I’m not trying to criticize your libertarian argument—I’m actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It’s just that interpretive difficulty isn’t a difference between statute and contract.
Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
differing policy preferences of individual legislators vs. different economic incentives of contract counter-parties.
issues can be unanticipated by all parties, which means the outcome of a dispute is essentially random (from an ex ante perspective).
In short, it’s just a fact about language that your choices don’t really affect the clarity of your legal obligations (either statutory or contractual). The deadweight loss of regulation isn’t a result of unclear regulation—even the clearest distortion of the market outcome costs some surplus value from the transaction.
Thank you for pointing out this aspect. It is a valid argument, and so the question is, how do you phrase it to avoid that. (A similar point was also made by Eugine_Nier) In a certain sense, this is the exact same problem as the one of FAI. (Which we all know is very hard.) Upon reflection, I don’t think the Unbreakable Vow is so strict in its interpretation of Vows, because if it were, safe Unbreakable Vows at all would be next to impossible. We do see Unbreakable Vows happening in the story though, so that is evidence for magic being slightly flexible in its interpretation of Vows.
Of course, magic does not exist in real life, and so we cannot do experiments on it to see how “strict” and literal the Unbreakable Vow is, so we cannot fully tell if such a system would actually work or not. It just depends on the author, really.
But if Unbreakable Vows are loose enough to be used the way they are both in canon and in HPMOR without screwing the participants over, I think it probably is good enough to work in our scenario, at least if we make sure to use very user-dependent wording. In other words, I think that a Vow something like ” I vow that I under a reasonable human interpretation of it” would probably be OK. (Remember in canon and HPMOR we see people making such Vows without the last clause, and the Vows don’t seem to screw them over, so if we are extra careful and add on extra clauses like that, it seems likely that it could work.)
But, of course, what we really want to do before putting these Vows into mass production is to do some experiments, see how they actually work in practice, see if they are safe. Sadly, they do not exist in real life, so this question might never be solved.
Um . . . I think you are still misunderstanding my objection. From the same sentence as the point I’m criticizing:
[A law] is costly to implement, and in general would cause . . . bad effects
Those are good points in favor of a libertarian perspective on public policy. Interpretive difficulties don’t belong on that list. To quote Sesame Street, one thing on your list just isn’t like the others.
OK. I might be misunderstanding you. I thought you were saying that a problem with Unbreakable Vows is that they would go by a strict, literal, genie-like interpretation of whatever you say, which would cause bad results. But I might just have been thinking of that because Desrtopa raised an argument of that type a couple of posts ago. If that is not your objection, feel free to restate it in a clearer way. But ultimately, I do suspect we are mostly in agreement, and that there is no particularly major difference between our opinions.
Sure. I’m saying that it is extremely difficult to reduce intended outcome to words.
Both statutes and contracts are attempts to reduce intention to words, and they have a roughly equivalent failure rate. Thus, problems arising from mismatch of word and intent (i.e. interpretive problems) are not a reason to prefer contracts over statutes.
I’m not trying to criticize your libertarian argument—I’m actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It’s just that interpretive difficulty isn’t a difference between statute and contract.
Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
differing policy preferences of individual legislators vs. different economic incentives of contract counter-parties.
issues can be unanticipated by all parties, which means the outcome of a dispute is essentially random (from an ex ante perspective).
In short, it’s just a fact about language that your choices don’t really affect the clarity of your legal obligations (either statutory or contractual). The deadweight loss of regulation isn’t a result of unclear regulation—even the clearest distortion of the market outcome costs some surplus value from the transaction.
Thank you for pointing out this aspect. It is a valid argument, and so the question is, how do you phrase it to avoid that. (A similar point was also made by Eugine_Nier) In a certain sense, this is the exact same problem as the one of FAI. (Which we all know is very hard.) Upon reflection, I don’t think the Unbreakable Vow is so strict in its interpretation of Vows, because if it were, safe Unbreakable Vows at all would be next to impossible. We do see Unbreakable Vows happening in the story though, so that is evidence for magic being slightly flexible in its interpretation of Vows.
Of course, magic does not exist in real life, and so we cannot do experiments on it to see how “strict” and literal the Unbreakable Vow is, so we cannot fully tell if such a system would actually work or not. It just depends on the author, really.
But if Unbreakable Vows are loose enough to be used the way they are both in canon and in HPMOR without screwing the participants over, I think it probably is good enough to work in our scenario, at least if we make sure to use very user-dependent wording. In other words, I think that a Vow something like ” I vow that I under a reasonable human interpretation of it” would probably be OK. (Remember in canon and HPMOR we see people making such Vows without the last clause, and the Vows don’t seem to screw them over, so if we are extra careful and add on extra clauses like that, it seems likely that it could work.)
But, of course, what we really want to do before putting these Vows into mass production is to do some experiments, see how they actually work in practice, see if they are safe. Sadly, they do not exist in real life, so this question might never be solved.
Um . . . I think you are still misunderstanding my objection. From the same sentence as the point I’m criticizing:
Those are good points in favor of a libertarian perspective on public policy. Interpretive difficulties don’t belong on that list. To quote Sesame Street, one thing on your list just isn’t like the others.
OK. I might be misunderstanding you. I thought you were saying that a problem with Unbreakable Vows is that they would go by a strict, literal, genie-like interpretation of whatever you say, which would cause bad results. But I might just have been thinking of that because Desrtopa raised an argument of that type a couple of posts ago. If that is not your objection, feel free to restate it in a clearer way. But ultimately, I do suspect we are mostly in agreement, and that there is no particularly major difference between our opinions.
Sure. I’m saying that it is extremely difficult to reduce intended outcome to words.
Both statutes and contracts are attempts to reduce intention to words, and they have a roughly equivalent failure rate. Thus, problems arising from mismatch of word and intent (i.e. interpretive problems) are not a reason to prefer contracts over statutes.
Well, I suppose the question is how the unbreakable-vow magic interprets it.