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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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This seems unnecessarily defeatist. The law is ultimately semi-formalised human judgements, and humans are perfectly capable of making judgements without rigid rubrics.

Except a major strain of liberalism (I keep going back to what Michael Munger said in an interview as an example, where he compared all power and authority to the One Ring) holds that, no, human judgement can't be trusted, not in matters of governance, and that the whole liberal project — Weber's "rationalization" and "bureaucratization" — is about replacing all human judgement, in matters of authority, with procedure. With algorithms, based in "rigid rubrics," with no exceptional cases, such that any human beings remaining in government are quality-agnostic carbon hardware upon which that software runs, like the man in Searle's Chinese room. "I don't make the rules, I just follow them" and all that. A set of algorithms so complete, so perfect in aligning incentives, that, per Kant, they can produce optimal outcomes even from a "society of rational devils." Systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, as T.S. Eliot put it.

(And isn't fully formalized human (moral) judgements the aim of "alignment"?)