I think #2 is really interesting. What do you do about bad, incompetent, or corrupt but not evil laws? The rule of law obviously has benefits for society, but many laws are suboptimal. There would probably be harmful nth order effects if people just went around ignoring laws they didn’t like despite how noble their intentions were.
I’m not sure how to balance this with for example, Uber/ridesharing — which has made the world a better place. But Uber couldn’t just ask the taxi cab medallion owners (and their local politician buddies) if they could ruin their racket. Now that Uber exists and is working, the coalition of Uber + drivers + riders incentivizes politicians to keep it legal. We could only get to this point through the illegal actions of Uber.
I think one answer is Ben Thompson of Stratechery’s Hero Paradox. In the Chinese movie Hero, a man is hired to assassinate an emperor during the Warring States period. But when he realizes that the emperor shares his ideals of a unified and peaceful China, he decides to turn himself and his collaborators in. For this, he is a hero for serving the common good, but he is still executed for his crime of trying to kill the emperor. And thus, he is buried a hero.
I think #2 is really interesting. What do you do about bad, incompetent, or corrupt but not evil laws? The rule of law obviously has benefits for society, but many laws are suboptimal. There would probably be harmful nth order effects if people just went around ignoring laws they didn’t like despite how noble their intentions were.
I’m not sure how to balance this with for example, Uber/ridesharing — which has made the world a better place. But Uber couldn’t just ask the taxi cab medallion owners (and their local politician buddies) if they could ruin their racket. Now that Uber exists and is working, the coalition of Uber + drivers + riders incentivizes politicians to keep it legal. We could only get to this point through the illegal actions of Uber.
I think one answer is Ben Thompson of Stratechery’s Hero Paradox. In the Chinese movie Hero, a man is hired to assassinate an emperor during the Warring States period. But when he realizes that the emperor shares his ideals of a unified and peaceful China, he decides to turn himself and his collaborators in. For this, he is a hero for serving the common good, but he is still executed for his crime of trying to kill the emperor. And thus, he is buried a hero.