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Comment by lurk2 | Hacker News Reader

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right.

This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.

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> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure...

Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them.

The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details.

Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.

The law in North America and Europe (possibly elsewhere too, I don't know) is full of accommodations for special interests at the cost of everyone else, due to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs causing the former to lobby aggressively while the latter doesn't.

To make a clear example: I don't think that it's fair that I'm not allowed to plumb my own (commercial¹) building just because I didn't learn how via a difficult to get, underpaid, full time, 4 year apprentiship in whatever state I'm living in at the moment, with usually ~0 practical escape hatch to demonstrate competence in any significantly different way, or to just have the result inspected.

1: some places, not all, have exemptions for owner occupied single family homes

> And we live in a society.

Correct.

> So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible

Doesn't follow.

> and that we have achieved them.

Doesn't follow.

> The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness.

That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and ought to be.

> People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality.

Define "neutrality."

> Neutral procedures are a solved problem

If this were true we wouldn't be having this discussion.

> the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.

"Draw the rest of the owl."

> That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and ought to be.

If you’re an immigrant from my home country of Bangladesh, you’ll be treated more fairly in any Anglo country than in any other country, including Bangladesh.

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