Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 10:49:48 PM
In my post "
Utopianism and Disaster" I wrote that one of the problems with laws that try to create "social justice" or make things "fair" is that the concepts themselves are not well defined. I have not yet received any comments on the post (and usually don't on longer articles), but I was certain that if anyone commented, one of the complaints raised would have been that, while in some cases it is hard to tell what is "fair", in most cases "justice" and "fairness" are obvious and self-evident.
Which made me think of two technical issues I have encountered.
The first is object oriented programming. I started programming a long time ago, and learned some BASIC, but then went right to assembly language. Later I learned Forth and C and Perl and others, but I only picked up object oriented languages such as C++ and Java very late.However, even before I touched them, I heard many people telling me that OOP (Object Oriented Programming) was so much easier, as it was "more intuitive" and matched the way people thought. It sounded interesting.
Until I touched it. And immediately I decided it didn't match any of my thoughts. In my mind, data is something you carry from place to place, and feed into programs. The way you put food in an oven, or mail in a mailbox. In OOP, the object carries its own functions, like an MRE that heats itself, or a self-inflating raft. Yes, I can see how it may work for some models, but by and large I found it more confusing.
The same thing happened when I encountered modern Apple computers. I recalled the first generation Macs, with the black and white monitors from the 1980's, and the Apple II and IIe's from even earlier, but I had not touched any Apple software or hardware between the late 1980's and 2000. I heard the Apple interface was wonderful, intuitive, easy to use, all the same things I heard about OOP. And with the same disappointing results.
Despite the claims, I found myself going on line over and over to find out how to perform simple tasks, such as renaming icons. Things that I did without thought on Windows, or even on Unix (I have been a FreeBSD fan and intermittent volunteer for years), were a tremendous chore on the Apple. Even things I thought I could figure out often ended up doing something other than what I expected. It was just not intuitive, at least not for me.
And that is the problem with utopian schemes to bring "social justice". Those promoting these ideas are like Apple users or OOP partisans, they associate with one another, have similar mindsets, and have used the terminology so long they all share an unspoken understanding. For them, the definitions are clear and self-evident. But that is not the case for the rest of mankind. "Social justice" is meaningful only in terms of one's preconceptions and ideology. Which is why so often when a particular group enacts a nebulous law, with great discretion for enforcement, they find themselves quite disappointed in the outcome. They often think they were betrayed by insincere politicians, but in truth, those enforcing the law were just as ardent as those who advocated for it, they just had a different understanding of what is just.
And that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with both laws based on nebulous concepts such as justice or fairness, and with "pragmatic" solutions which appeal to the nebulous concept of "doing what works". Both are defined only in terms of the unspoken assumptions of those passing the laws or those enforcing them. And often the two do not match, leading to unpredictable outcomes.
POSTSCRIPT
The other problem with nebulous terminology, besides the tendency for practice to deviate quite a bit from conception, is that as those enforcing the laws change, the enforcement changes as well. I mentioned this previously in terms of inconsistent and predictable awards from juries in "social insurance" tort cases. However the harm is not limited to civil suits, unpredictability is harmful in all areas of government. To read a bit more on the topic, check out "
Predictability", "
"Empathy" Threatens not "Justice" but Predictability" and "
Sotomayor and Empathy", and the articles cited in those posts.