feotakahari

When Arknights talks about fantasy America, there are things it’s definitely saying about real America. So I have to read something into when it talks about fantasy China.

In her Operator Record, Leizi considers the case of a fellow member of the Censorate who had a corrupt official arrested, but used forged evidence to create a pretense for the investigation. Leizi argues that the Censorate oversees others without being overseen itself, so Censors have no choice but to rigidly oversee each other. If Censors allow each other to break the law, it becomes too easy to justify each other’s increasingly murky conduct for increasingly vague notions of the greater good. Therefore, the offending Censor will be tortured and imprisoned despite his many years of exemplary service.

I don’t know what the Censorate corresponds to in real life. But I suspect Chinese players have a much better idea of what the game is saying.

A proposal: the value of law exists in negative space. Rather than it being a good or bad thing that there is a law, it is a good or bad thing that there is no law about something.

Let’s start with a society that has no law at all. If you hurt someone’s child, they can beat you up. If someone doesn’t like that you’re gay, they can beat you up. In effect, the unwritten “law” is not to do anything that annoys people who are capable of beating you up.

Now let’s suppose the society bands together and creates law. If you beat someone up, the community’s chosen enforcers will beat you up in turn. Assuming the enforcers don’t become corrupt (admittedly a big assumption), this is the “freest” possible society. No one is getting beaten up for their actions.

But someone steals your television, and you want to beat them up for that. So you pass laws against thievery and a few other things. Now, this is already butting up against other liberties, depending on what other issues your society has! If you’re gonna beat up thieves, you’d better make sure everyone has enough food to eat without having to steal it! But there’s a large amount of negative space, in that no one’s going to beat you up for being gay. I consider this the ideal setup.

Now you pass more and more laws against things you don’t like. It’s illegal to smoke pot. It’s illegal to cut hair without a license. The negative space shrinks, but it still exists. It’s at least theoretically possible not to get beaten up.

The worst case scenario is when enforcers realize they can beat you up, then put pot in your car and say you were beaten for smoking pot. The negative space is now gone, just as if you had no law at all. You can be beaten whenever the enforcers want to beat you.

The million-dollar question, of course, is how to keep the enforcers from being corrupt. I don’t have an answer, but it’s probably easier if you have fewer laws they can possibly enforce to justify beating you up.

(Another possible objection is that punishing you won’t actually stop you from breaking the law again. I can’t speak for every circumstance, but the prospect of getting thrown back in prison seems to be the main thing stopping my nephew from outright murdering my niece, instead of just breaking into her house and destroying all her stuff with his machete. I don’t know where he even bought that giant machete.)

I’m not going to name the source for this post, because s/he’s taken more than enough mockery already. I’m just gonna quote it so I can dissect it.

“This might be an unpopular opinion, and obviously everyone should be arrested and prosecuted equally, and I get that is the point here, but you could also… not do illegal drugs? Wait for it to be legal or if its really that important to you that you would risk ending up in this situation, move somewhere where it already is.”

I see this argument in so many different forms, from “if you don’t want to risk unplanned pregnancy, stop having unprotected sex” to “if you don’t want to risk arrest under sodomy laws, stop having sex with other men.” It’s always treated as an end point, something you can’t respond to that will automatically win the argument. It never actually works that way, though, because people don’t stop.

Take teen pregnancy as an example. Educators across America have been pushing abstinence as the best way to not get yourself pregnant. Considering the failure rate for most forms of birth control, this is a pretty good idea. (The pill doesn’t count for much when you keep forgetting to take it.) But between 1995 and 2010, the nationwide percentage of teenage girls who stated they were virgins only went from 49% to 57%. I’ll avoid any speculation on reasons, but the fact remains that abstinence can’t be the only thing we push.

I see this argument as the purest expression of why deontology doesn’t work. Once you’ve created a rule for what people should do, it’s easy to divorce yourself from what people actually do. Reality should never be irrelevant to the decisions you make and the aspersions you cast.