On the necessity and meaning of a "professional judicia

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michelmanen
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Multi-level citizenship

Post by michelmanen »

While RA representatives should have the final say in approving public policy (by voting aye or nay) the "design" of public policy should be basaed on an on-going deliberative processs including all CDS citizens. Their RL or 2L profession should be of no relevance to their ability to contribute on an ongoing basis to the process of policy formation and policy discussion.

As to the substance of the proposal above (and please, let's get over this Ash-bashing syndrome; it really adds nothing to the discussions!), CARE's notion of Multi-level citizenship, with both territorial (place-based) and non-territorial (group-based) elements, has been designed exactly with similar purposes in mind: how to we extend the unique assets of the CDS (self-governance, justice sysem) beyond our own borders. At this stage, CDS citizenship might begin to take some of the features of Roman citizenship in that the latter:
"
1. was extended to specific individuals and groups outside Italy, who then acquired the rights and privileges associated therewith, in particular better access to a justice system more favorable to citizens than non-citizens;

2. a higher standing in their local community;

3. no voting rights in the Roman system of governance outside the walls of Rome itself.

As these communities grew all over the Empire, forms of local self-government of developed for these citizens who lived most (if not all) their lives outside Rome, until eventually citizenship was extended to all residents of the Empire.

While the comparison clearly does not hold in many respects (the Roman Empire was no democracy!), some lessons can be drawn:

1. individuals wishing to prevail themselves of our system of justice would become non-resident CDS citizens;

2. they would acquire the protection of the "universal" element of our multi-level citizenship: equal protection under the law;

3. as citizens, they would then possess locus standi to bring proceedings under our legal system;

4. they would then prevail themselves of our judicial system and advocates (under either arbitration or litigation procedures);

5. the notion that CDS citizens can be non-resident, and that such citizenship confers access to a superior system of justice would work from the bottom-up to enhance the image of the CDS asa whole, our our judiciary in particular, and of CDS citizenship benefits specifically;

6. as more individuals decide to join in a specific sim or a specific group, local forms of self-governance will begin to develop, wtih our assistance;

7. in time, our multi-level citizenship would be mirrored by a system of multi-level governance, where local issues would be deal with locally and more universal (2L) issues at the more general level, with citizen groups all over 2L being able to elect representatives to the legislative body in question;

8. if the LGSG takes off, out bottom-up approach could be complemented by a top-down approach in which more powers would be delegated by LL to the sims and where some sim owners would decide to join full-scale the CDS because of our systems of self-governance and justice, as well as because of the beniefits conferred by, and inherent in, our notion of multi-level citizenship.

For this to happen, we would need to actually have:

1. a fair, stable and professional justice system; and
2. a multi-level CDS citizenship

which is exactly what CARE has been advocating in its policy platform.

The difference between CARE's approach and the above porposal resides in the coherence and long-term vision of our approach, which does not view "justice" as simply a "service" we can provide in a quasi-anarchic market of goods and services, but as a means to enhance CDS standing and prestige in 2L and extend the boundaries of self-governance, democracy, individual rights and citizenship throughout 2L, combining both a bottom-up and a top-down approach. The extension of our public sphere, adapted to the needs and requirements of non-CDS resident citizens, would go a long way in adding "civil society" and "self-governance" elements to the globalised" 2L market forces, and assist in our own future negotiations with LL towards a gradual devolution of powers at sim (or sim group) level.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Claude Desmoulins":37bqmzpj]Ash points out, and I very much believe him, that there was an intention to create a legal education system so that eventually the CDS could grow its own legal community. I wonder of this didn't break down because the decision was made. in our eagerness to have operating courts to staff the judiciary first and develop the legal ed system later. This almost inevitably created a circumstance where the standard for participation was such that it could only be met initially by those with RL legal education and training. Even had the legal ed system in CDS come to pass, you would have still been left with an almost caste system dividing those with RL training from those who were legally trained only in the CDS.[/quote:37bqmzpj]

The whole point of having having a first-life legal professional design the system in the first place was to bring first life legal expertise to the system. The idea always was that the initial group of people would then go on to train further people. Provided that the people trained had received a sufficiently high standard of education, I don't see any reason why there should be a "caste system" between people trained in the CDS and people trained in other legal systems. Indeed, people trained only in the CDS may have had an advantage, as they would not be inclined to make assumptions based on any given first-life system that may have proven false for the CDS. It was important to have the system running first, since people would need something specific and operational to be educated [i:37bqmzpj]about[/i:37bqmzpj].

Now, of course, there is no prospect of any sort of coherent system of legal education here, or any sort of coherent legal system about which to educate people, nor any prospect of anybody with any adequate level of expertise being stupid enough to invest any non-trivial amount of time in providing such education.

[quote:37bqmzpj]The notion of "RL expertise not required" has always been very resonant to me. Based on my RL credentials I am unlikely to become a legislator, but here they didn't matter, and my ideas were allowed to stand or fall on their own merit. That capability for reinvention is a powerful part of our shared virtual experience and one I am loathe to lose.[/quote:37bqmzpj]

The divide appears to be between those who believe that the function of a legal system in a virtual world is to enable people who are not lawyers in the first life to take part in running a legal system, and those who believe that the function of a legal system in a virtual world is exactly the same as the function of such a system in the first life: fairly, efficiently and predictably to resolve disputes. I firmly believe the latter, and that the design of a virtual world legal system should be whatever design does, in fact, entail the most fair, efficient and predictable resolution of disputes, come what may as far as the participation of those who want to be lawyers for the fun of it are concerned.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Jon Seattle":2dzll5ia]This may get tomatoes thrown at me, but its an interesting speculative idea. I may have not thought through all the consequences, but for what it is worth here it is.

Second life has many, and will continue to have many small virtual communities with different organizational structures. The variety and onging evolution of those communities is something that makes SL interesting. Most, like us, have just a handful of citizen-citizen disputes each year that cannot be solved through mediation. (We have several commercial disputes at the moment , but all of these involve non-citizens and heck if I know what we can do about those.)

Even if we did have full blown court procedures it is not clear to me that we could ever really support five or ten or twenty lawyers. And as a variation on the old saying goes, idle hands may start meddling in public policy. I strongly believe that designing public policy should be the job of elected representatives, with the SC just making sure these are consistent with the constitution and UHDR.

Why not start an organization that provides highly professional judicial services to SL communities on contract?

1. This might help address the dis-economies of scale. You could concentrate more cases in a single legal system and have more work for participating professionals.

2. Subscribing communities could gain the advantage of being part of a single legal system with other communities. This would open the door for settling disputes across community boundaries.

3. Communities could decide if the principles of the legal system fit their values and needs. As a provider you could even offer a range of different models of justice and judicial philosophies as products. (This would make it harder to solve cross-community disputes, but you could search for good models for resolving those.)

4. You could offer a service that identified and tracked griefers and other violators who moved from community to community. In other words a "police" option.

5. My guess is that RL organizations who establish a presence in SL with significant resident populations might be very interested in such services. Especially if they were able to link in an effective way with their RL legal departments if that became necessary.

So why not go commercial (or non-profit) with this?[/quote:2dzll5ia]

A system exactly as you propose it would not work, but something very similar might. The reasons that the system exactly as you propose it would not work are that a judicial system can only work as part of a nation or state of some sort, with a fully developed executive (for effecting the enforcement of court orders, without which the judicial system is pointless), and legislature (to create the laws for the judiciary to interpret and apply in the first place; laws can be built up through the common law, but it is a dangerous system indeed in which the final power to make the law rests with the same people who interpret it: the separation of the powers is of great importance, so a legislature is needed even in a common law system). If a series of virtual nations were to use the judicial system, it would be of very little worth if they were free to disregard with unchecked impunity any decision of the system that was unfavourable to their government or with which officials of the government disagreed: a judicial system can only work where its orders are, without exception, obeyed by all those in public office. Also, a specific, individual judicial system can only work if it is coherent, which makes it impossible for a single judicial system simultaneously to have multiple models of administration, much less multiple, incompatible concepts of justice and law.

What would work (if LL implemented the tools for true enforceability) is a federation, or series of federations (each of which might be run by people who subscribed to different judicial and political philosophies), which local communities could join, and to which they could delegate their judicial and some of their executive and legislative requirements. The point about economies of scale is well-made, although it should be noted in the context of the planned development of a judicial system in the CDS that the plan was always for the CDS to be the top-level of government, the equivalent of a federal level, and for the system of franchulates to comprise the lower levels of local administration. It is quite evident now that the CDS is very far from being up to any such task.

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Post by Dianne »

[quote="Dianne":183zkl63]...We are in fact [i:183zkl63]simulated[/i:183zkl63] characters in a simulated environment, not just real people walking around in a simulated environment. Some of us are not even human. ...[/quote:183zkl63]
[quote="Ashcroft":183zkl63]An avatar is not a substitute [i:183zkl63]person[/i:183zkl63]: it is merely a substitute [i:183zkl63]body[/i:183zkl63]. The [i:183zkl63]mind[/i:183zkl63] is not virtual: it is real. The bodily aspects are virtualised, but the mental aspects are not. It is the mental aspects that are the important ones, and that are the relevant ones as far as law and justice are concerned. We are all human, even if we choose to be represented in a virtual world by a household appliance avatar: an avatar, after all, is a representation of a real person, not a whole person unto itself. [/quote:183zkl63]Since this statement is very much a reiteration of your original point of view, I won't belabor the point other than to say that I completely disagree and that I really think you have missed the point of SL in my view.

A lot of SL's avatars (me included) are basically the same person as our RL selves, only with a different form or appearance just as you suggest, but I can say from experience that many are not. There are large numbers of avatars that are "characters," role-players, split personalities etc. and I have had the pleasure of having several SL friends that have multiple avatars, each as different from each other in personality as any two RL human individuals. Some carry on that way for years.
[quote="Dianne":183zkl63]My point here was that it is "fair" and "just" to the people in those cultures at that time. [/quote:183zkl63]
[quote="Ashcroft":183zkl63]There is a crucial logical flaw there: a person or set of people believing something to be just is not the same as something actually being just. A person or set of people can be wrong about whether something is just or not. Whether something is just cannot depend merely on whether people think that it is just, or else one descends into incoherent circularity: what are people thinking that it means for something to be just? If they are merely thinking that other people are thinking that something is just, then those other people would have to be thinking that being just meant that other people were thinking it was just, and so on ad infinitum. If other people thinking are something just in a way other than the the mere fact of believing that others so think, then it is possible that the person might be either right or wrong in thinking that the thing that he or she thinks has that property which he or she calls justice. [/quote:183zkl63]No offense but this makes no sense at all. Justice is not some absolute thing that we can hold a statement or event up to and measure it to see if it is "just," in any objective concrete fashion, the whole idea is preposterous. "Justice" is not even describable as a teleological goal or a platonic ideal, it's hardly describable at all. Justice is indeed subjective and relative both to the situation and the perception of the situation, as I suggested in my initial response. It is a concept necessarily embedded in a particular culture and not always applicable to other cultures.

By any decent definition that can be quoted (I won't bother to link to any of the online dictionaries, it's trivial to look it up), "justice" is what if [i:183zkl63]fair[/i:183zkl63] and what is [i:183zkl63]moral[/i:183zkl63]. The easiest common definition is that justice is [i:183zkl63]"what is right."[/i:183zkl63] All of these words refer to subjective, personal evaluations that are definitely not concrete, not absolute and undeniably culturally specific.

[quote="Dianne":183zkl63] If I was a member of a tribal group that had this tradition I would probably think this was the most sensible way to decide who was guilty. To suppose otherwise is to suppose that the culture and the people in question set up an unjust, foolish system on purpose. [/quote:183zkl63]
[quote="Ashcroft":183zkl63]That is not the point: the point is that they genuinely, albeit [b:183zkl63]mistakenly[/b:183zkl63], believe it to be just. [i:183zkl63]In [b:183zkl63]fact[/b:183zkl63], it is unjust.[/i:183zkl63] It is always better to have a system that is [b:183zkl63]genuinely just[/b:183zkl63]. Having a system that one [b:183zkl63]falsely[/b:183zkl63] believes is just, whereas in [b:183zkl63]fact[/b:183zkl63] it is unjust, is no better than having a system that people know is unjust (and potentially worse, since the [b:183zkl63]defect[/b:183zkl63] is less likely to be cured). [/quote:183zkl63]
Again, this is nonsense. I understand your literalist position on this given your RL occupation and life's work (that hopefully is not an insult, I intend merely to describe your "thinking style" as it were), but you seem to believe in a definition of justice not found in any dictionary available to me. You seem to be arguing simply that anything that you don't determine to be just by the rules and procedures that you believe in, is unjust. You are engaging in exactly the same kind of cultural relativeness that I am trying to describe, yet somehow not seeing it. How is this any different than simply saying "my culture right, your culture wrong."??

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Post by Diderot Mirabeau »

- An SL user's pockets cannot covertly be picked in order to steal money from him
- An SL user cannot be tied down/restrained/imprisoned without his consent
- An SL user cannot be subjected to physically torturous actions in the context of SL
- There is similarly no in-world representation of human phenomenae such as hunger, cold, warmth, breathing, sleepiness, illness, the need to defecate or any other sensations or human processes
- An SL user can fly and teleport
- An SL user can escape persecution, prosecution and other targeted initiatives directed at his avatar by creating a new alt
- An SL user can block off verbal parts of harassment by selective muting of the offender(s) in question
- An SL user can carry around several thousands of items in his pockets and rezz them at will
- An SL user is at any time in possession of the material necessary to build a cathedral
- Even if in possession of the necessary building materials and skills an SL user cannot build a cathedral on a piece of land if the permissions are not set for him to do so - or if the land does not have enough prims
- In general land permission regulate directly what an SL user can physically do on that piece of land - without the need for human intervention
- It is possible to block 100% effectively physical access to one's land by other SL users
- Every SL user is at all times in possession of equipment to allow him to pinpoint his location in the world immediately with 100% accuracy.
- Any avatar can at all times be instantly identified.
- Human attributes such as strength, endurance, tone of voice, bodily cycles and processes of aging/maturity are not represented in SL
- Vision in SL is dependent on your client's hardware capacities rather than on your own organic faculties
- Only Linden Lab can effectively and permanently 'kill' an avatar and even this power can in principle be circumvented by creating a new alt
- Most plants and trees do not grow
- Most non-avatar animals have practically no intelligence and no capacity for emotion or sensory input
- An avatar does not float in water
- An SL user is not endowed / emburdened with certain inescapable physical characteristics at birth that links his fate whether he likes it or not to a certain sub-group of people (think skin colour, gender, religion, height, disabilities or sexual orientation f.x.)
- Nobody can arbitrarily subject an SL user to the threat of damage by a weapon. The only risk an SL user exposes himself to is in principle voluntary and can be escaped from anytime at the press of a few buttons.
- An SL user is not dependent on anything for the daily upkeep of his avatar
- SL users are not 'born into' established power relations from which they may be subject to repression, abuse or exploitation. All relations entered into are voluntary.
- A prim cannot be physically or structurally damaged
- Objects can recreate themselves
- The production of multiple copies of a physical object does not require a linearly equivalent expenditure of work on the process
- Your avatar can only move the limbs of his body in a way that has been pre-programmed through built-in or acquired animations. It is therefore in principle possible to pre-determine all possible gestures made by an avatar
- RL Geographical distance has no bearing whatsoever on the range of interaction possible between two SL users - save for that effected through a difference in time zones
- Any law of nature could potentially be changed from one minute to the next through appeal to Linden Lab without it necessarily having any impact on any other aspects of the world or on life in it

Just a subset conceived of in maybe twenty minutes time. I am sure that contributions from more posters, more experience and more time to think will yield even more good examples on characteristics of this world that necessitate a re-thinking of the application of law to Second Life.

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Post by michelmanen »

Granted. However, this does not affect the underlying legal principles structuring a judicial system, the skill and professionalism requiring its administration, and actually demands greater creativity and innovation in adapting and applying established RL rules, procedures and remedies to the circumstances of SL enumerated above.

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Post by Diderot Mirabeau »

[quote="michelmanen":2gekl7w9]Granted. However, this does not affect the underlying legal principles structuring a judicial system, the skill and professionalism requiring its administration, and actually demands greater creativity and innovation in adapting and applying established RL rules, procedures and remedies to the circumstances of SL enumerated above.[/quote:2gekl7w9]
I think the question of the necessity of adopting the procedural norms for obtaining fairness from one particular temporal and cultural state of RL jurisdiction has already been addressed by [url=http://forums.neufreistadt.info/viewtop ... 2:2gekl7w9]Dianne[/url:2gekl7w9] and [url=http://forums.neufreistadt.info/viewtop ... 7:2gekl7w9]Beathan[/url:2gekl7w9]better than I could hope to do it.

Furthermore, since CARE's view of professionalism seems to fall within that of which I perceive there to be a certain consensus about (i.e. tiers 4 and 5 of my loose taxonomy) there does not seem to be a need to discuss that question in particular.

What may remain to be addressed could be the question of the relative priorisation of elaborate processual guarantees of fairness as interpreted by one temporal and cultural RL jurisdictional context relative to taking comfort in the substantive/value-based guarantees offered by advancing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or possibly a derived, more SL/CDS-specific and elaborated version thereof to be known as the "CDS Act of Citizens' Rights") as the core intercultural source of judicial guarantees of fairness supplemented by a plethora of procedural approaches offered to accommodate different cultural contexts and their according desire for a procedure best matching their idea of fairness.

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Post by Oni Jiutai »

I don't think there can be a conflict between the UDHR and 'a fair procedure' (leaving aside the question of what a fair procedure is for the moment). Even if we could create a 'perfect' definition of Human Rights, which resolved all the internal conflicts it would be useless without a just system of making decisions about those rights.

Which is why, of course, the UDHR includes:

[quote:53wjf53i][b:53wjf53i]Article 8.[/b:53wjf53i]
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

[b:53wjf53i]Article 10.[/b:53wjf53i]
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.[/quote:53wjf53i]

The point is that procedure is vitally important, and getting the right procedure is an important Human Rights issue. That's why both the UK and US governments have been criticised so heavily for reducing the procedural safeguards in terrorist cases.

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Post by Diderot Mirabeau »

Hey Oni thanks for replying! I was actually thinking of you and hoping you'd chime in when writing my previous post.

Let me be the first to admit that the wording may have been a bit .. obfuscated from the somewhat compressed(?) writing style.

I'd therefore like to rephrase my 'point' a bit to see if by doing so we can get closer to a common understanding of what I perceive to be the important issue:

Is there one procedure, which better than any other is fair?

What is the most important:
a) defining one, comprehensive procedure, which can be shown to be fair by way of some RL benchmark, or

b) establishing a range of procedures from which a citizen can choose according to his own preference and prioritisation of for example the relative merits of elaborate processual guarantee vs the possibility to read in less than a page in normal language how a court case is conducted?

Personally, I tend to favour option b. In my view option b makes it easier to devise processes that take into account the voluntary nature of everyone's contributions to SL (which means that it may in some aspects be difficult to live up to all the requirements on an RL judicial procedure that is considered to be fair) while at the same time accommodating for a citizen's own perception of what is the most important aspect of fairness in a procedure all the time keeping the 'safeguard' of having a minimum of fairness defined by an act of 'CDS Citizens Rights', which might include a minimum definition of what guarantees a procedure should offer.

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Post by Oni Jiutai »

[quote:83gw9wps] Justice is not some absolute thing that we can hold a statement or event up to and measure it to see if it is "just," in any objective concrete fashion, the whole idea is preposterous.[/quote:83gw9wps]

I don't think that it is.

I am confident that a method of trial that involves plunging the suspects hands into boiling water, then seeing how long it takes the injury to heal is profoundly unjust. I feel the same about settling things with duels or by random chance. I suspect that most people here would agree. But even in saying that we must be saying that conclusions about what is just or not can be reached on objective basis.

I agree that justice can be described as doing what is fair and what is right, but I think we can reach sensible conclusions on those things. We can decide that murder is wrong. And if someone else says that they believe they have the moral right to massacre people, we can say that they are wrong.

The problems, inevitably, arise in the borderline cases, where reasonable people may disagree about what is wrong and what is right. But the problem is not that there isn't a solution, but that - being imperfect - we can't agree on what it is.

Of course, it is impossible for any human system to achieve perfect justice (and even if it did, a perfect system for SL might well be different to a perfect RL system). But that shouldn't mean that we abandon the quest, anymore than a surgeon would say "My operating theatre can never be entirely sterile, I might as well do surgery in the street".

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Post by michelmanen »

[quote:o07gfi4c]What may remain to be addressed could be the question of the relative priorisation of elaborate processual guarantees of fairness as interpreted by one temporal and cultural RL jurisdictional context relative to taking comfort in the substantive/value-based guarantees offered by advancing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ([b:o07gfi4c]or possibly a derived, more SL/CDS-specific and elaborated version thereof to be known as the "CDS Act of Citizens' Rights"[/b:o07gfi4c]) as the core intercultural source of judicial guarantees of fairness supplemented by a plethora of procedural approaches offered to accommodate different cultural contexts and their according desire for a procedure best matching their idea of fairness.[/quote:o07gfi4c]

I. Since (as we seem to agree) the whole-sale importation of the UDHR into SL is not advisable for the very reasons you enumerated in one of your posts above, and since CARE's core principles would in any case require that the principles and values behind such a fundamental constitutional document be discussed, debated and approved by CDS citizens and institutions, we would indeed support the SL/CDS specific version you refer to - as was indeed proposed, some time ago, by our (ex-) Chief Justice.

II. If we are in agreement that we are devising a legal system for the longer-term (as we should), which implies the possbile inclusion of different cultural contexts into our juridico-political system, then our task at this time becomes three-fold:

1. Devising the SL/CDS specific Declaration at a level of universality, flexibility and SL specificity high enough to allow it to be accepted as legitimate by other cultures and non-CDS citizens who may wish to join us (beyond which each such culture / sim / group that may join may devise their own, contextual body of laws and procedures as applicable to their specific environments - and which do not constitute tasks the CDS can or should concern itself with);

2. Developing our own judicial and procedural rules, applicable to our exisiting and future sims and specific culture, as would be applicable to all CDS citizens resident in our sims; and

3. Deciding upon specific sets of regulations that would be sim-specific and would be left up to the residents of each particular sim -subject, of course, to compliance with the instruments listed in items 1 and 2 above.

Once such a multi-level juridico-political system would be in place, we would be able to both deepen it [in the sense of perfecting our own, (current) CDS-specific legal system and (current and future) individual sims-specific regulatory systems] as well as widen it (that is, both create new sims ourselves and welcome other 2L groups / sims to join us].

To the extent that:

1. other non (current) CDS groups / sims' systems of justice and procedural guarantees comply with the SL/CDS specific Declaration mentioned above; and

2. our judiciary and advocates have the necessary skills and flexibility (ie. "professionalism" ) to familiarise themselves with other, cultural-specific laws and regulations and apply them in accordance with item 1. above,

we will be able to both administer and apply our own justice system in accordance with our specific cultural norms and values; and to provide valuable legal services to other non (current)-CDS individuals / groups / sims wishing to prevail themselves of our expertise in this field.

The key challenge here is to ensure that we keep the 3 levels mentioned above conceptually different, since the instruments applicable to each will necessarilly be quite distinct in both form and substance if they are to be deemed legitimate and acceptable by those to whom they will apply (non-CDS resident / 2L citzens; CDS resident citizens; specfic CDS sims residents).

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Post by Oni Jiutai »

[quote:1byok3m6]Is there one procedure, which better than any other is fair?

What is the most important:
a) defining one, comprehensive procedure, which can be shown to be fair by way of some RL benchmark, or

b) establishing a range of procedures from which a citizen can choose according to his own preference and prioritisation of for example the relative merits of elaborate processual guarantee vs the possibility to read in less than a page in normal language how a court case is conducted? [/quote:1byok3m6]

Well, philosophically speaking, I think there is a "Perfect Procedure" out there. And what we should do is try to get as close to it as possible. But I'm not sure that's an interesting answer, except philosophically, since I'd also say that since our knowledge is less than perfect we can't reliably distinguish many "not quite perfect procedures".

I think it's quite important to examine what we mean by having 'one, comprehensive procedure'. In one sense, we can only have one procedural system - just as you can have only one Code of Laws - because if there's a choice of procedure, that choice is still part of the overall system.

However, having a single procedure doesn't meant that all cases need follow the same sort of route. For example, there in once sense there is a single UK procedure called The England and Wales Justice System. But, within it there are quite literally hundreds of different procedures which will apply depending on the type of case. The procedure used for a seven digit figure shipping case will be very different to that used for a £400 unpaid wages claim.

The key question, I think, is about how much flexibility do we want in the system, and where should it be. The extremes, I think, are self-evidently bad. Ultimate flexibility would be recreating a judicial system from scratch in every case (which nobody has ever suggested). No flexibility would mean every tiny thing had to be agreed in advance and nobody had any power to change any of the rules (which equally nobody has ever suggested).

I think that there are really two ways of introducing the needed flexibility. One is to give discretion to the decision maker in each case. So there may be a rule that the parties do X, but they want to do Y instead. The decision maker would need to decide whether Y was a good way of proceeding. If one party wants to do X and one wants Y the decision maker would choose between them. The whole process naturally, being governed by whatever laws or procedures were in place.

Two, is the possibility of having different procedures for different cases. Now in one sense that seems quite unobjectionable and is, in fact, the way RL systems work. I see a number of problems with it, which is why I prefer the other system.

The first problem is that I think people want to do things that will cause problems in practice. It would obviously be great if parties to litigation could work together to design their own system, but I really think it''s a lot to ask. People who are suing each other are rarely on the best of terms and what they really want is to get their case sorted out (and win, naturally). They don't want to sit down and start talking about jurisprudence. Also, each party has an obvious built in bias - they want to win. So they will want a procedure that will help them win, not necessarily a fair procedure. Sorting all of that out in a way that ends with a fair system sounds nightmarish.

The second problem, I think, is just one of complexity. It's - history suggests - extremely difficult to design one system. Designing more than one strikes me as ... ambitious.

And, of course, there's also the possibility of simply opting out of the system altogether. Both the UK and the CDS have rules on arbitration, but even before these, most problems are actually solved by negotiation and agreement. And anyone may agree to allow their dispute to be resolved by pretty much whatever system they like. So in a sense, if the parties both wish, there is near total flexibility open to them anyway. Those who have disputes best solved through another route can take it, and will take it.

RL fairness is an interesting question. Diderot and others are certainly right that we have some built in disadvantages. But I think we have some built in advantages too. For example, compared with RL courts we have a tiny, tiny number of cases. Also the nature of SL means that we're unlikely (at least in the medium term) to need to grapple with the range of legal problems people can get themselves into in RL - especially useful criminal behaviour is capped at a relatively low level of seriousness, with the possible exception of property related crime. We have - compared with any RL country - stunningly well educated citizens.

Basically thought, I think we should aim for as high a standard of fairness as possible (indeed, given the UDHR I think we're obligated to, but I think that's a good thing. But we must remember that fairness includes things like access to justice - which means that people need to be able to operate the system.

Which raises the important question of what access to justice requires, but I need to do some RL legal work now.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Dianne":3u9zqv6d]Since this statement is very much a reiteration of your original point of view, I won't belabor the point other than to say that I completely disagree and that I really think you have missed the point of SL in my view.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]

It was not [i:3u9zqv6d]just[/i:3u9zqv6d] a restatement of my original point of view: it contained a great deal more detail and elaboration. But, what exactly do you think that the point of SecondLife is, if it is not a virtualised physical environment for novel forms of social interaction between people, and novel forms of creativity? If you think that the point is different than that, why do you think that there is a single point that I am missing, rather than that SecondLife can be used to achieve many different sorts of objectives, of which yours (whatever it is), and that which I have stated are both examples?

[quote:3u9zqv6d]A lot of SL's avatars (me included) are basically the same person as our RL selves, only with a different form or appearance just as you suggest, but I can say from experience that many are not.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]

I don't think that you understand my point: an avatar cannot be "the same person as our RL selves", since it cannot not a [i:3u9zqv6d]person[/i:3u9zqv6d] at all: it is a computerised [i:3u9zqv6d]representation[/i:3u9zqv6d] of a person. An avatar just does whatever the interaction between the human whose avatar it is and the programming of the SecondLife software tell it to do. It does not have a mind of its own. Having a mind of one's own is an irreducible minimum of personhood. For that reason, an avatar is not in any sense whatsoever a person. Some people might [i:3u9zqv6d]pretend[/i:3u9zqv6d], for fun, that an avatar is a person in its own right, but that does not mean that everyone must take such a pretence and treat it as if it were reality if one is to have anything to do with SecondLife at all. SecondLife is not just about pretence; virtuality is not the same as make-believe.

[quote:3u9zqv6d]There are large numbers of avatars that are "characters," role-players, split personalities etc. and I have had the pleasure of having several SL friends that have multiple avatars, each as different from each other in personality as any two RL human individuals. Some carry on that way for years.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]

None of this detracts from the fundamental point that these avatars are just multiple representations of the same person, virtually embodying different aspects of that single, flesh-and-blood person's personality. The same person may behave in vastly different ways in different situations: an actor when acting, a person when in a meeting compared to when in a party, a spy, a fraudster, a person trying to create a good impression, or a person in a particularly good/bad mood; those differences in behaviour do not mean that multiple people are sharing a single body: it is quite possible for the same person to behave in radically different ways in different circumstances.

[quote="Dianne":3u9zqv6d]No offense but this makes no sense at all. Justice is not some absolute thing that we can hold a statement or event up to and measure it to see if it is "just," in any objective concrete fashion, the whole idea is preposterous. "Justice" is not even describable as a teleological goal or a platonic ideal, it's hardly describable at all. [/quote:3u9zqv6d]

That's not true at all. Justice is very simple to describe. Justice is the principle that nobody shall benefit from her or his own wrong, nor suffer in consequence of another's.

[quote:3u9zqv6d]Justice is indeed subjective and relative both to the situation and the perception of the situation, as I suggested in my initial response. It is a concept necessarily embedded in a particular culture and not always applicable to other cultures. [/quote:3u9zqv6d]

Why do you claim that? What about the concept that nobody shall benefit from her or his own wrong, nor suffer in consequence of another's entails the existence of a culture, and what, precisely, do you think that the relationship between any given culture and that concept is?

In any event, you still cannot get around the point that I made in the first post, which is this: if different people in different cultures all have their own ideas of what justice is, then there must be some sense in which those ideas are ideas [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] the same thing, that is, justice, or else there would be no reason at all to think that the cultures have different ideas [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] justice. If there is a thing called justice about which different people (at least partly based on their culture) have different beliefs, then that entails that there is a thing about which people are having beliefs that is different from the beliefs themselves, or else people would all be deluding themselves when they think that they are having beliefs about a thing called "justice", just as if they were having beliefs about a thing called a "unicorn" (and the beliefs would all be false). A belief [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] X entails a [i:3u9zqv6d]relationship[/i:3u9zqv6d] between (1) the belief; and (2) X. A relationship, in turn, entails two distinct things between which there is a relationship, which therefore entails that, if people are having beliefs about something (rather than believing that they are having beliefs about something, but actually having beliefs about nothing, as in the unicorn example), that the thing about which they are having beliefs is an entity independent of those beliefs themselves.

You write about things being "subjective", but I am afraid that you make the all too common mistake of confusing subjectivity with the sort of infinite regress-generating hyper-relativity of "X is whatever people believe it to be". Subjectivity is merely the concept of the meaning of a statement depending in part on some property of the person making the statement (excluding the attributive function of pronouns). The archetypal example of subjectivity is taste: "fruit cake tastes good" is a subjective statement in that whether it is true or not depends on who is saying it. But notice this: every subjective statement can simply be rephrased to remove the subjectivity: "Mr. Smith likes fruit cake" is equally true or false whoever says it. "Mr. Smith likes fruit cake" cannot simultaneously be true "to" Mr. Smith and false "to" Mr. Jones. The relationship between Mr. Smith's preferences and fruit cake is a fact in the world just as much as that the earth orbits the sun or that the tides are connected to the sun and moon, and any proposition about it is either true or false.

In any event, justice is not like a person's taste in fruitcake: justice is not inherently a property of specific people: its very nature (a concept about what is right to do about certain aspects of relations between people) precludes that as a possibility. It is a property of relationships between people, which property cannot conceivably depend on what people believe it to be.

[quote:3u9zqv6d]By any decent definition that can be quoted (I won't bother to link to any of the online dictionaries, it's trivial to look it up), "justice" is what if [i:3u9zqv6d]fair[/i:3u9zqv6d] and what is [i:3u9zqv6d]moral[/i:3u9zqv6d]. The easiest common definition is that justice is [i:3u9zqv6d]"what is right."[/i:3u9zqv6d] All of these words refer to subjective, personal evaluations that are definitely not concrete, not absolute and undeniably culturally specific.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]

Why do you assume that what is right is (or is even conceptually capable of being) "subjective" (whatever you mean by that, exactly)? What is right is whatever produces most good. What is good is whatever brings the greatest happiness. Happiness, like preference for cake, is a real fact in the world, and, just like the answer "how do I satisfy my preference for cake?", what is right is, in theory at least, as ascertainable as a recipe for fruit cake and a list of places where one can buy the ingredients (although it is often, in practice, extremely difficult to work out what is right because of the inherent mind-boggling complexity of the world and of people).

[quote="Dianne":3u9zqv6d]Again, this is nonsense. I understand your literalist position on this given your RL occupation and life's work (that hopefully is not an insult, I intend merely to describe your "thinking style" as it were), but you seem to believe in a definition of justice not found in any dictionary available to me. You seem to be arguing simply that anything that you don't determine to be just by the rules and procedures that you believe in, is unjust.[/quote:3u9zqv6d]

Well, of course: that is trivially true. To paraphrase, you are stating no more than that I believe everything that I believe is unjust, is unjust. That is a mere truism. To believe anything else would simply be incoherent (self-contradictory). If I believe that X is unjust, I cannot simultaneously hold the belief that X is just.

[quote:3u9zqv6d]You are engaging in exactly the same kind of cultural relativeness that I am trying to describe, yet somehow not seeing it. How is this any different than simply saying "my culture right, your culture wrong."??[/quote:3u9zqv6d]

Because "my culture right, your culture wrong" is firstly too vague to be meaningful, and secondly assumes that a culture (as opposed to a specific decision or set of decisions about how to do things) is the kind of thing that is meaningfully capable of being conceived of as right or wrong.

However, the kind of hyper-relativity of "X is whatever a given culture says it is" leads to the same incoherency (self-contradiction) as does "X is whatever anyone believes that X is": there must be an X, inherently independent of any culture, for different cultures all to be having different attitudes [i:3u9zqv6d]about[/i:3u9zqv6d] the same thing. This sort of hyper-relativity also breaks down because it cannot be applied to itself: supposing that you hold (as you seem to hold) the belief that "whether something is right or not depends on whether any given culture traditionally holds it to be right". What happens when you subject that claim itself to that test, and find a culture who traditionally reject cultural relativism? You are left with nothing other than an incoherent set of propositions, from which no meaning can be extracted.

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Post by Dianne »

IMO this discussion is really going nowhere and getting way to long as well. :shock:

I don't want to dismiss the rather lengthy response you have made, but I don't see how we will ever agree. It honestly seems to me like the both of us are just re-iterating our positions over and over to no good effect. Since this part here seems to be the core of your argument (again IMO), I will comment on this only. Feel free to respond, but likely this will be my last post on this thread unless something fantastically new and interesting pops up.

[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":1pmdr2rp][quote="Dianne":1pmdr2rp]No offense but this makes no sense at all. Justice is not some absolute thing that we can hold a statement or event up to and measure it to see if it is "just," in any objective concrete fashion, the whole idea is preposterous. "Justice" is not even describable as a teleological goal or a platonic ideal, it's hardly describable at all. [/quote:1pmdr2rp]
That's not true at all. Justice is very simple to describe. [i:1pmdr2rp]Justice is the principle that nobody shall benefit from her or his own wrong, nor suffer in consequence of another's. [/i:1pmdr2rp][/quote:1pmdr2rp]
I went online again and looked at a few more dictionary definitions of "justice" (I even sunk so low as to look it up in Merriam Webster!), and I can't find any that substantially agree with your point of view although with this last definition above you are getting closer to arguing for the [i:1pmdr2rp]subjectivity[/i:1pmdr2rp] of determinations of justice (and therefore to [i:1pmdr2rp]my[/i:1pmdr2rp] point of view), than you are to the rather absolutist position you laid out previously.

The closest definitions I could find to [i:1pmdr2rp]your[/i:1pmdr2rp] point of view (as I understand it), is that several [i:1pmdr2rp]legal dictionaries[/i:1pmdr2rp] list definitions of justice that are concerned with the details of the existent RL legal systems of the culture that has written said legal dictionary. For instance whereas most dictionaries give the first two or three definitions of "justice" along the lines that I described (fairness, moral-ness, "what is right" etc.), and then present as a fourth or fifth option, a definition intended to describe how justice might be obtained or described within the existent legal system, some Legal Dictionaries will list this definition first and then follow up with the same more general and morally based ones.

"Justice" as a concept and the perception of justice, is subjective to the individual and the culture. I don't personally disagree with the definition you have put forward above, but we are from the same culture so that is really to be expected. ;)

I note that even it, is rife with the kind of subjective language that proves my point and not yours.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

Dianne,

I am not simply repeating myself: I am giving a very precise, step-by-step analysis of exactly why I think that your position does not make any sense and cannot conceivably be sustained. Do you think that my reasoning is flawed? If so, pointing out in exactly what step that you think that the flaw can be found, and analysing why that specific step is a flaw would not entail repeating yourself, since you have not yet attempted to do that. But, really, when somebody presents a precise logical argument as I have done, the only way to surmount it is to show (1) that a specific premise is false; or (2) that there is a specific flaw in the reasoning. My analysis attempts to show where I think that the flaw in your reasoning is; a response to my response should either do the same, or concede a point.

[i:1mb2dyn6]Edit[/i:1mb2dyn6]: My analysis of justice was not the core of my argument: the core of my argument was the point about the inherent incoherency of the hyper-relativist position of "X is whatever people believe X to be" that I analysed above. Even if my specific analysis of the nature of justice is wrong, the main point, that there is a specific true analysis out there that people can be wrong or right about, still holds. You must accept, mustn't you, that, unless there is a specific logical flaw in that argument, it conclusively defeats yours? Further, on the point about "subjective language", I explained above why concepts of right and wrong and good and bad cannot possibly be subjective in any meaningful sense, so that point is not well taken (at least, not without a serious and conclusive counter-argument to my point about subjectivity).

In any event, that issue aside, I should find it very helpful indeed if you could answer for me this question from my above post:

[quote:1mb2dyn6] what exactly do you think that the point of SecondLife is, if it is not a virtualised physical environment for novel forms of social interaction between people, and novel forms of creativity? If you think that the point is different than that, why do you think that there is a single point that I am missing, rather than that SecondLife can be used to achieve many different sorts of objectives, of which yours (whatever it is), and that which I have stated are both examples? [/quote:1mb2dyn6]

[i:1mb2dyn6]Edit[/i:1mb2dyn6]: Really, the most important part of this discussion is not the analysis of justice at all, but the analysis of the purpose and nature of SecondLife and interaction through virtual worlds.

I do not see a justice system within SecondLife as just another fun activity in which to participate, but as a serious means of resolving serious disputes between real people who happen to be interacting through a medium of the sort that generates disputes specific to that medium. The purpose of a justice system in SecondLife is not to provide entertainment for its participants, but to enable users of SecondLife to enjoy better the other things that they do because there is an effective system preventing them from becoming the victims of injustice. You must admit that there is truly serious commerce in SecondLife: why should SecondLife's serious commerce (or any subset thereof) be regulated by a judicial system whose main function is to give its participants something interesting to do with their free time? Do you accept that, whatever you think that the CDS should do, there is room for - and a real need for - a genuinely serious justice system within SecondLife that resolves the serious disputes that arise between real people when interacting through the medium of the virtual world? If not, why not? If there is not real justice in the virtual world, then there will certainly be real injustice.

Ashcroft Burnham

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