criminals.
I used to be like that, then I started seeing things happening myself. The first time you see Kia Boyz smashing windows and grabbing purses in a grocery store parking lot at noon on a Sunday is an eye opener (Do they want to get caught? this is pretty blatant, maybe they know we don't have many police these days). I always thought our crime problem was limited to porch piracy and street parked cars getting their windows bashed in at night (you know, typical drug addict crime), but nope, we have another problem.
I hear what you're saying, I live in SF. My opinions are evolving on the subject. There is a lot of not profit-driven vandalism and violence that I witness here and disrupting fencers will obviously do nothing for that.
But for car theft & other profit-driven commodity thefts, I do think targeting the markets can often be very effective.
I don't know. Many of these kids...they are from war torn communities (legal immigrants, refugees). They might be working through huge trauma, and they don't seem very organized at all (steal a car to...steal another car and/or knock over a gas station...then abandon the car on the street somewhere). There really isn't a market to target, the cars are almost always found after a few days, just trashed and damaged. They are just used for other crimes mostly.
The drug addicts are much more organized in comparison (steal legos at Target, fence at some place for fentanyl).
In the US* but in Canada (subject of this article) many are shipped off - ie. 10% are never recovered in US, 40%+ never recovered in Canada.
Yep. I don't know anything about car theft outside of where I live (Seattle), so its not even generalizable to the rest of the states, and I'm commenting specifically on Kia Boyz car thefts...I'm sure Seattle has actual car thieves who are stealing cars to sell them off and not just cause general very visible chaos. Although statistics show most stolen cars are recovered here in Seattle:
https://www.seattle.gov/police/crime-prevention/vehicle-thef....
86%.
Nearby Vancouver, at least, tracks Seattle:
https://www.ufv.ca/media/assets/ccjr/reports-and-publication...
That data might be outdated though.
It really depends where you live in France. You have a big fence left in the west, a 'casse' near bordeaux, but you won't really find anything from violent crime (copper, stolen cars, phones and bikes at most, and most of the activity is genuine).
It's also a good way to know if organized crime is present in your area. If water distribution and/or trash collection is privatized to a 'local' company, you probably have some :)
The rest of the west, even Nantes and Rennes are really chill.
The issue in France is the resurgence of organized crime since 2004-2006. The tough on small crime policy jailed small magrebi caïds (basically local slumlords and drug dealers). Some local caïds gangs were strong enough to endure the storm and to emerge as stronger gangs, but organized crime from southern France (Grenoble, Marseille), and new gangs used that time to carve parts of Lyon and Paris. New crime families emerged around 2012, and around 2015 (I was living in Paris at that time) it could have turned really bad. Rumors of missile launchers, ak47 and other nice stuff in every shop. Things calmed down for no reason (I think the travellers families and magrebi gangs decided to share territory after the terror attacks and Sentinel), nothing really exploded, I left Paris.
To me, the only true violence left in 2023-2024 is around Marseille, near Monaco (Russian mafia left a big hole recently), in camargue (because of the new travellers families). Maybe it'll start again in Paris and Lyon, hopefully not.
The premise that catalytic converter thefts have plummeted in the last few years is incorrect. In fact, recent data indicates that vehicle-related thefts, including catalytic converter thefts, have surged. According to a report by the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), the nation experienced more than 64,000 catalytic converter thefts in 2022, with California and Texas leading the country in these incidents[3]. This represents a significant increase from 16,660 claims in 2020 to 64,701 in 2022, indicating a rising trend in catalytic converter thefts[3].
Furthermore, overall vehicle thefts have also increased. The FBI's annual crime report showed that there were 721,852 car thefts across the country in 2022, up from 601,453 incidents in 2021 and 420,952 reported in 2020[2]. This surge in car thefts has been attributed to various factors, including economic downturns, supply chain issues, and the high demand for cars and parts[4]. Additionally, a viral TikTok challenge encouraging the theft of Kia and Hyundai vehicles for joyrides, known as performance crime, has contributed to the uptick in car thefts[2].
Therefore, the data clearly indicates that catalytic converter thefts, as well as overall vehicle thefts, have not plummeted but have significantly increased in the last few years.
Citations: [1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-auto-the... [2] https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/car-theft-soared-20-last-year-... [3] https://www.nicb.org/news/news-releases/catalytic-converter-... [4] https://www.deepsentinel.com/blogs/car-theft-statistics/ [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2023/11/06/report-... [6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-ve... [7] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/car-thefts-are-on-the-rise-why-... [8] https://stateline.org/2024/02/09/car-thefts-and-carjackings-...
My comment was confusing so let me address what you are saying:
1. This is a very recent thing I am discussing, the fencers were only arrested in the beginning of 2023 and the thefts have fallen in 2023, specifically second half. This should be available in more fine-grained crime stats or simply by looking at like google trends of catalytic converter replacement searches.
2. Crime is much lower than in the 20th century, but I agree there has been a post-pandemic upshift.
e: found some news articles https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/california-catalytic-...
this trend is after they busted a billion dollar auto parts company for being heavily involved in fencing these parts, seized 500 million dollars, and other anti-fencing provisions were made
Do you mean DG Auto Parts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020–2022_catalytic_converter_...) or is there another auto parts chain I should avoid.
Ah yes, that's the one. Misremembered the apprehension date slightly. There have been subsequent arrests in the Bay Area of people who were part of the supply chain for this group.
No, you're looking at old data. Cat thefts in 2023 halved compared to 2022.
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/catalytic-converter-th...
Agreed, it really is a paperwork issue. Just have transport and shipping companies require proof of ownership prior to accepting the car, and these thefts will evaporate overnight. Without a channel to market, it eliminates the incentive for thieves to steal your car in the first place.
It's not a tech problem, rather a legislative one. Too bad it won't fly because the current govt. has made it a habit of treating every issue as a wedge issue.
I think part of the problem is also that as criminal trade becomes lucrative & there are more crackdowns in other potential venues, more and more capital is being spent to basically build up these ports in Canada as criminal strongholds.
There is likely significant political shielding for the operation of these criminal groups in many Canadian ports.
This seems right for preventing criminals from forming out of otherwise-blank-slate children, but what do you do with these kids? There's no magic wand that turns their home & school life right.
On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who had a perfectly fine and financed upbringing who turned into criminals and terrors, they just tend toward white-collar crime.
This brings us full circle to the original comment that religion used to serve a useful purpose for society that's been largely lost -- a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at all times. In modern times the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by surveillance cameras, but what is the base of morals replaced by?
The first thing is that there are no universal sets of morals. Ethics is a totally different beast but it’s something I’m not sure a young kid can wrap their heads around. But following “the rules” is something you can teach a kid and works until they are old enough to know when to break the rules.
One thing we stressed to our son is: if you break the rules/laws, you will eventually get caught. So make sure whatever you are doing is worth the consequences.
There’s no need for some magical god to punish people, just the fact that, eventually, someone will figure out what you did (or more likely, they’ll tell on themselves). It’s worked so far…
That's a belief presented as fact. I'm not super excited about getting into a philosophical debate, but just something to consider:
"The rules: help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others’ property, were found in a survey of 60 cultures from all around the world." -- https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-02-11-seven-moral-rules-found...
It’s a fact because I think we can agree there is at least one person on this planet who has counter-morals to any morals you present, for example. As long as one person on this planet has a difference of opinion on what morals they abide by, there can be no universal morals. That IS a fact, not an opinion.
Your unstated assumption is that universal agreement is required for universal morals to exist
Do you think we didn't have crime when the church was in charge?
Is that really what you think I said? How about making a point with less snark to it that I could respond to?
if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages.
one gets constantly brought up while the other is celebrated.
Yes! Which makes our lack of action even more tragic.
when we consider wage theft as a significant driver of poverty, punishment for the 13 year old is more useless than anything.
So you would condemn the 13 year old to a (likely short) life of hardship because wage theft is a more important problem?
Do you know about the endemic of illiteracy in the US right now? More likely than not that child can't even read above a 2nd grade level.
We could have real rehabilitation centers focused on educating the kids, treating them like human beings with respect, and show them how to live life well.
Or we could put them in kid-jail and be put at a higher risk for all sorts of violence and abuse just to punish them.
As long as people hold the opinion that a 12 year old is "well on their way down the path towards irredeemability", we won't ever move past revenge based for-profit prisons and the crime problem will continue to get worse as these illiterate and stunted children are released back out into society.
Even better, we could focus on educating them properly the first time!
What teachers are saying is that socio-economics prevent any type of education from happening in many cases, i.e. there are many, many children who are going to struggle mightily unless the totality of their life systemically improves. Could teachers improve? Probably. Are teachers the underlying problem? I used to think so, but in dealing with our own school board/system it's very clear this is not the case.
That's easy. We just need to halve class sizes, fire half of the administration, double the pay for teachers in the worst districts, and raise the floor of the child social safety net to the point that even having complete fuckups for parents won't ruin your life.
Society had better correct that problem quickly or those two 12/13 year old kids are going to have ruined their lives by the time they turn 18. Something drastic has to be done, a slap on the wrist and sending them back to their parents isn't sufficient. Right now we fail on both sides of the pendulum, maybe its time to rethink things.
I do think Europe does deal better with this. Even in France, they have a fairly aggressive/intolerant police force, but a real correction focus once arrests/convictions have occurred.
The problem cannot be corrected by locking them in a room until they're 25, then releasing them.
The problem also cannot be corrected by letting them run wild until they are 18, and then locking them in a room until they are 50, and then releasing them.
Criminality is congenital. Social interventions will not fix the kid. Neither for that matter will prison, but at least it will protect the rest of us from his increasingly violent depredations.
This is a categorically disproven view. Thankfully, it's no longer widely held, but unfortunately not before it was used to justify millions of cruel acts from eugenics to genocide.
In the US we lock more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation on Earth. Conviction for even a minor offense can make it extremely difficult to get employment or housing. People rarely get a clean slate after serving their time and even an arrest record without a conviction can haunt you. Nearly all other developed countries have abolished capitol punishment. We haven't gone a single year since 1981 without an execution.
The pendulum has already swung too far towards punishment and law enforcement, to the point that abuses by police and our mass incarceration problem are a total embarrassment for a country that tries to call itself "the land of the free" with a straight face.
There's little doubt that many of the people arrested in the US would do better with some compassion than they would with harsher punishment. This is especially true for literal children. One example where compassion is the better option would be treating addiction instead of punishing drug addicts. That would save billions in tax dollars, reduce crime, and help the addict to recover their lives and remove several barriers that could prevent them from getting work and being productive members of society. If we'd done that decades ago instead of feeding US citizens to the prison industrial complex we'd be so much better off as a nation today.
There's a risk for over-correcting, but there's also a massive amount of space between "do nothing" and our usual method today which amounts to "torture then never forgive" or "torture then kill" so there's plenty of opportunity to find some improvements.
I fully agree with you regarding situations where people get put into the system. Our justice system in practice, if not philosophy is very much based on punishment rather than rehabilitation. In my personal opinion this is medieval and really needs to change.
However, what GP I suspect is seeing and what many others have seen as well, is a recognition that the system is broken, and thus a reluctance on a part of authorities to move forward with prosecutions for certain people. The goal of not institutionalizing them and setting them up for a difficult future is noble and laudable, however, I worry that this will ultimately be counterproductive. It is going to cause a swing much like what we are seeing, where people conclude that we are not tough enough on crime and thus we need to get more extreme, more punishing, and more authoritarian, which is the exact wrong way in my opinion.
I would much rather we focus on fixing a monstrously broken and outdated system, rather than trying to work around it. That also makes for much more equality and Justice, because then you don't have to hope that you are one of the lucky ones for whom The system looks the other way.
It doesn't have to be a massive revolution either. We can iterate towards it in a progressive manner, starting by removing absurdities like mandatory minimums, victimless crimes or crimes for whom the victim is some nebulous "society", and other things like that.
To reiterate what you just wrote in the second paragraph: Punishment ruins lives, so people vote against ruining each other's lives, so a group of people (who are but you did not refer to as fascists) who are disappointed with the amount of lives not being ruined will increase the level of punishment even further to maintain or exceed life-ruining equilibrium?
It may be true or false, that I don't know, but the blame for it should lie squarely on the people who seek to increase life-ruining instead of the people who seek to decrease it.
Then don't punish. Reform, correct, fix. A lot of people will still see that as punishment (like they would see army bootcamp as punishment), but then we would just start disagreeing.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. It can be difficult to sync on terminology and philosophy though because in theory for most people the justice system is supposed to be about rehabilitation. The idea that you should serve your time and return to society is almost universally agreed saving the most extreme cases. Yet our system doesn't achieve that because a lot of the structures are based on "punishment" and "deterrence." Simply raising awareness and following the trail of logic is usually enough to find a lot of common ground. But it being a systemic problem, there isn't really anything an individual can do (that isn't IMHO counterproductive, see earlier thread about the unintended consequences of well-meaning DAs and LEOs letting people go to avoid the pitfalls of the system). It's a tremendously challening problem.
I don't disagree, but assigning blame won't get us anywhere. In fact I think it actively works against us because:
1. It just further causes divisions. If people feel like they're being blamed, they will get defensive which usually also includes a double down and a shift to amygdala-based reasoning rather than PFC-based reasoning.
2. It shifts the conversation to a debate about "whose fault" or "who is to blame" rather than "is the system ethical, efficiacious, and what can we do about it?" That debate will then take all the energy, and even if it got resolved it's all wasted because simply assigning blame doesn't do anything toward solving the problem.
I totally agree. I also worry that people will continue to push for more extreme forms of punishment. It's gross that we accept how prisoners and ex-cons are treated as it is. I think there are still a lot of people who would already prefer if our legal system was even more cruel, but even if most of us want reform all we can really do is vote for the people willing to do it. Our strongest point of leverage here is jury nullification, but I wonder how popular that would actually be with jurors and since most cases never reach trial we're denied the opportunity to use nullification to prevent defendants from being subjected to excessive, inhumane, and unjust punishments anyway.
The US isn't very uniform. Mississippi locks way more people up than Washington state. Both states are pretty ineffective in keeping crime down.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html?gad_source=1&g...
Washington is put at around Thailand, Mississippi locks more than twice as many people per capita up (and isn't very comparable to a country).
Well that's depressing. Thailand is not a country we should strive to emulate. They have their own mass incarceration problem (they rank 8th in the world), state executions, their own "war on drugs", lots of violent killings involving guns, high levels of corruption, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and a horrible track record for human rights. Thailand is a mess and it's tragic that so much of the US can't do any better when it comes to locking citizens behind bars.
It isn't, but many places in the US are not as bad as it seems if we count the USA as a whole. Mississippi (and Louisiana and most of the south up to and including Texas and Florida) is just really bad.
this is an absolutely insane position to take in 2024. all around we have junkies in the streets, squatters, shoplifters, car thieves, burglars operating with impunity. you are replying to a post about 12-13 year-olds stealing cars and carrying guns, ffs. this should involve at least several years in jail. maybe a 2nd chance at 18.
the pendulum has definitely swung too far, but the direction it's swinging is not what you think. the last decade has been an wonderful experiment in reversing some of the "tough-on-crime" laws. the results of which have basically completely disproven the idea that sentencing, bail, etc. reforms would ever have a net benefit.
mass-incarceration is not a "problem" to be solved - it's a symptom, a result. the problem is an increasingly lawless society. measuring how many people are incarcerated is meaningless without comparing it with how much crime is happening.
compassion, i agree with. but what's needed is to put effort into better sorting in the justice system. some people, for example juveniles, deserve and will be well served by compassion. others will simply take massive advantage of it. the later need to be locked up, not for rehabilitation, but to prevent crime. a great way to differentiate it is repeat offenders. there's basically no excuse for this. 2nd chances? maybe. 3rd, 4th, etc... no way.
None of these things are new. Junkies aren’t new, organized criminal groups aren’t new, car thefts aren’t new.
There has been a pandemic uptick, but the broader trend is way, way less common than in your parents lifetime.
The thing about policies that are redistributive and the media is that generally the people writing the stories will be closest to those who have been hurt, not helped. I am sure there are plenty of people (criminals, yes) who have been helped by bail reform.
This is the insane take. Maybe that's your personal bubble talking, but there are millions of people who go about their daily lives without seeing a single junkie in the street. America has always had "bad" neighborhoods filled with junkies/squatters/shoplifters/car thieves/burglars but they have not and do not operate with impunity. You can easily find examples of all of those things resulting in someone being arrested/convicted/shot by police.
Record numbers of Americans can't afford rent. Household debit is at all time highs as well. There are also historic numbers of Deaths of Despair. Is it any wonder that drug use, homelessness, squatting, and crimes like shoplifting/theft are rising? It doesn't excuse the behavior, but it does explain much of it. Give Americans zero help for mental illness, don't act surprised when you get a bunch of crazy people around you. Punish addicts instead of helping them? Enjoy your junkies I guess! Allow massive numbers of people to live in desperation and you can't act shocked when they act out of desperation.
"Tough-on-crime" laws will not fix those issues because they do nothing but making the underlying causes even worse. "Tough-on-crime" laws are exactly what have been failing us, and why people have started looking for alternatives.
A 12 year does not benefit from a prison sentence. Do you honestly think that's going to keep them from committing crimes later on in life? We should expect children to do stupid things. Their undeveloped brains are wired for risk taking, and failing to see/consider the consequences of their actions. (https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...). That doesn't mean they are incapable of making good choices, but it does make it much more likely (and natural) for them to fail to make good choices from time to time. Not all acts of teenage impulsivity will lead to stealing cars, but those 12-13 year olds mentioned would be far from the first kids to do it. Perhaps you could argue that it's the parents who should be punished for not raising their child properly or for failing to keep them away from guns, but I'm skeptical that it would prevent other families from having the same problems. Children need to be allowed to grow and learn from their mistakes. There need to be consequences for when they screw up, but is sending a child off to get tortured and raped for years the best solution you can come up with?
Hard disagree. There is plenty of research into the problems it causes and enables to continue. It's hugely wasteful and expensive. Not only do tough on crime laws and mass incarceration fail to prevent crime (see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crime-and-punishment...), it actually makes things worse! It rips families apart. It hurts communities. It hurts the economy, It hurts the people who are abused in prisons. It prevents people from being contributing members of society. No good comes from mass incarceration.
It's also not about how much crime there is. Look at this: https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/NATO_US_2021.webp
Do you honestly think America has so much more crime than the rest of the planet? It's not as if our incarceration problem only got that bad recently either. It's been insane for a very very very long time.
"how much crime is happening" isn't really the issue anyway. It's "what crimes are committed, should they be crimes in the first place, and do we need people behind bars because of them".
A massive percentage of the people who are locked up have never even been convicted of a crime (https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2023.webp) and many who have been are there for non-violent and drug related offenses, often with no victim at all!
Everyone should be free to take advantage of compassion, but compassion doesn't mean that people can just get away with whatever they want either. I agree, that prison is no way to rehabilitate someone. That said, a night or two in jail can be a nice "time out"/wake up call. There will always be some people who need to be kept locked up to protect the rest of society. It should be a last resort though and those people shouldn't be subjected to torture or substandard conditions. They should be allowed to live a safe, healthy, good life - just one kept apart from the rest of the us and without their freedom.
You can't imagine why someone who gets out of jail, is suddenly saddled with massive debt, fees, and fines from the experience, but whose record means they cannot get a job or an apartment might turn to crime again? Why someone who has spent years being beaten, raped, tortured behind bars might come out of prison with problems that lead them to drugs and the problems that causes? Why people who are locked up for mental illness and released without treatment or the means to get treatment might reoffend?
Again, it doesn't justify the crimes, but it does help to explain them. If we don't give people who get out of prison a chance to get their life back together what else do we expect? Our current system makes it extremely unlikely for someone to have a normal decent life once they are out of prison. Especially if that person had very little money/support, or had mental illness or an addiction, or very little education (maybe they were only 12-13) when they went in. The vast majority of the people who enter the justice system have a mental illness/impairment, an addiction, or both. That has to be dealt with or it's just going to cause more issues. Many leave prison with mental problems due to the trauma of their experiences. That has to be dealt with.
This isn't an unsolvable problem. Other countries do so much better than we do, so we can draw from their examples. Suggesting that we should ignore all those examples and be even more draconian and oppressive is a very weird take.
There's an entire field of study covering how ineffective punitive justice is. Unless the perpetrator at hand is literally an irredeemable monster, locking them away in a box until they're later released with even more stigmas, even further behind the curve, and without the ability to earn a living does nothing except push them right back to the anti-social behavior that put them on the radar of the justice system in the first place.
All evidence on the subject points to the same thing: the best predictor of who will be a criminal and who won't is their zip code, because of things like under-served communities and generational poverty. When you give people no options to make a living in a pro-social way, they will do it in an anti-social one.
Does that mean every person in the justice system just needs a firm pat on the back and to be released? Fuck no. But if you long term want to actually reduce crime, the evidence is in: you do that by improving home lives and giving communities the resources they need to grow, not by locking people up.
To be honest, there's also entire fields of study of how God makes everything in the world happen, so I doubt I'm much convinced by how many fields of studies there are. People have been able to bullshit each other over obvious things for eons. The existence of such fields means nothing.
God doesn't have many peer reviewed studies. This is a non-sequitur. You don't get to hand wave away reality that you don't like
Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway was peer-reviewed so that isn't convincing either.
Sounds like they had some rich parents to bail them out. I highly doubt they had court in less than a week.
Just to help not spread misinformation, the 12 year old was released as he was a passenger and police believe he was forced by the driver (his brother) into the car.
The 13 year old driver was not released and will remain in jail until his trial.
people as organizations are a larger problem that people as cultural products.
I like the idea in theory, but I'm not sure if it's practical. There's no such thing as a secure system, there are only systems with no known security issues -- a vehicle that has no known security issues one day, is one discovery away from being completely open the next day. So, it would be hard to legislate the security of a system.
The solution might be to incentivize a quick resolution. For example, if a security issue is found with a vehicle, there could be laws that govern how quickly a fix needs to be available, how it's made available, and how far back it goes in model years. I would suggest that the severity of the issue (life threatening | theft | inconvenience) and the number of vehicles affected, should dictate how much time they have to resolve it.
Nobody's demanding that auto manufacturers build a secure system, we are just expecting them to meet an incredibly low bar of security.
The manufacturers in question, unlike their peers, have failed to clear it.
I agree with you, I'm just not sure how you'd wright the law that makes them clear the low bar when that bar might need to move up before the bill even becomes a law. That's why I would prioritize some kind of "security update bill" instead of trying to legislate the low bar that needs to be crossed.
I mean, in modern vehicles you can pretty much get there, but you might have to give up some features. For example, walk up unlock. You need to push a button somewhere to make unlock secure.
The way you get there is through FIDO. Have the engine controller ask the hardware key to confirm who it is through a handshake. Don't start/enable the engine if that handshake fails.
With that in place, the route to theft involves removing/replacing the engine controller which can be a major pain to do fast.
Cars with bad security systems generally involve pulling the steering column off and touching the right two wires together to start then engine.
That said, preventing theft of the contents of a car is impossible. Windows break easy and it's stupid easy to push the unlock button. That can't change.
This is tautologically true. However, the car manufacturers haven't even tried.
They had the same default password for every car. Then they had wireless systems that were vulnerable to replay. Then they had wireless systems that were vulnerable to relay. etc.
The wireless systems on cars need two things: encryption and time of flight detection. The problem is that adds a couple dollars of cost per car and will lock out users some amount of time inversely proportional to the development cost (which the car manufacturers will shirk on so the system will suck). So, no manufacturer will do it short of being forced by legislation.
From an engineering point of view, the main limitation is the battery in the keyfob. If you interrogate the keyfob too often, it will drain the battery and consumers will complain.
This seems really bizarre to me and kind of dismisses the entire premise of this subthread.
So we have a particular activity - theft - which we as a society have deemed to be inappropriate and codified the punishment of such behavior into law. The law doesn't prevent such behavior, it merely lays out the punishment if one is caught and convicted which can be seen as a deterrent. However, vehicle theft still happens which leads us to this entire topic.
The suggestion is to impose requirements via law onto companies who make vehicles to prevent this theft; although interestingly enough no legal requirements for the manufacturer of the tool used in the commission of these crimes. The companies complying with such regulations will pass on the cost to the consumer just like the mandated safety features such as back-up cameras and so forth. So in essence we would be punishing all consumers by increasing the cost of a vehicle to prevent an unrelated third party from committing an already illegal act. Of course what is secure changes over time, so what is secure today may not be tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I'm not sure how that fits into the equation.
Keep in mind this is just one aspect of a vehicle out of many. We already have loads of regulations around vehicles from safety features to emission standards. When you say that a buyer presumably expects a lock to be resistant to this sort of attack you are adding to a very long list of things the buyer may or may not actually care enough about to spend their money on it. When do we admit that many, many different groups have convinced legislators to regulate what vehicles the public is allowed to have rather than pretending we are speaking for the consumer?
Please note that I am not saying all laws and regulations are bad, far from it. I do believe that there are no solutions in law, merely trade-offs which I alluded to above. My point here is to question if another law will actually fix the issue and if the knock-on effects are worth it. As a society we tend to pass laws that stay on the books long after we learn how damaging and counter-productive they actually are; e.g. the war on drugs. We also have an uncountable number of laws and regulations on the books; we literally don't know how many there are. So saying the only solution is more laws seems a bit like saying everything is a nail because all I have is a hammer.
You also brought up ethics in relation to manufacturers. I have to ask though, why do they have an ethical responsibility to prevent a bad actor from using a tool to steal their product from their own consumers? I'm having a really, really hard time agreeing with such an ethical responsibility. How much ethical responsibility can we really put onto manufacturers to prevent crime?
I get where you're going with this. At the same time, I am reminded of the Kia Boyz incidents - where the immobilizer was pretty much expected on every new car, and Kia had decided to maximize profits on their low end models by just omitting that feature.
It would be like if you built a new house and decided not to install smoke alarms. (Except, of course, this is regulated.)
And yea, regulations right? Why should we regulate stuff like that anyway? :P
Every car on the market now has a flaw where I can put a air wedge on your door and a coat hanger on the lock button.
Given those two tools, can you steal the car, or does that require a lot more effort for some models?
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
false advertising and fraud are already banned. car theft is banned. cars below a certain price are effectively banned by regulations. poorly lit parking lots are almost certainly partially banned. soon, leaving one's car in a dark parking lot will be banned.
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.
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.
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…
I don't think I agree with this. If anything, it seems more like the reverse: societies have been less-and-less willing to enforce assimilation and a certain set of society-wide cultural behaviors, and therefore they "fall back" to the rule of law as described by you.
As a melting pot, the US takes in a lot of folks from countries that are not doing very well... so in a way, if we keep importing folks from cultures that failed without trying to integrate them to our culture, and instead celebrate their original culture, eventually our amalgam culture will fail just like theirs did.
Its why we have signs that say to "sit, not stand on toilets". You dont think we would need to write it down, but if you import hundreds of thousands of toilet standers, "the norm" goes out the window.
The melting pot is a way of integrating people into our country. It has been criticized as being too homogenizing; and now I think (for the better) most people see it as a nice lumpy stew. We shouldn’t ask people to give up all their traditions or change completely to become American, it is a give and take communication process that we both benefit from.
WRT toilets, I think it has been shown that squatting actually reduces the strain when using the toilet; I think those signs reflect the fact that we are integrating new toilet information. They are part of the natural back-and-forth pushing process. Hopefully we’ll converge on a toilet that is lower to the ground but doesn’t have accessibility issues.
Squatting toilets are fine, maybe they are even better. But the signs are about people squatting with their feet on the toilet bowl on a sitting toilet. That is dangerous (the bowl can easily break from the pressure of your feet) and dirty (you are very likely to leave the area around dirty, and there are typically no ways to clean the outside of the bowl in typical western bathrooms).
What I wanted to highlight is that this confusion, people coming to the toilet with different assumptions and misusing it as a result, is part of the process of improving by integrating additional information. Sure, they are being misused, but the way they are being misused gives us a chance to reflect on how they could be better.
If we want to be obnoxiously neutral, haha, we could just say there’s a mismatch between the design and the user expectations. Maybe we could look at retrofitting some of these toilets with a retractable foot platform, or something along those lines, instead of a sign.
If American culture "fails," I'm gonna blame xenophobes like you who are incapable of adjusting to a dynamic world, not the "toilet standers."
Your terms are acceptable.
Bad example. I believe squat toilets are actually better for you (less strain to use) so really there is a case to be made we (those who do not use them) should follow those who do.
This was not about squat toilets, but about people who squat on sit-down toilets, which is dangerous and dirty.
Go on, tell us more.
you know that the melting pot analogy is meant to say that we integrate immigrant cultures into "our" culture by both changing the immigrant culture and the dominant culture. The contents of the pot as a whole are less changed than the individual components are.
I think you may be thinking of the Candaian conception of a cultural mosaic.
I'd like to note that the United States is in fact extremely good at assimilating immigrant groups and has done so successfully numerous times.
Honestly, I see little evidence it is doing any worse at assimilation than in, say, the early 1900s.
Erm, how exactly do you think we’re going to educate people on the “normal” way of using a toilet, if it’s not educational signs above toilets?
Do you imagine some kind of toilet license? Where people have to take toilet train and demonstrate their competence in front of an examiner?
Or perhaps at every border, non-citizens are given mandatory toilet training.
Or perhaps you’re gonna follow everyone into to the toilet and tell them how to use it correctly.
Your issue is with people not learning your native culture, but your evidence for people not learning is educational material that teaches people your culture. So it does rather seem your problem is that your specific culture isn’t the world wide norm.
> This is why the UN exists and the LON before it
Um, you do realize that the League of Nations was a failure? And that the UN, although at least it still exists (unlike the LON, which only lasted a decade or so), has not accomplished anything meaningful in terms of enforcing actual norms of behavior?
Dude. I was just listening to my taxi driver tell me about how the UN helped him escape from war at 14 and got him to this country (Norway) where he’s been able to have a decent life. I’m not sure you know what you’re talking about.
Point being that the norm in question would be "not having the war".
Are you kidding? UN has had tremendous impact in the world.
> UN has had tremendous impact in the world
Perhaps, but if so, I think its impact is, at the very least, net negative, not net positive.
That's a wild statement to make about UN's unproductiveness in the history of its existence. I'd like some evidence please.
> I'd like some evidence please.
Um, the state of the world today? Read the preamble of the UN charter and ask yourself how well the UN has actually done at moving the world in the direction of those things.
That's because the UN isn't an actor in its own right, it is merely a forum through which countries can co-operate if they want to.
I think what may be missing from the discussion at this point are distinctions between law and equity and different kinds of judgement in statutory versus common law.
The ideal in jurisprudence is that we _always_ have equity - the ability to interpret the law and apply it in each specific cases.
The "opposite" is statutory law. Like you get a speeding ticket regardless of any mitigating situation.
So you were rushing to the hospital in time for your pregnant wife to give birth before your dying father breathes his last.... Cry me a river. $200 fine! Next case.
Mechanical justice is cheap and rough. Statutory law fits perfectly with our capitalist society, efficient, inflexible, uniform, quick and cheap. Judges and juries are expensive.
Others mentioned the Chinese concept of Li (loi?) and the "spirit of the law", which are casualties in a technocratic society.
This seems a bit of a false equivalence. Capitalist societies are the ones that are based on liberalism and think individuals are important - important enough to make companies and agreements between each other. They quite often are the ones that also think individuals are deserving of justice in and of themselves, not based on what group someone has put them in.
Are you not confusing democratic societies with capitalist ones?
I mean, there's some overlap, but if we're talking about clumsy equivalences... :)
And to be honest I see ever less intersection between actual current "late stage" capitalism and the "rule of Law". Those I know in the legal profession complain we are in state of "lawfare", a state in which most of the common principles of justice have broken down in favour of "justice for the rich" (I realise many Americans take that to be perfectly normal)
How about I use the expression "greed driven societies" instead?
To split hairs - the UN does not exist to be a world police (Its charter is explicitly built to ensure that it fails at that task).
It exists to be a forum for countries to talk to eachother. But its a purely voluntary engagement.
I don't think your evidence supports your argument at all. Pick any consistently governed region, even one with regime changes. Compared to the UN, which is unable to affect some of the worst genocides in recorded history. As well as the League of Nations, an institution notable for accomplishing nothing. Nothing is immune to external threats but institutions that avoid them by doing nothing on critical issues are not the most inspiring examples.
The rule of law is our best attempt at codifying Individual freedoms, outside and above the power of the state. Definitely a noble goal, but leads to the observations made by the parent comment.
You are describing anarchy.
No leader, or force required. People just acting according to their consciences.
But you DO have a second line of defense even in your culture because that sort of thing DOES happen even in your culture only perhaps less often.
With respect to the Flipper Zero, I don't understand how culture solves this particular problem. I'm not sure I'd want to be in a culture that solved this particular problem a priori. I think I'd prefer to be in an imperfect Rule Of Law society that adapted albeit imperfectly to new problems as they appeared.
And now we come to the unfortunate fact that there is no equivalent in English for the distinction between Recht and Gesetz, or droit and loi, both being subsumed under the term law. The former is an immanent thing, a "shared search after justice". The latter is temporal, it is written down and itemised in Strafgesetzbuche and Codes Civiles, and is very appealing to HNers because we can read "common standard for some subset of behavior" and think "I can put this into a computer". But that Law is not The Law. And The Law is not even Society. It's something we yearn for or desire, and our confidence in society varies with our confidence that our neighbours are also yearning for it with us. The rule of law is a feeling, man.
Isn't this explained in the phrase "the spirit of the law" vs. "the letter of the law", or is there more to the concept.
I think "spirit of the law" can be interpreted as how the (written) law was trying to get at The Law. But even that spirit is not The Law. Here's an example - modern Germany defines itself as a Rechtsstaat. On the face of it this is a "State of the rule of law". But this fails to capture what distinguishes it from a hypothetical Gesetzstaat, so Wikipedia also tries on "state of justice and integrity" and "constitutional state" to get the distinction across. And the absence of Recht - a Nichtrechtsstaat - is one "based on the arbitrary use of power".
The historical context is that of trying to define what in a state should set it apart from both the 3rd Reich and the DDR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
I suspect many Germans have varying personal interpretations (not being German). However, StackOverflow has a question/answer [1] where the most general answer is "right or freedom as in Recht auf freie Meinungsäußerung being 'freedom of speech'".
Otherwise, tends to represent "the encompassing scope of all laws" vs "the interactions of a single law."
The "the spirit of the law" tends to be more like: "what did we believe the law was supposed to do vs what does it actually result in if you're a rules lawyer."
Games have a lot of that with little oversight, legal laws tend to get publicly challenged. We made a rule where all the miniatures have to stand in squares, except now all anybody does is abuse the facing and distance rules.
[1] https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/30384/what-s-the-...
Perhaps what you are trying to express as "shared search after justice" could be thought of as a "Social Contract"; a non-codified agreement of how society (should) co-exists, in context of said Society.
English common law is largely not codified but the result of practices and precedent, and is still part of the legal system in most English-speaking countries, as opposed to continental-style civil codes that you mention which are more explicit. I do think that distinction exists in the English-speaking world.
> You just described the “rule of law”
What the article is describing is not the rule of law.
The rule of law would be: make theft a crime, and enforce that. Not: criminalize the use of security research tools to show which vehicles are more susceptible to theft.
> What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated in favor of common law
I think what the GP poster wants is to have the law limited to criminalizing things that are actual crimes, like theft, not things that are inconvenient to the rich and powerful.
Please list all of the “actual crimes”
I don't remember the terms but there's a category of crimes that are "crimes because that's what the written law says"(i.e. driving without a license) and "crimes that morally abhorrent and actual harm to someone"(i.e. murder, theft)
"Actual crimes" would be category 2.
Building or owning a flipper zero would be in category 1. (As would laws that ban things like owning/carrying lockpicks without being a licensed locksmith)
The problem with rule of law is that it's like a very sloppy program that relies heavily on global variables. Whether it's the constitution or any of the million codes they all have implicit assumptions or vague language that requires a certain cultural or ethical baseline to interpret properly. Just the 2nd amendment is already a plenty popular example.
law:
prompt engineering before it was cool
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.
I'd say OP actually talked about two different things. The abstract description in the first paragraph is the rule of law (which I agree happened a long time ago, and is a good thing for a democratic society), but the concrete gripe in the later paragraphs is a different thing.
Rather, it's something like the difference between laws applying to individuals who may violate normative behavior ("it's illegal to steal"), or whether laws (in this context aka "regulations") apply continuously to above board businesses, with the goal of a priori preventing individual violations of normative behavior ("it's illegal to make a car that can be easily stolen").
I have to object that the rule of law isn't about the extent of laws and enforcement but rather about making whatever enforce exists systematic, fair and so-forth.
The concept of rule of law never implied the replacement of custom with bureaucracy - although that often happens. It implied the replacement of the venal authority of kings and nobles with codified principles. Especially, as the parent points out, customary honesty isn't based on any enforcement system.
"What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated in favor of common law,"
I must have missed that. I do not see them making that point.
"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."
I don't know that I would call this a perfect example. This is extremely narrow and doesn't dive into many aspects of the relationship. I'd say it's more focused on individuals giving up freedoms on the notion that those freedoms don't benefit them personally, but could pose some harm to them if others are allowed to exercise them, without realizing that the same thoughts can be used against them in the future. More a tyranny of the majority than role of government discussion, even if somewhat related.
This has literally nothing to do with rule of law.
Rule of law simply means that the laws of the land are respected and enforced (no matter what law it is). Ie codified rules are followed.
This has nothing to do with how the rules are written or what they are.
‘Rule of law’ is the concept that no one is above the law, as opposed to having a specific ruler that can do as they please. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the comment you’re replying to, which would be the same idea if it were decreed by an untouchable supreme leader.
I... don't think what they described is "rule of law" in any way.
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.
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%.
Great - and how is that different from the law again?
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.
Sorry - you edited your comment substantially, the process you initially described was identical to the law.
You do realize that some portion of the population can't feel bad about it right?
Needless to say, I pray to whatever deities that you do not work in computer security. You would be laughed out of existence by saying "Just tell the world to be nice" rather than say, not write SQL injections.
How about "Tell all the viruses to be nice and not infect cells".
Why do you believe this isn't happening? Things like the golden rule and other normative ethical ideas are literally being taught in schools today, from kindergarten all the way up through required college classes.
The vast majority of people don't do bad things explicitly because they think it would be "bad". The vast majority of human behavior IS normative ethics right now! Next time you go to the grocery store, pay attention to what percentage of carts make it back to the cart corral vs are just left in parking lot, despite zero legal framework or forcing behavior to make it happen.
The human brain however has no difficulty squaring such "good and bad" concepts with doing bad things though. Everyone believes they are the hero of their own story, and the brain is willing to lie to itself to reinforce that belief.
You seem to suggest that parents and schools are not teaching ethical behavior.
Do you think this is happening at a large scale?
I know some leftists (I'm liberal) who don't seem to care about minor theft or crime because it seems like peanuts next to the civilization-wrecking greed and pollution and wealth transfer underway by the owners of capital.
But I don't think that is a majority thought. I personally think the criminal justice system has decided they either won't do their jobs, or that they are so understaffed that they can't do their job of investigating and punishing crime.
Again, my take is that most people of all political stripes want crime to be punished.
I don't really get the impression that teachers are expected to instill strong moral values, more just teach the subject and then leave.
With parents, my feeling is not so much that society expects them to instill strong ethical values in their children, but rather something more pragmatic, Machiavellian, "making it in life," and so forth.
People don't want their cars stolen. Punishing the thieves doesn't undo their actions.
The largest metro area on the planet, Tokyo, 34 million people, is also the one of the safest with the extremely low crime. Seoul, and Singapore are both around 10 million and are also safe with low crime.
It's also illegal to possess a gun in Tokyo, not just illegal to shoot somebody.
1. Go look up how relevant guns are to overall crime rates in the US.
2. Go look up what happened to the last prime minister of Japan.
The context is talking about whether we should regulate the environment or just normative ethics; Tokyo has a lot of laws regulating the environment.
I don't know if you're pretending to be unaware or genuinely ignorant, but no. Japanese society places extreme emphasis on teaching children to behave respectfully in society and these values are taught from early childhood to adulthood. If you want to attribute their low crime rate to gun control you'll have to bring something halfway convincing to the table.
I've learned not to trust those sorts of statistics. It's like the "<ethical group A> commits way less crime than <ethical group b>" argument you see on reddit sometimes by the ACKSHUALLY crowd. The problem with those statistics is they only count the people who were CAUGHT (and convicted and punished) breaking said laws.
People break laws and get away with it all the time - probably the majority of the time. My friend, when was the last time you saw a $100,000 Mercedes on the side of the road with 3 cop cars behind it, the driver sitting on the curb, and a K-9 sniffing the inside of the car? Yet I can count plenty of times I've seen such a car run red lights, roll stop signs, and flagrantly disobey posted speed limits. (Especially when a BMW badge is involved lol)
Japanese criminal procedure is … interesting from what I can tell. There is a very high conviction rate, suspiciously so.
Singapore is questionably democratic, utilises corporal punishment and is described by some as a police state. I think it’s fair to say that while a strong sense of community ethics may be present in Singapore, it’s certainly not the only thing holding people in line.
Seoul I know little about.
Truly confused why `religious` norms come into play here.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but that is hard because religion is such a big part of our history. There aren't many large scale things from the past you can describe without talking about the influence of religion, because well, religion was there and it was pretty prominent.
However, that doesn't say much about whether religion was necessary for morality to substantiate. In fact, so many immoral things have been carried out in the name of religion, that you might as well wonder if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion.
Kind of an unanswerable question, but I think my tentative answer is "not really." Mostly because the moral viewpoints that underly atheistic criticisms of (usually Christian) religion tend to themselves be derived from earlier Christian ideas. I don't think it's likely that we'd have a universalist sense of democracy/human life without the underlying Christian soul concept. The Romans, for example, had no qualms about human life being divided into "valuable" and "not valuable" groups.
You could use the criticisms of someone like Nietzsche against Christianity and say we'd be more advanced without it, but I don't think this is probably the type of "advanced" that most people today would have it mind.
That's an extreme claim that requires extreme evidence. You don't just get to pretend your preferred interpretation of a history that humans don't even have (prewriting society) is correct just because you want it to be.
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.
How many European states where founded as theocratic monarchys? The United States is found on the idea that "All men are created equal, and endowed by their creator (God) with certain unalienable rights"
Yes people have done horrible things in the name of religion. But you still can't talk about morality without talking about religion. (And I'm an atheist)
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.
Not sure about Western world as a whole here. Some countries do not have such hard separation between church and state, but governing parties with clear religious affiliation, constitutions referencing God, religious holidays with bans on certain activities, etc.
Religious norms guide behavior. They are a course in ethics for those without undergraduate education.
Nietzsche gave us a religion-free solution in the concept of Ubermensch 150 years ago, it's still too controversial today.
The Übermensch is fortunately/unfortunately not a mass-market kind of product, but one designed for isolated individuals.
Yes, another example is Humanism.
Because the bible probably says "Thou shall not use a Flipper Zero to break into thy neighbor's chambers."
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.
I wouldn't be so sure...
Exactly, a classical case of Chesterton's fence.
Some of them are (and you're making a very good point here!), but some of them may be just pragmatic.
Again, very true.
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) Although IANTP ("I am not the pope";-)), of course, and neither am I a theologian, so take this with a grain of salt.
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.
You could make a similar argument about capitalism. We _should_ have grown past it by now, but we haven't, and every time we try to invent a replacement system we end up making things worse.
You can see the ethical decay unfolding in real-time as societies turn replaced the old, rigorously tested system of religion with shiny new secular ethics.
The Nordic countries are all among the least religious countries in the world, yet they seem to have some of the most ethical societies on the planet if you consider human rights, democracy and low violence to be the result of an ethical society.
The most religious countries in the world are all at the very bottom of rankings taking into consideration any of those factors.
I think your example is not a good one. Nordic countries have the concept of Jante law. If you can verbalize such a concept and also recognize that it exists in your society, by definition it makes your society more intolerant than a culture that has no such concept (such as the USA).
In fact, I would argue the open-ness and tolerance of nordic culture is specifically exploitative of the cultural expectation that you do not raise concern or object and are expected to be in agreeance with everyone else that "this here is a tolerant society". It's a valid theory that the fastest culture to adopt any philosophy will be the one that has the population with the greatest number of people who don't disagree.
I think a case could be made (although I'm struggling to do so myself) that the growth of mercantilism, and then capitalism, could be understood as direct challenges to Abrahamic-religion-based ethics, especially as capitalism directly discourages altruism.
I think this is a thesis I need to do some work on to either reject it or let it mature, but I think this is an interesting starting place. It is worth noting that the early Christians frequently practiced collectivism and rejected the concept of individual property rights, although that was ~2000 years ago, the faith has evolved sine then.
All of this to say, I do not believe its that secular ethics per se are the cause of the decay, but rather that the religions of the world have not made a compelling enough case to sway people away from rejecting altruism in the name of personal enrichment. The situation is made considerably worse by the fact that a fair number of the global religions see the spoils of personal enrichment as evidence of righteousness, and altruism as at least adjacent to sin.
it's in some ways fitting that the same people who threw away roughly two thousand of years of the most successful philosophy have doomed themselves to a demographic death spiral lol
I don't think this is true. Falling birth rate is positively correlated with key markers of quality of life (especially infant survival rate, education, overall lifespan, and productivity) irrespective of dominant religion or religiosity in general.
edit: changed "infant mortality" to "infant survival" so as to not contradict "positively correlated"
You're telling on yourself a bit here. Why should I think highly of the religious when they are as petty as you?
Not everyone is as smart as someone that thinks of the golden rule "on their own", therefor religious ethics has its place.
Also, we grew up in a society that already had this in place, essentially you could have grown up on this planet instead: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_Lines_(episode), and you would probably grab a gun, shoot someone because they had something you wanted rather than thinking of the golden rule at all.
There are a lot of cultures around the world that hate adultery, not just Christians. Some of them had a double standard there (men could have sex with other anyone but women could only have sex with their husband), but many historical cultures had concepts of adultery.
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?
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?”
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you asking yourself the correct questions?
For example, what unethical behaviors do you take part in that are not illegal? And if you do, why have not stopped doing them even without a law?
I heavily doubt you can “fix the culture” in a short period of time, especially when it’s causing problems right here and right now. And frankly speaking, I don’t think society finds it acceptable, it’s just not that easy to prevent it unless you start putting draconian measures and hardcore surveillance with enforcement. and even that isn’t really that easy especially in huge countries like US and Canada.
I don't think that society finds this acceptable so much as predictable. There's a big difference, especially when you're eeking out the last fractional bits towards a higher quality of life.
Even if 99 out of 100 people will behave ethically around a car with the keys literally sitting on the windshield (and I suspect the ratio is actually much higher), if 1 out of 100 causes you to have a loss of tens of thousands of dollars, you're going to want better protections than "that was unacceptable".
Our political system is currently demonstrating this - in theory, public servants should be altruistically motivated, making informed and wise decisions about how to govern for the good of the people, and elections should select for these individuals. Unfortunately, this system is highly vulnerable to narcissistic, wealthy, greedy, power-hungry famous sociopaths willing to lie and compromise their ethics. We should not be surprised or disappointed when out of a nation of 300 million people, a few of those people emerge to take those positions.
The sensible response is not to throw up our hands and moralize about corruption in politics, it's to design the system so that this perfectly predictable outcome doesn't keep happening.
Also, while the courts are not entirely fair and free of bias, trying to enforce cultural norms about not stealing by public shaming is not likely to be any more fair. I'd rather take my chances with a lawyer, prosecutor, and jury than to have the rumor mill spread falsehoods about an immoral act I may or may not have committed.
there is a lot of ambiguity about it in places like san francisco. better to lock up the deoderant than lock up a human being, the logic goes
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?
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."
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).
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.
Why do you believe this?
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.
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.
Why put all Western countries into the same bucket? Car theft is much more prevalent in the US than Germany, for example.
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.
There is little or no consequence in America to breaking the law - especially for those who have nothing to lose
Which country is more diverse culturally? the answer to that feeds directly into op's argument.
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?).
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 or the overarching 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%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.
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.
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.
The idea that guilt has been replaced by a strong authority sounds like a more precise framing of what I'm talking about, definitely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) ...
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.
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.
Ah yes, I completely forgot about blockchain. Trustless is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The problem with this is all it takes is one bad actor to cause a lot of chaos and destruction. The laws are needed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't assume anything. We observe what is happening. People do steal cares. If you want to change that you have to change something.
Is it a new method? We use locks and gates and etc since before history began. How is this suddenly a "new method"?
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.
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.
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.
Uhh noo, this philosophy already there as old as Chinese Legalism ca 400 BC
OP is talking about western culture - there is no Chinese Legalism tradition in Western Culture so yours is a red herring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
…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.
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.
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?
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/
[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy
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.
Theology warning:
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!"
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
That's literally what the law itself is, since the dawn of time.
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)
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.
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
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-instrumental/
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.
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
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.
McGilchrist on left vs right brain will interest you.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
English law often refers to "the man on the Clapham omnibus". Quote from Wikipedia:
He would fit your description of "normative ethics". I think the trend you describe mostly (?) applies to the US.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.