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No because adherance to social norms implies a higher likelihood of being better adapted to ones environment. Being maladapted, I naively assume*, being as likely to arise from an adapted equilibrium maintianing piece of information being flipped to more or less adaptive.
So that your predilections may not have been accepted in the past gives the information that something in you is broken from that equilibrium, and it might not have a monotonic effect, i.e., the biological, DNA, hormonal,etc or cultural, etc driver that is the root cause of the downstream behavioural manifestation may do other things too that we can't see. Or it is posisble that the non conventional behavior has second or higher order negative consequences in our environment thst wr are unaware of. All we know is that it is at best 50/50 beneficial to you, and might be actually very bad for us.
So in conclusion it is actually entirely reasonable to use adherance to social norms to inform whether someone is more or less likely to engage in criminal behaviour, if we assume wuch behaviour is not the wrll adapted norm in our society. However, it might be reasonable for the maintenance of power for a regime to give the appearance of blind justice, etc formal procedural laws not influenced by this entirely salient and freely available information, in which case the judge has to appear not to give any credence (but if not maladapted themsleves will be aware of).
Or it is possible – and should be the default assumption unless you're some kind of ultra-reactionary who thinks the world has only got worse since the 18th century – that people in the past had irrational, unfounded, capricious prejudices, the elimination of which has resulted in a better society for everyone. With this corrected prior, you would have arrived at a very different probability from 50/50.
Yes, sometimes the fence is there for a good reason, but in many cases it's only there because if anyone suggests removing it, he'll get laughed at or ostracized or "all citizens [will] unite to kill that person".
I really don't understand this impulse, apparently relatively common on TheMotte, whenever someone suggests that some widespread belief or practice is irrational and arbitrary, to try to find a brain-genius-tier explanation for why it actually makes perfect sense. OK, fine, maybe religion is so universal because, as atheists fail to understand, it keeps society stable and is a good mechanism to promote pro-social norms and strengthen communal ties, and so forth; but why must a mammal both chew cud and have cloven hooves to be edible? Why is music haram? Why is a beaver a fish during Lent?
Sorry, but sometimes something that seems silly at first glance is still silly after a careful analysis that considers the possibility of higher-order effects and the broader historical and social context.
Whether something seems silly, is silly, or is not is completely and utterly irrelevant to my point.
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