That strikes me as an extremely inapt analogy. Dictionary authors have little no authority in language because they are not a condition on the possibility of language. I think it’s reasonable to say that the polity is a significant (if not necessary or sufficient) condition on the possibility of morality.
So you would cease to be a moral person if the law went away? I don’t understand. Maybe you mean that the world would be morally much worse off without law? I agree with that, but that doesn’t imply that the law is the source of morality or whatever. It’s still instrumental and hopefully following from morality, not the other way.
You’re reading me as saying “obeying the law, whatever it says, is a moral good”. I didn’t say or imply this. I said that violating the law is a moral bad. So the above doesn’t follow.
Ok, so we should remove the laws that people tend to violate a lot, to reduce the moral badness in the world. I guess if you think that law is our morality, this would still be a bad idea because changing your morality is a bad idea (the gandhi kill pill argument).
I can’t.
Yes you can. Sorry, I didn’t mean like give up your citizenship, I meant keep it out of your self image, because people are irrational about things in their self-image.
For example: I live in canada, I have an american and canadian citizenship, I enjoy the benefits, I do not think of myself as canadian or american because then I would not be able to think clearly about the differences between me and the countries of which I am part. I also do not consider my gender, age, race, or name to be part of my identity.
Have you ever talked to chinese citizens about the actions of the chinese government? You may have noticed that many are unable to differentiate between criticism of the chinese government and criticism of the chinese people. This is because the propaganda conflates the two. Avoid that.
But all this is a little astray. My point is just that its immoral to ignore or violate the law for one’s personal gain. If you disagree with that, then my much more specific claim about why probably won’t convince you.
I agree that violating the law is bad, but not intrinsically immoral the way murder is. Violating the law is bad because of the consequences for the rule of law, and because the law is often parallel to morality.
I’m afraid if you don’t think breaking the law has any moral significance, I have no immediate way to argue for the immorality of filesharing. Or theft.
Leave yourself a line of retreat. In the absence of law, would it be bad to steal? If not, why make the law in the first place?
Stealing is bad because it is bad for the person you stole from and creates the wrong kind of society. No law required.
Not all sharing is illegal or even of the controversial sort. I torrent my operating system images, and I have license to those. I share images on the internet that are public domain works.
Copyright Infringement I am unsure on. I’ve seen plenty of evidence, if you have more, please share it with me.
Whatever you think, don’t try to justify a law by appealing to the fact that it is law. That is circular. If there is some other argument why in a counterfactual world without a law, it would be a good idea to create it, appeal to that instead of the circular part.
Do you understand why I don’t think talking about the current laws is a good idea in a moral discussion?
not relevant to this particular discussion.
Maybe not. You were making mistakes in your reasoning because of your identity, so I brought it up.
Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
Assuming not everyone is law-abiding, yes.
If I murder someone, I can’t just decide that this act is no longer a part of my self-identity and thereby become innocent of it. I did something evil and nothing can ever make that go away. It’s mine forever.
There is a difference of philosophy here. I will state my position on these matters:
Ideas like Punishment, Responsibility, etc are social protocols instrumental in maintaining a valuable society. They may even be built in at the hardware level, but they are not intrinsic moral values the way “don’t hurt people” is. We are now smart enough to come up with better solutions to the problems that they solved.
Punishment is about getting people to follow rules that are a good for everyone when there is individual profit in defecting. Game theory, specifically iterated prisoners dilemma and so on, implies that punishment of defectors is a very good strategy for maintaining a beneficial relationship in many circumstances. It turns out that our ancestral environment was one such situation, so we have the idea of punishment built in at an instinctual level. There are situations where punishment is not the best solution, so taking it as a given is stupid.
For example, let’s say we find out that some murders are not calculating defections, but failures of self control and lack of education. Let’s further suppose that there is a two -week course that a murderer can take that has a 98% success rate in making them productive members of society, never to murder again. Let’s say that Bob is such a murderer. What do we do with him? We can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping him in degrading prison, after which he will still be a murderer, or we can put him thru our two week course for a couple thousand dollars, after which he will be a productive member of society. What to do? Do we decide that punishment is the moral thing to do, or do we decide there are more important things than following obsolete tribal-politics hueristics?
Responsibility is another evolutionary and social hack to kick you into action when you have the ability to affect something morally important. It is not a moral primitive. We now have utilitarian decision theories and associated philosophy that does a much better job at improving the world.
You brought up responsibility in the context of murder and torture. Once you factor out punishment, as demystified above, and ability to affect things, the people starving to death all over the world are just as important as the person you save or kill right here. Once you factor out your ability to change things, the people being tortured by foreign powers are just as important as those being tortured by the government you live under.
This is what I mean when I say not to excuse yourself from tragedies outside your identity. Minimize your identity and feel responsible for all the tragedy in the world, not just that which “you” cause.
I think you and I have a problem of miscommunication. These claims are not my claims, and do not follow from anything I’ve said:
-The law is morality.
-You would cease to be moral if the law went away.
-It is morally good to obey the law.
I do agree that we should reconsider laws that people tend to violate a lot: widespread violation is good evidence for the impracticability of a law. But it would be senseless to remove violated laws to decrease the moral badness in the world, because the laws exist in the first place for the good of the polity and its citizens.
Yes you can. Sorry, I didn’t mean like give up your citizenship, I meant keep it out of your self image, because people are irrational about things in their self-image.
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity. I can work to change, but I can’t change by fiat.
Do you understand why I don’t think talking about the current laws is a good idea in a moral discussion?
Not really. I take it you would say that nothing vouchsafes the morality of current law, so we cannot look to law for moral principles. In a certain way I agree with this, but I think this view underestimates the relationship between the law and our moral lives. It is in virtue of living in a polity that we can be moral beings. If there were no polity, we might still be capable of morality (especially if we were raised in a polity) but in a very limited way. Very, very important things like courage and loyalty and honesty and justice would be curtailed or closed off to us.
Punishment is about getting people to follow rules that are a good for everyone when there is individual profit in defecting.
This is, I think, not a good view of justice, specifically in that it involves a contempt for the criminal. It is not okay to lock people away in a little box, or cause them pain, or take their freedom, or anything like this for the sake of changing their behavior. Manipulating people by causing them to suffer is torture, and that’s not what (I hope) our justice system is up to. We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty). Punishment isn’t aimed at some further end, like torture or coercion.
Thanks for taking the time to present your views on the subject, I found them as interesting as they were different from my own. What makes ‘don’t hurt people’ an intrinsic moral value?
I do agree that we should reconsider laws that people tend to violate a lot: widespread violation is good evidence for the impracticability of a law. But it would be senseless to remove violated laws to decrease the moral badness in the world, because the laws exist in the first place for the good of the polity and its citizens.
My statement about removing laws that people violate was intended to be obviously absurd. I don’t think it is a good idea to do it (at least not for that reason).
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity. I can work to change, but I can’t change by fiat.
Disagree. Identity is a matter of where you carve the world, which you should do in whatever way works best. It happens that people are not capable of reasoning as rationally about things that they identify with. It seems perfectly reasonable to say “am I not capable of thinking rationally about this category (things I identify with), and it does not provide enough value to make up for that, so I ought to simply delete it.” It’s a mind hack, for sure, but I think it is fully possible and the right thing to do.
Not really. I take it you would say that nothing vouchsafes the morality of current law, so we cannot look to law for moral principles. In a certain way I agree with this, but I think this view underestimates the relationship between the law and our moral lives. It is in virtue of living in a polity that we can be moral beings. If there were no polity, we might still be capable of morality (especially if we were raised in a polity) but in a very limited way. Very, very important things like courage and loyalty and honesty and justice would be curtailed or closed off to us.
You seem to at least understand what I meant. I’m afraid I don’t yet understand your position. Could you explain in more detail why some form of law is necessary for morality (if I even have that right)?
This is, I think, not a good view of justice, specifically in that it involves a contempt for the criminal. It is not okay to lock people away in a little box, or cause them pain, or take their freedom, or anything like this for the sake of changing their behavior. Manipulating people by causing them to suffer is torture, and that’s not what (I hope) our justice system is up to. We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty). Punishment isn’t aimed at some further end, like torture or coercion.
There is no contempt for the defector. Punishment is simply a sad duty that we must credibly pre-commit to to maintain social order. Torture is unnecessary and morally expensive. People often overestimate the amount of punishment needed to deter defectors (as opposed to other types of crime that must be handled with other methods).
We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty).
That is exactly what I disagree with. Why should we punish them? What benefit is there from spending our resources to hurt them, if it’s not the game-theoretic determent?
What makes ‘don’t hurt people’ an intrinsic moral value?
I’ll retract that. ‘Don’t hurt people’ may not be morally intrinsic, but it’s much, much closer than punishment, which we (or at least I) now know is derived (but only in some cases) from other principles. I can’t think of anything much more universal than ‘don’t hurt people’, but I’m sure it reduces somewhere. The point I was trying to make was that punishment is not as fundamental as some other principles, and should be abandoned in favor of them when that is the dilemma.
Identity is a matter of where you carve the world, which you should do in whatever way works best.
Isn’t this a prescription for the happy psychotic, who carves the world up in such a way that he is always maximally happy? I take it we should carve the world at the joints, whether this is good for us or not, and whether we like it or not. If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a ‘mind hack’. You cannot by any force of will decide to believe something you believe to be false and you must believe everything you believe to be true. You have no control whatsoever over what to believe. I cannot adjust my self-identity without coming to the (I think false) belief that I am not really a US citizen. You might convince me that this actually isn’t a part of my self-identity, but only by convincing me that it never was.
Could you explain in more detail why some form of law is necessary for morality (if I even have that right)?
Well, I called it a ‘significant condition on morality’ and I suggested that it may well be (I don’t know) a necessary or sufficient or necessary and sufficient condition. I doubt I can be persuasive here, since we disagree on the subject so broadly. Being good is hard. Being good means being generous with people, and this requires some modest wealth. It also means being courageous. Being just requires an association with people, and in any significant number, this requires leadership and law. Being civil, kind, etc. requires friendship, and this likewise requires associations and mutual interests, and all these practically depend upon the law. Courage is the belief that your life is worth something, such that it would be better to die than live a life of terribly low moral quality. Courage therefore means a willingness to die for the sake of the above moral goods. And perhaps most generally, being good means doing great good things with your life, and this requires powers and wealth vastly beyond the capacity of a single human to provide. Being good requires leisure, because it requires reflection and deliberation, and leisure can only be provided under the conditions of a polity, among friends, in safety, etc.
What benefit is there from spending our resources to hurt them, if it’s not the game-theoretic determent?
My point is that punishment is not for the sake of any benefit at all. It’s a manifestation of anger, which is the rational response to wrongdoing. If we are not angry with the wrongdoer, we are treating them like an animal or a small child. Anger, and so its manifestation, is a form of respect for the capacity in the criminal to do good. The last thing justice is about is using suffering and imprisonment to manipulate people.
I’ll retract that. ‘Don’t hurt people’ may not be morally intrinsic, but it’s much, much closer than punishment, which we (or at least I) now know is derived (but only in some cases) from other principles.
If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a ‘mind hack’. You cannot by any force of will decide to believe something you believe to be false and you must believe everything you believe to be true. You have no control whatsoever over what to believe. I cannot adjust my self-identity without coming to the (I think false) belief that I am not really a US citizen.
You are misunderstanding the nature of self-identity. It is not a fact about the world that you have to get right, it is a cognitive category that causes you to go insane about anything that is in it. The fact that you have a US citezenship does not mean you should put “Actions of the US” in the “I should be insane about these” category. If you truly believe that mind-hacks don’t exist, I don’t know how you intend to deal with biased cognitive machinery.
The reason we don’t talk about politics around here is precisely because people have politics as part of their identity, and are therefore incapable of reasoning about it. The more general form of “don’t think about politics” is “don’t identify with stuff”.
The fact that you have a US citezenship does not mean you should put “Actions of the US” in the “I should be insane about these” category.
I promise never to do this.
The reason we don’t talk about politics around here is precisely because people have politics as part of their identity, and are therefore incapable of reasoning about it.
From what does the ‘therefore’ follow? Is this an empirical claim?
I’ve observed this phenomenon a lot, and it explains quite a bit. If you can show me some evidence you have about this that I don’t, that would be cool.
My point is that punishment is not for the sake of any benefit at all. It’s a manifestation of anger, which is the rational response to wrongdoing. If we are not angry with the wrongdoer, we are treating them like an animal or a small child. Anger, and so its manifestation, is a form of respect for the capacity in the criminal to do good. The last thing justice is about is using suffering and imprisonment to manipulate people.
This is all wrong. The rational thing to do is whatever is best by your values, which does not necessarily mean getting mad at people and hurting them.
This was my impression of your presentation of your view too. We should both be extremely suspicious of our ability to evaluate the correctness of a view to which we object so deeply that we cannot find enough common ground to have an argument. I think I’ll tap out but I’m happy to discuss these things and so if you want to discuss these topics further, start a discussion topic or send me a message. Thanks for the discussion.
There is obviously some huge inferential distance here. I’ll try to come up with lower-level build up for my position. You should to. Agreeing to disagree is unacceptable.
Are you asserting that it’s unacceptable to agree to disagree in situations where the estimated time and effort for coming to agreement is higher than the estimated value of coming to agreement? If so, can you expand on why?
Just in general it shouldn’t happen. I think some cases aren’t worth it if it is sufficiently difficult, as you suggest. This may be one of those cases.
On the other hand, I think formulating a coherent explanation of punishment is a useful thing to do, because there are so many people who make the mistake of assuming that it’s fundamental.
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity
I would say, rather, that changing my identity the way nyan_sandwich suggested would be similar to changing how I navigate through the territory by changing the map I use… which seems like a pretty good idea to me, if the map I’m currently using doesn’t get me where I want to go.
EDIT: sorry for the length /EDIT
So you would cease to be a moral person if the law went away? I don’t understand. Maybe you mean that the world would be morally much worse off without law? I agree with that, but that doesn’t imply that the law is the source of morality or whatever. It’s still instrumental and hopefully following from morality, not the other way.
Ok, so we should remove the laws that people tend to violate a lot, to reduce the moral badness in the world. I guess if you think that law is our morality, this would still be a bad idea because changing your morality is a bad idea (the gandhi kill pill argument).
Yes you can. Sorry, I didn’t mean like give up your citizenship, I meant keep it out of your self image, because people are irrational about things in their self-image.
For example: I live in canada, I have an american and canadian citizenship, I enjoy the benefits, I do not think of myself as canadian or american because then I would not be able to think clearly about the differences between me and the countries of which I am part. I also do not consider my gender, age, race, or name to be part of my identity.
Have you ever talked to chinese citizens about the actions of the chinese government? You may have noticed that many are unable to differentiate between criticism of the chinese government and criticism of the chinese people. This is because the propaganda conflates the two. Avoid that.
I agree that violating the law is bad, but not intrinsically immoral the way murder is. Violating the law is bad because of the consequences for the rule of law, and because the law is often parallel to morality.
Leave yourself a line of retreat. In the absence of law, would it be bad to steal? If not, why make the law in the first place?
Stealing is bad because it is bad for the person you stole from and creates the wrong kind of society. No law required.
Not all sharing is illegal or even of the controversial sort. I torrent my operating system images, and I have license to those. I share images on the internet that are public domain works.
Copyright Infringement I am unsure on. I’ve seen plenty of evidence, if you have more, please share it with me.
Whatever you think, don’t try to justify a law by appealing to the fact that it is law. That is circular. If there is some other argument why in a counterfactual world without a law, it would be a good idea to create it, appeal to that instead of the circular part.
Do you understand why I don’t think talking about the current laws is a good idea in a moral discussion?
Maybe not. You were making mistakes in your reasoning because of your identity, so I brought it up.
There is a difference of philosophy here. I will state my position on these matters:
Ideas like Punishment, Responsibility, etc are social protocols instrumental in maintaining a valuable society. They may even be built in at the hardware level, but they are not intrinsic moral values the way “don’t hurt people” is. We are now smart enough to come up with better solutions to the problems that they solved.
Punishment is about getting people to follow rules that are a good for everyone when there is individual profit in defecting. Game theory, specifically iterated prisoners dilemma and so on, implies that punishment of defectors is a very good strategy for maintaining a beneficial relationship in many circumstances. It turns out that our ancestral environment was one such situation, so we have the idea of punishment built in at an instinctual level. There are situations where punishment is not the best solution, so taking it as a given is stupid.
For example, let’s say we find out that some murders are not calculating defections, but failures of self control and lack of education. Let’s further suppose that there is a two -week course that a murderer can take that has a 98% success rate in making them productive members of society, never to murder again. Let’s say that Bob is such a murderer. What do we do with him? We can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping him in degrading prison, after which he will still be a murderer, or we can put him thru our two week course for a couple thousand dollars, after which he will be a productive member of society. What to do? Do we decide that punishment is the moral thing to do, or do we decide there are more important things than following obsolete tribal-politics hueristics?
Responsibility is another evolutionary and social hack to kick you into action when you have the ability to affect something morally important. It is not a moral primitive. We now have utilitarian decision theories and associated philosophy that does a much better job at improving the world.
You brought up responsibility in the context of murder and torture. Once you factor out punishment, as demystified above, and ability to affect things, the people starving to death all over the world are just as important as the person you save or kill right here. Once you factor out your ability to change things, the people being tortured by foreign powers are just as important as those being tortured by the government you live under.
This is what I mean when I say not to excuse yourself from tragedies outside your identity. Minimize your identity and feel responsible for all the tragedy in the world, not just that which “you” cause.
I think you and I have a problem of miscommunication. These claims are not my claims, and do not follow from anything I’ve said: -The law is morality. -You would cease to be moral if the law went away. -It is morally good to obey the law.
I do agree that we should reconsider laws that people tend to violate a lot: widespread violation is good evidence for the impracticability of a law. But it would be senseless to remove violated laws to decrease the moral badness in the world, because the laws exist in the first place for the good of the polity and its citizens.
I think it would be profoundly irrational to think of my self-identity this way. It would be similar to thinking I could change the territory by redrawing the map. I am a person with a definite identity. I can work to change, but I can’t change by fiat.
Not really. I take it you would say that nothing vouchsafes the morality of current law, so we cannot look to law for moral principles. In a certain way I agree with this, but I think this view underestimates the relationship between the law and our moral lives. It is in virtue of living in a polity that we can be moral beings. If there were no polity, we might still be capable of morality (especially if we were raised in a polity) but in a very limited way. Very, very important things like courage and loyalty and honesty and justice would be curtailed or closed off to us.
This is, I think, not a good view of justice, specifically in that it involves a contempt for the criminal. It is not okay to lock people away in a little box, or cause them pain, or take their freedom, or anything like this for the sake of changing their behavior. Manipulating people by causing them to suffer is torture, and that’s not what (I hope) our justice system is up to. We punish people because they did something wrong (assuming we get it right and they are guilty). Punishment isn’t aimed at some further end, like torture or coercion.
Thanks for taking the time to present your views on the subject, I found them as interesting as they were different from my own. What makes ‘don’t hurt people’ an intrinsic moral value?
My statement about removing laws that people violate was intended to be obviously absurd. I don’t think it is a good idea to do it (at least not for that reason).
Disagree. Identity is a matter of where you carve the world, which you should do in whatever way works best. It happens that people are not capable of reasoning as rationally about things that they identify with. It seems perfectly reasonable to say “am I not capable of thinking rationally about this category (things I identify with), and it does not provide enough value to make up for that, so I ought to simply delete it.” It’s a mind hack, for sure, but I think it is fully possible and the right thing to do.
You seem to at least understand what I meant. I’m afraid I don’t yet understand your position. Could you explain in more detail why some form of law is necessary for morality (if I even have that right)?
There is no contempt for the defector. Punishment is simply a sad duty that we must credibly pre-commit to to maintain social order. Torture is unnecessary and morally expensive. People often overestimate the amount of punishment needed to deter defectors (as opposed to other types of crime that must be handled with other methods).
That is exactly what I disagree with. Why should we punish them? What benefit is there from spending our resources to hurt them, if it’s not the game-theoretic determent?
I’ll retract that. ‘Don’t hurt people’ may not be morally intrinsic, but it’s much, much closer than punishment, which we (or at least I) now know is derived (but only in some cases) from other principles. I can’t think of anything much more universal than ‘don’t hurt people’, but I’m sure it reduces somewhere. The point I was trying to make was that punishment is not as fundamental as some other principles, and should be abandoned in favor of them when that is the dilemma.
Isn’t this a prescription for the happy psychotic, who carves the world up in such a way that he is always maximally happy? I take it we should carve the world at the joints, whether this is good for us or not, and whether we like it or not. If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a ‘mind hack’. You cannot by any force of will decide to believe something you believe to be false and you must believe everything you believe to be true. You have no control whatsoever over what to believe. I cannot adjust my self-identity without coming to the (I think false) belief that I am not really a US citizen. You might convince me that this actually isn’t a part of my self-identity, but only by convincing me that it never was.
Well, I called it a ‘significant condition on morality’ and I suggested that it may well be (I don’t know) a necessary or sufficient or necessary and sufficient condition. I doubt I can be persuasive here, since we disagree on the subject so broadly. Being good is hard. Being good means being generous with people, and this requires some modest wealth. It also means being courageous. Being just requires an association with people, and in any significant number, this requires leadership and law. Being civil, kind, etc. requires friendship, and this likewise requires associations and mutual interests, and all these practically depend upon the law. Courage is the belief that your life is worth something, such that it would be better to die than live a life of terribly low moral quality. Courage therefore means a willingness to die for the sake of the above moral goods. And perhaps most generally, being good means doing great good things with your life, and this requires powers and wealth vastly beyond the capacity of a single human to provide. Being good requires leisure, because it requires reflection and deliberation, and leisure can only be provided under the conditions of a polity, among friends, in safety, etc.
My point is that punishment is not for the sake of any benefit at all. It’s a manifestation of anger, which is the rational response to wrongdoing. If we are not angry with the wrongdoer, we are treating them like an animal or a small child. Anger, and so its manifestation, is a form of respect for the capacity in the criminal to do good. The last thing justice is about is using suffering and imprisonment to manipulate people.
In virtue of what is it closer?
You are misunderstanding the nature of self-identity. It is not a fact about the world that you have to get right, it is a cognitive category that causes you to go insane about anything that is in it. The fact that you have a US citezenship does not mean you should put “Actions of the US” in the “I should be insane about these” category. If you truly believe that mind-hacks don’t exist, I don’t know how you intend to deal with biased cognitive machinery.
The reason we don’t talk about politics around here is precisely because people have politics as part of their identity, and are therefore incapable of reasoning about it. The more general form of “don’t think about politics” is “don’t identify with stuff”.
I promise never to do this.
From what does the ‘therefore’ follow? Is this an empirical claim?
Yes. The hidden empirical premise is that people can’t think straight about things they identify with. They get defensive and go into politics-mode.
See paul graham’s take.
I’ve observed this phenomenon a lot, and it explains quite a bit. If you can show me some evidence you have about this that I don’t, that would be cool.
This is all wrong. The rational thing to do is whatever is best by your values, which does not necessarily mean getting mad at people and hurting them.
This is so wrong I don’t know how to tackle it.
This was my impression of your presentation of your view too. We should both be extremely suspicious of our ability to evaluate the correctness of a view to which we object so deeply that we cannot find enough common ground to have an argument. I think I’ll tap out but I’m happy to discuss these things and so if you want to discuss these topics further, start a discussion topic or send me a message. Thanks for the discussion.
There is obviously some huge inferential distance here. I’ll try to come up with lower-level build up for my position. You should to. Agreeing to disagree is unacceptable.
Anyways, it will be a while.
Are you asserting that it’s unacceptable to agree to disagree in situations where the estimated time and effort for coming to agreement is higher than the estimated value of coming to agreement? If so, can you expand on why?
Just in general it shouldn’t happen. I think some cases aren’t worth it if it is sufficiently difficult, as you suggest. This may be one of those cases.
On the other hand, I think formulating a coherent explanation of punishment is a useful thing to do, because there are so many people who make the mistake of assuming that it’s fundamental.
I suppose. Mostly I think those people should read a good book on animal training.
Then again, I think everyone should read a good book on animal training.
Everything you said here points to law being instrumental, so I’ll assume that you agree.
I would say, rather, that changing my identity the way nyan_sandwich suggested would be similar to changing how I navigate through the territory by changing the map I use… which seems like a pretty good idea to me, if the map I’m currently using doesn’t get me where I want to go.