Something a little different from my regular posts.

Long ago, Plato asked if we would do better with good rules or good rulers. If we could attain utopia, wherein people are all knowledgable, enlightened, caring, etc., we might be able to make do with having good rulers. We would not need set rules since all would understand justice and fairness, though good rulers might be needed to settle honest disputes and, perhaps, keep everyone on the path of justice. But utopia is utopia, not possible. So we must make due with something significantly less. We must make due with well-formulated rules. But rules, by definition, must apply to general cases. That means that rules must be blunt.

When crafting rules, one can try to design the best rules or one can try to design rules that are good enough and will be accepted. Given the way people are–in particular, the way legislators are–if one tries to craft the best rules, the rules one crafts will often (perhaps always) be rejected. So one should try to craft rules that are good enough and will be accepted.

Given that we can’t trust that we have good rulers–or good administrators–we must make sure the rules that are good enough and accepted are also such that they can be followed. Indeed, we must allow that the agent of the state that is accountable for upholding a particular rule be able to “cover their ass,” by being able to truthfully say they acted in accord with the rule. A state worker (police officer, DFCS social worker, FDA officer, etc) has to be able to say “I followed the law/policy; it requires X in situations of type Y and this is a situation of type Y, so I did X.” If they can’t say that and it be true, then it can’t be known if they acted as agents of the state are supposed to act. If they can only say “look, the state wants to do what is best, so I did X because it was best,” (a) they are open to being fired because their supervisor thinks X was not best and (b) the citizen ruled against can truthfully say they believe X is not best and what they were doing was. If (b) happens, there is a “state agent said/citizen said” dynamic with no authority to appeal to (yes, the state can call authoritative sources to support its position–assuming the rest of the state body sides with the state agent who did X–but so can the citizen). The point is that absent a stated policy requiring certain acts in specified circumstances, there is no clear way to end the debate. (Which does not mean there is no truth of the matter about what was/is/would be best.)

So, we must have rules that are good enough, can be accepted by legislators, can be followed by those who must uphold them, and such that they can be demonstrated to be upheld. If it were possible to come up with such rules and such rules be such that they would only ever lead to good and never to bad, we would be set. Justice would (or at least could) always be done. But rules are blunt. That bluntness means that the rules will sometimes lead to bad. That means agents of the state will do some bad. (This is consistent, of course, with the claim that they will also do some good.) On my view, this also means that the rules we have should be as limited in scope as possible. That is how we limit the bad that state agents can do in the name of the state.

A final note: It may be that this reasoning, if valid, also applies to non-state organizations. I think there are 2 important differences though. First, non-state organizations tend not to insist they have a legitimate right to exercise power over individuals who do not consent to such. Second, and related, non-state organizations tend to have more flexibility. (The second is related to the first as the lack of need to claim legitimacy means the non-state organization has less need to insist on consistency in the way it applies its own rules.)