I believe an ideal society meets a few simple criteria:
- The Principle of Freedom. Society should not limit actions except where those actions would harm others.
- The Principle of Intent. Citizens who knowingly contribute back to society should be rewarded and appreciated. Citizens who choose to defect from society should accordingly lose privileges and be expected to make reparations.
- The Principle of Abhorrence. No acts by any entity which are intentionally crafted with the primary purpose of causing suffering should ever be permitted.
- The Principle of Democracy. Society should allocate its centralized resources towards causes prioritized proportionally based on equal votes of all citizens.
- The Principle of Legibility. No individual may be held accountable for a violation of a rule they could not reasonably have known or understood in advance of their violation.
I further believe that most people would agree with these rules, in the abstract. Yet our individual lives, and certainly laws and government, often fly in the face of these principles.
To build a truly ideal society, we’d need to change a lot of interconnected things. But there are some one-off changes we can make which would immediately improve things in this direction. Here are a few examples:
Repeal the Corporate Veil
People respond to incentives. If nobody is incentivized to prevent an outcome, they will not generally fight to prevent it.
The “corporate veil” is a legal concept that generally protects business leaders from personal liability if their company does something bad. The core problem with this is that it breaks the incentives. If the only entity held liable is “the company”, then nobody is being held liable, because “the company” is not in fact a person and cannot respond to incentives.
If a major corporation is found to be polluting a small town’s drinking water; chronically addicting children to dangerous content; manipulating democracy; or even simply lying to its customers…someone should be held responsible.
When you punish companies, you can only extract monetary assets from them, since that’s all the company really has. But this money often fails to amount to even a slap on the wrist for the people responsible.
I do believe that corporations and individuals should have separate finances. But I believe that corporations can not break the law; only people can do that. So when a law is broken, I believe that the people who broke it should be held responsible.
This is part of a broader trend I’ll write more about sometimes – punishments must strike a balance between sufficient to remedy the harm, but also sufficient to discourage the behavior. That’s not malice, it’s just economics.
Replace Regulations with Education
Broadly speaking, I dislike the government regulating things in the sense of “preventing citizens from doing things unless they meet specific criteria.”
I think the much more effective and morally correct solution is for the government to audit the way producers are building their goods, and to make it stupendously easy for citizens to understand the results of those audits. This might include things like certifications.
Obviously this requires citizens to trust that centralized audit authority, but this is achievable, because the whole point of such an entity is that it would do EVERYTHING out in the open. (Not in the “file a request and we’ll share an opaque file in three months” sense, but in the “we are legitimately building in public and constantly sharing what we are learning” sense.)
I can see arguments against this strictly for kids or for goods so destructive (like nuclear weapons) that even a single individual misusing the good could cause irreparable damage. Outside these criteria, the only penalty for “violating” a “regulation” should be that the public is told clearly about what you’re doing and permitted to make their own decision on the tradeoffs.
