That is the best explanation of common dispreference of strong rule of law I’ve heard yet. Almost nobody (including myself) believes that humans will actually implement it fairly, so the current acknowledgment of arbitrary exceptions is actually closer to the truth of what we’ll get anyway.
It’s important to acknowledge that most (and perhaps all) humans don’t have terminal goals or preferred states. We have instrumental goals and preferred directions. Our brains tend to backwards-project this into a state for communication and signaling reasons, but that’s not the truth of our preferences. In other words, we don’t get to pick a counterfactual baseline; the baseline is automatically the (perceived/expected) status quo without the action under consideration. This is a very fundamental cause of the copenhagen interpretation of morality: the projected non-action world is the baseline, and only changes are evaluated for goodness. Some of us may be able to override this in ourselves with a fair bit of effort, but I doubt it’s possible for very many topics in any individual or for any topics in a large population.
My perception of “judgemental” people is not only that they make harsh judgement, but that they make attribution errors—they judge people based on a small number of observed actions, rather than judging the actions and acknowledging that they know very little about the person. There may be a fair bit of status-signaling in the judgements as well, in cases where we call the person “judgemental” rather than simply asking about the validity of a given judgement.
Three distinct thoughts on this:
That is the best explanation of common dispreference of strong rule of law I’ve heard yet. Almost nobody (including myself) believes that humans will actually implement it fairly, so the current acknowledgment of arbitrary exceptions is actually closer to the truth of what we’ll get anyway.
It’s important to acknowledge that most (and perhaps all) humans don’t have terminal goals or preferred states. We have instrumental goals and preferred directions. Our brains tend to backwards-project this into a state for communication and signaling reasons, but that’s not the truth of our preferences. In other words, we don’t get to pick a counterfactual baseline; the baseline is automatically the (perceived/expected) status quo without the action under consideration. This is a very fundamental cause of the copenhagen interpretation of morality: the projected non-action world is the baseline, and only changes are evaluated for goodness. Some of us may be able to override this in ourselves with a fair bit of effort, but I doubt it’s possible for very many topics in any individual or for any topics in a large population.
My perception of “judgemental” people is not only that they make harsh judgement, but that they make attribution errors—they judge people based on a small number of observed actions, rather than judging the actions and acknowledging that they know very little about the person. There may be a fair bit of status-signaling in the judgements as well, in cases where we call the person “judgemental” rather than simply asking about the validity of a given judgement.