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Do you believe that it's practical to build and enforce a set of rules that ensure acceptable outcomes so long as they're followed, regardless of the behavior of those operating under the rules? Put another way, do you think loopholes are a generally-manageable problem in rule design?
...I think the above questions are pointing to a concept that seems extremely relevant to your question, but I'm not sure the questions themselves communicate the issue clearly enough.
Long ago, I was interested in tabletop game design, and came across the concept of "rules fragility". As I understood it, the idea was to seperate out the general concept of "good rules" into "good when people are actively trying to work with them" and "good when people are actively trying to subvert them". If you're familiar with the PnP roleplaying concept of a "munchkin", or the proliferation of explicit GM fiat as a conflict resolution mechanism, both are necessary because of rules fragility. Generally speaking, the simpler your ruleset, the easier it is to eliminate fragility. Games like chess or M:TG are sufficiently constrained that their rules can be made very resilient, regardless of player cooperation. The sprawling D&D ruleset, on the other hand, is legendary for its exploits, paradoxes, and hilarious implications. Munchkins and GM fiat exist because roleplaying games are, of necessity, too complex to make rules that self-enforce a good experience on uncooperative players.
Life is a whole lot more complicated than D&D, and while societies as far back as we can observe have always tried to form some sort of rule set, until relatively recently human societies frequently resorted to some level of GM-Fiat-analog. This changed with the Enlightenment, which introduced the idea that we could bind society to rules not through a superpowerful enforcer, but through the law itself. The idea was that it was possible, even practical to write a set of universally-applicable, objective rules that could account for all the exigencies of circumstance and behavior, resolve all disputes and settle all conflicts. One way to put it would be that the Enlightenment idea our society was founded on was that loopholes were a manageable problem, on the object level and all meta-levels.
As I've argued many times previously, it seems to me that this idea worked as well as it did for as long as it did because a relatively homogenous population more often than not treated our social "game" as fundamentally cooperative, not competitive. Periods where this cooperation broke down stand out in our history as moments where the system worked very poorly or failed completely. The problem now is that we are no longer homogenous, and our social game is becoming increasingly competitive. The simple fact is that the basic ruleset our society operates off is in fact fragile. Being fragile, it can't hope to handle high-stakes competition between cultural factions of the sort we now enjoy.
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As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?
Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.
Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?
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[EDIT] - Nope, can't leave it there.
You appeal to the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Any given ruleset can claim that it's an improvement or even optimal from a Rawlsian point of view. How should people assess such claims? Why should people accept claims that a given Rawlsian assessment is rigorous and reliable? If people disagree over an assessment, how can we resolve that conflict?
I argue that appeals to Rawls are just another dead-end, for the same reason appeals to law or the Constitution are dead-ends. Rawls doesn't actually provide a way to ensure good-faith cooperation, and without confidence in good-faith cooperation, none of the rest of these arguments matter.
So, a few off-the-cuff remarks while I digest your larger point.
I used to think so, but given the obvious failure of the liberal ruleset in preventing enemy take-over, I obviously have to reassess my position. This admittedly half-baked post is part of that process. Many here pointed out that this ruleset can only work in somewhat homogeneous societies, which I am not quite sure about. Another thought is that the ruleset only works as long as it's enforced by a crypto-oligarchy of benevolent liberal true believers (this would explain the late 90s).
Yeah, Rawls himself was struggling with this quite a bit IIRC. His solution, the "reflective equilibrium" is a pretty big cop out, because it translates to "we, uhm, take all the facts into account, think about it real hard, and try to have them match lol idk".
But that was not my point. My point is that Rawlsian fairness is a regulative ideal. Whether a certain situation or proposed solution comes closer to it than a given alternative is up for debate. But my point is that the perceived validity of that regulative ideal as an aspiration is in decline and has been replaced by a tribalistic spoils system.
This really describes the crux of the issue perfectly. I am afraid I am unable to disagree.
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That's a very insightful comment, thank you! I will need to mull it over for a bit.
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