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.
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.
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).
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.
I think you may be thinking of the Candaian conception of a cultural mosaic.
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.
Honestly, I see little evidence it is doing any worse at assimilation than in, say, the early 1900s.
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.
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.
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?
Perhaps, but if so, I think its impact is, at the very least, net negative, not net positive.
Many nations have continued to commit crimes against humanity since the UN was founded, without any shaming at all. Some of them have had their leaders praised and given awards and invited to be keynote speakers at conferences at the same time that their crimes against humanity were in full swing (for example, Robert Mugabe). And two of the most egregious such nations, Russia and China, have permanent seats on the UN Security Council.
It is true that the UN has shamed some nations for crimes against humanity (the Milosevic regime in Serbia, for example). But that just makes the lack of shaming in so many other cases worse, especially when the cases that are ignored are at least as egregious as the cases that are shamed.
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.
And neither I, nor you can make such a contrast fairly. It immediately goes hard into speculative-fiction territory, and such an exercise would educate us about our own biases, more than we'd learn about the UN.
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.
Point being that the norm in question would be "not having the war".
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.
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?
Well, they both are rooted in the idea that individuals are important, which is a relatively new idea, all things considered.
> How about I use the expression "greed driven societies" instead?
You can do, except I think it's not helpful, as you're joining the ranks of the people who misuse the word "society" to mean "how I happen to think about the stuff I don't like in the world".
Helpful to who?
I see it differently. I think it helps us all to aspire to clear values. Karl Popper thought "there is no society". Lady Thatcher thought we merely misused the word society, not as you say - to universalise social facts - but to forget our "duty" (Thatcher's words) to ourselves and our neighbours (my emph). Thatcher sincerely saw business as a social good, as do I. Using the word society in that way is avoidant. You seem to think that's what I am doing?
Social facts exist, at least in Durkheim's view as behaviours and attitudes. They definitely include greed and selfishness as psychologically measurable traits. You may not think much of sociology and psychology, but to a lot of people they are solid sciences.
Moral judgements are also social facts. And for us Christians (as a moral framework), greed is more than a neutral, observable fact. It is an ugly weakness.
The hoarding of power and wealth by a tiny minority to assuage their insecurity , while returning nowt but "disruption" to the world is objectionable. Being parasitic upon the rest of the population is a harm.
So I've no problem declaring, greed, vanity, megalomania as "stuff I don't like in the world". Others may or may not agree with me. As an individual, you may disagree. But as an individualist you must concede my equal right to call out greed and selfishness as harmful to the rest of us - even without a "Logical basis". Further, you must do so without criticism.... unless you deny the existence of social facts, or yourself find greed attractive and virtuous?
But which "us"? That's my point. You aren't talking to all of society (assuming "us" was all of society), so you using it like that doesn't even theoretically do this.
> Social facts exist, at least in Durkheim's view as behaviours and attitudes.
This isn't the same as "society". My point is that the definition of "society" changes dramatically based on where you live and what you consume. It's like a giant straw man.
> So I've no problem declaring, greed, vanity, megalomania as "stuff I don't like in the world". Others may or may not agree with me. As an individual, you may disagree. But as an individualist you must concede my equal right to call out greed and selfishness as harmful to the rest of us - even without a "Logical basis". Further, you must do so without criticism.... unless you deny the existence of social facts, or yourself find greed attractive and virtuous?
It's hard to make sense through the purple prose, but maybe I can pick something out. You're not calling out greed; you're calling an entire society greedy. That's the problem. All the rest of what you said here doesn't seem relevant.
I agree you said that. I disagree that it's true. If I go to my kid's football kickabout, run mostly by volunteer parents, or I attend a local street party, or go for a pub quiz night, or any of many societal endeavours, I don't see greed.
As of 2019, the US had 50 million immigrants[0] living there, either 1st or 2nd generation. Far more than any other country. Are those immigrants really all just idiots for moving there?
If you think the US is a wasteland, it sounds like you're American.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/...