In the scenario of the teacher who hates science fiction, you expect us, the LW readers, to know in advance that science fiction isn’t so bad. It’s obvious to us that the teacher is arguing in bad faith.
But that’s like saying that it’s okay for a policeman to search someone without a warrant, and using as an example a case where it’s obvious to the reader that the person is guilty. When one of the big problems with such a rule is that you can’t limit it only to cases where someone is obviously guilty, or guilty at all.
The key difference between the student vs. policeman examples is that the policeman (in a country of laws) operates within a well-defined framework for using their powers that they are explicitly told they should put first and foremost in their job duties.
By contrast, there is much more ambiguity as to what constitutes appropriate feedback from teacher to student, and from student to teacher. There is also (in the example I gave) a fairly unambiguous breach of teacher communication norms with the student, in that the teacher is depicted as “systematically making fun of” the student’s entire story. Navigating these breaches and ambiguities is the heart of the argument here.
A more apt comparison, in my mind, would be an example of an American policeman deciding to use force to arrest someone when that policeman can see that the person they’re arresting was in the middle of attacking them. In America, it would not be appropriate to use force to arrest someone who was not resisting arrest. Sometimes, police officers do use force in ways that are widely viewed as inappropriate or criminal. However, we still rely on those officers to make judgment calls about whether force is appropriate, and can meaningfully discuss what officers should do in various types of concrete scenarios (i.e. “what if the arrestee is already on the ground and in cuffs, but still struggling?”), despite realizing that in an actual scenario, we have to take the cop’s word for it that the person was “still struggling.”
In the scenario of the teacher who hates science fiction, you expect us, the LW readers, to know in advance that science fiction isn’t so bad. It’s obvious to us that the teacher is arguing in bad faith.
But that’s like saying that it’s okay for a policeman to search someone without a warrant, and using as an example a case where it’s obvious to the reader that the person is guilty. When one of the big problems with such a rule is that you can’t limit it only to cases where someone is obviously guilty, or guilty at all.
The key difference between the student vs. policeman examples is that the policeman (in a country of laws) operates within a well-defined framework for using their powers that they are explicitly told they should put first and foremost in their job duties.
By contrast, there is much more ambiguity as to what constitutes appropriate feedback from teacher to student, and from student to teacher. There is also (in the example I gave) a fairly unambiguous breach of teacher communication norms with the student, in that the teacher is depicted as “systematically making fun of” the student’s entire story. Navigating these breaches and ambiguities is the heart of the argument here.
A more apt comparison, in my mind, would be an example of an American policeman deciding to use force to arrest someone when that policeman can see that the person they’re arresting was in the middle of attacking them. In America, it would not be appropriate to use force to arrest someone who was not resisting arrest. Sometimes, police officers do use force in ways that are widely viewed as inappropriate or criminal. However, we still rely on those officers to make judgment calls about whether force is appropriate, and can meaningfully discuss what officers should do in various types of concrete scenarios (i.e. “what if the arrestee is already on the ground and in cuffs, but still struggling?”), despite realizing that in an actual scenario, we have to take the cop’s word for it that the person was “still struggling.”