The Limits of Principle

Code vs Reality

What has emerged over the past 24 hours is something wonderful. We have all been smacked in the face by a bracing change that brings a moment of joy to people who have suffered a travesty of governance for over two decades. The capture and extradition of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to the United States is a victory for democracy. The military operation that took place was one of those kinds of triumphs that people will be talking about for years, that is to say people who care about military history. As one who has worked with Venezuelan exiles for many years, I understand their celebrations and support for this dramatic act.

The Rude Retort
There’s a caveat for which I expect rigorous arguments to be made. “It’s not Constitutional”. Here’s my short answer. Maybe it’s not. If so, then there is a Constitutional way to handle the matter of violations of the Constitution. Shutup and get on the docket.

Here is a link to the principled dissent as expressed by Connor Boyack. The most salient points I see are the following:

You want a country of laws? Then act like law matters when it’s inconvenient.

Stop treating the Constitution as a decoration.
Stop citing precedent as if it were permission.
Stop excusing today’s overreach because you hate today’s target.

Because the bill always comes due, and the payment is usually made by people who never voted for the war, never authorized the mission, and never wanted their country turned into the kind of thing it once claimed to oppose.

So yes, we can answer James Madison’s question: “Will it be sufficient… to trust to these parchment barriers (i.e., the Constitution) against the encroaching spirit of power?” Obviously not. Parchment only restrains power when the people treat it as a leash—not a suggestion. When half the country cheers the leash getting snapped because their guy did it to their enemy, the paper might as well not exist. And that's the cycle we've long been in.

His summarization:

Maduro’s capture illustrates what I believe is one of the biggest problems in politics: people frequently treat principles as costumes—worn when convenient, discarded when costly.

My argument against this dissent can be summed up this way.

A fixed set of principles is sufficient to constrain the legal actions of a government, but they are insufficient to direct the appropriate moral actions of a nation.

There are any number of qualifications I might try to wordsmith into that sentence, but I will let it stand, which foreshadows precisely what I’m talking about, which is a kind of Kantian defense of moral intent.

A Game Theoretical Framework
I should also mention that my argument contra this particular dissent also covers those similar which reference international law. And since I know many of my readers are intrigued by my particular ethnic background, I’m going to provide the first example directly to the applicability of the Constitution. What I’m talking about of course is the Underground Railroad.

Moral resolve

I composed this picture in the style of painter John Singer Sargent, because I want to evoke something beyond the constraints of words in my communication to you. And I wish to express that I see these two as exemplars of heroes of our nation. They are praying together, which is something they would do whether or not it was expressly allowed by the letter of the constitutional law. Their aims, to deprive men of their legal property is sanctioned and encouraged by their religious beliefs which constitute defiance of another set of principles, namely that of the American Constitution.

Yet we know they are not a government, and for them the 14th and 15th Amendments to that Constitution do not exist. Yet they are taking action in the establishment, operation and maintenance of the Underground Railroad, secreting slaves towards freedom. We know they were motivated by Christian ethics, but the Bible didn’t show them how to shoot the guns on the table between them. They combined a number of different principles from independent sources to meet the challenges of the day. There wasn’t simply one framework. They weren’t just ‘doing their jobs’. They were going to war. They were calling on a broader set of incentives and putting everything on the line to achieve their aims.

This is why appeals to constitutional principle or to international law fall short. There is no constitutional principle to ‘save the planet from anthropogenic climate change’, but certain people expect our government to do so. There is no international law without international law enforcement, and there is no constitution of international law enforcement for the very same reason there is no enforcement of climate change interdiction. There’s just a very nice set of principles for people to agree upon, on something that is not even international law. I should state for the record that on the Paris Accords, I think it’s the height of hubris to make a political statement calling for regulation of the weather.

This, incidently, is why atrocities occur. The United Nations doesn’t stop kinetic conflicts or ethnic purges. They issue statements of principle.

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The Failure of Abstraction
What I understand is that there is no comprehensive set of rules possible to make the proper constraints and incentives generate the proper actions in people. So what’s important to know is that people come up with these virtuous or vile actions on their own. People often don’t understand exactly what motivates them to behave as they do. But we can create abstractions of those motivations and call them reasons. Even when those ‘reasons’ are purely emotional. We abstract them and try to determine intent and we mutually go around and guesstimate what they were thinking. We do so in order to come up with rules, and laws and codes that we can put together like building blocks of order. We want to intercede or interact or contravene or prohibit. We want frameworks of rules.

I understand this because such things are the underpinnings of my profession, of computer science, game theory, economics, law, religion and philosophy. I guess politics too. These are all vectors of organizing human thinking - and of course part of what is beeing attempted in artificial intelligence is to capture, square by square, more aspects of human cognition and computation. Our perceptions. Our executive actions. Why not have a machine do it? And what have we learned in all of our computational experience? You cannot simply program a machine to be a human being. You cannot write enough code with enough logic and exceptions to make a single individual human being behave in reality. You can’t even simulate it well. Everything is lost in the abstraction because it’s too angular - we draw straight lines where there are curves. We draw circles where there are fractal infinities. Abstractions fail. Every analogy has its limits.

Yet we still try to create order from chaos. We continue to abstract. We know when things get out of kilter and we use our powers to restrain ourselves and others. We admire the virtues of moderation, discipline, circumspection, discernment, logical rigor. At any moment I could ask “Discernment about what?” and you would have infinite answers and we’d have to go down that rabbit hole. Because reality has nooks and crannies and we can’t simply point to some axiom of our religions, some paragraph in our policy, some postulate in our playbook and declare This Is The Way. Well, we can and we do, but we’re lucky to bat .300 on what real life pitches.

We Are Still Apes
Some call us the rational ape. That’s a pretty nice abstraction. Like all apes, we have dominance hierarchies and all kinds of ways to express them. They are our unwritten rules, and we all know them from baby babbles to booty shakes to raised fists. I recognize a certain disgust we express for each other when wankers among us behave like silly bastards and poutingly point to the rules on the wall. That’s an attempt at expressing dominance as well, so is my disrespectful description.

What’s unquestionable right now is that a tyrant is in custody and our neighbor Venezuelans have infinitely more possibilities today than they had a week ago. So putting one ape in a cage serves a lot of beneficial purposes, more than what has been written and ratified.

Hurrah!

P.S. Don’t call Maduro “President”. He wasn’t duly elected and doesn’t deserve that respect.