Science fiction tells us all laws are local -- just like the Web

My latest Locus column, "A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web," is up: it's a piece on the way that science fiction's insistence that all laws are local prefigures the web's weird and wonderful diversity:

One of science fiction's greatest tricks is playing ''vast, cool intelligence'' and peering through a Martian telescope aimed Earthwards and noticing just how weird and irrational we all are. At its best, science fiction is a literature that can use the safe distance of an alien world or a distant future as a buffer-zone in which all mores can be called into question - think, for example, of Theodore Sturgeon's story of the planet of enthusiastic incest-practitioners, ''If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?'' published in Dangerous Visions in 1967.

Behind every torturer's mask, behind every terrible crusade, behind every book-burning and war-drum is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local. Forgetting that all laws are local is the ultimate in hubris, and it is the province of yokels and bumpkins who assume that just because they do something in a particular way, all right-thinking people always have and always will. For a mild contemporary example, consider the TV executive who blithely asserts that her industry is safe, because no matter what happens in the future, the majority of us will want to come home, flop down on the sofa, and turn on the goggle-box - despite the fact that TV has existed for less than a century, a flashing eyeblink in the long history of hominids, most of whom have gotten by just fine without anesthetizing themselves with a sitcom at the end of a long day.

Which is not to say that cosmopolitans don't believe in anything. To be cosmopolitan is to know that all laws are local, and to use that intellectual liberty to decide for yourself what moral code you'll subscribe to. It is the freedom to invent your own ethics from the ground up, knowing that the larger social code you're rejecting is no more or less right than your own - at least from the point of view of a Martian peering through a notional telescope at us piddling Earthlings.

Cory Doctorow: A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web

• [Kosmoid]

  To say that morality is invented is the ultimate in cynicism.

  A soldier fighting for his or her country in a war is following a long-honored tradition of defending the homeland. If that person comes to a different moral stance because of the experience of killing, you’re going to say that that person is inventing something? Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 comes to mind, where the military’s view was that the soldiers who come to the conclusion that war is insane are the most sane, and therefore need to be sent back into combat. The insane soldier will not realize this, and therefore wouldn’t ask to be removed from combat.

  Tell that to the veteran with PTSD. “You invented this, it’s all in your head.”

  Is vegetarianism an invention?

  And, I don’t see where this is particular to sci-fi.

  • [zio_donnie]

    Sorry but yes morality is invented, in fact there are more that a few “moralities”. The glorious soldier of your example (PTSD or not) is someone else’s baby killer. “Long honored traditions” are local tribes’ customs not universal truths.

    And yes vegetarianism is an invention. If left alone homo sapiens will eat everything other homo sapiens included.

    • [Kosmoid]

      “If left alone…”

      It happens more often than you might think.

      There’s Huck Finn, lying on his back on the raft at night, floating down the river, staring up at the stars, thinking about his place in the vastness of creation, having his existential moment.

      I clipped this from somewhere on the Web:

      “Ernest Hemingway declared that ‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.’ T. S. Eliot called it a ‘masterpiece.’”

      • [zio_donnie]

        Both Twain and Hemingway are modern Western thought products. Hardly universal. It would be interesting to know what Indian, Chinese or ancient Egyptians would think if left alone.

        Out of my mind i think of the Spartans that found killing non perfect infants and preferring death to dishonor was their harmony with the universe. In fact their model prevailed (albeit temporarily) over the much celebrated in history Athenians.

        No doubt there are many examples of people and cultures that ,when left alone, have existential moments radically different from Huck Finn’s.

        Epiphany is a bitch, you can get Jesus Christ or Chengis Han.

    • [cuvtixo]

      “If left alone homo sapiens will eat everything other homo sapiens included.” Then why didn’t our ancestors eat eachother into extinction? “Left alone”- does that mean without the magic man in the sky to teach us not to eat eachother?

      • [John Greg]

        “Then why didn’t our ancestors eat each other into extinction?”

        Because tribes/species who practice cannibalism generally do their grocery shopping outside the tribe for the simple fact that all species have an understanding (so to speak) that you cannot eat yourself and survive. It’s in the genes.

        Also, for most human groups that practiced cannibalism, it was not the sole source of food, and was often a ritualized procedure rather than a basic sustenance procedure.

        If practicing cannibalism began to lead to tribal/group extinction, survivial mechanisms would kick in directing the tribe/group to change its food source, and if that were not immediately possible then given enough time evolution would solve/select for different nutritional requirements; if such simply were not not available then tribal/group extinction would in fact happen.

• [floraldeoderant]

  It seems like everyone’s conflating legality with morality, which are two very different things. Morality only occasionally informs legality.

  Also, in relation to people talking how ‘relative morality’ is entirely neutral– how my morality is no better than your morality, I would point you to Sam Harris (his books are good, but his TED talk is a pretty concise peek into his philosophy), where he provides a framework for talking about morality intelligently.

  I mean, come on. Do you really believe that when a girl is raped, if her father’s first response is to kill her out of shame (relatively common in rural Afghanistan), or help her through years of support and therapy (typical in most South African families, or French, or American), that those two responses are morally equivalent? (Totally Sam Harris’ example, fyi). I don’t think so.

  His talk is highly recommended.

• [robulus]

  I don’t know. Moral relativism is all good and well when it means accepting the validity of another social group’s cultural idiosyncrasies, but once they start circumcising women or rounding up Jewish folks, I’m an absolutist. Or maybe a universalist. I just wikied that and it sounds heaps better.

• [Anonymous]

  blah blah blah

  my morality is no better than your morality

  blah blah

  “Better” is part of your morality.

  If anybody wants to have a “higher-level” discussion, outside of the subjectivity of somebody’s morality, they have to stop asserting value judgments about anything. That includes “better” and “no better,” “valid” and “invalid” and “right” and “wrong” and any further clever synonyms you’d like to invent for the purpose. You can discuss objectively verifiable facts about particular people and examples of their actual behavior.

  You wanna talk about what’s “valid” or “invalid,” you gotta climb back down into subjectiveland with everybody else, where some things are OK and other things are not OK, and anybody sane already knows that just means they’re not OK with the particular people talking about it right now.

  Even if they have no vocabulary to deal with it rigorously.

• [Anonymous]

  Cory Doctorow thinks physical reality is bound by the rules of fiction. Wonderful!

  Next he’s going to be telling us how his dreams are real and how reality “snaps back” into shape when he wakes up.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Quite a few of us think something like that.

• [Keneke]

  Since ethics are utilitarian to society, a top-down dissection of ethics, as with sci-fi, is entertaining, but I think it misses the main point – that morality’s subjectivity (or lack thereof) serves a purpose to life, and therefore doesn’t really stand alone as an entity to be accepted or rejected. It’s like saying that a car’s tire size is this standalone thing, and that this tire size or that tire size is objectively better or subjectively appropriate. Even saying that ethics (or tire size) is arbitrary doesn’t quite approach the reality, which is that tire size is so intertwined with more important factors (size and function of vehicle) that to say tire size is arbitary and meaningless is as wrong as saying tire size is objectively true in all cases. It’s simply a shorthand for a very complex utilitarianism, and having fun with moral differences, such as the short story you mentioned, is similar to the “1 = 0″ proof.

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Morality is exclusively concerned with justice: but law is involved with a great deal more than justice alone.

    As a matter of fact, law and justice need not walk together at all.

    But it is nice when they do, as they make a great couple, and as such, form an excellent adornment to any society.

• [Anonymous]

  In our increasingly fragmented society, one persons’ “cosmopolitan” is anothers’ yokel. Cory Doctorow is, I think, falling into the trap of denying an essential human nature because it has a liberating effect; we don’t have to apply the same considerations to “ours” that others do “theirs”. This does nothing to bind us together, something the classic cosmopolitan should concern themselves with. He does not deny an essential nature because it is a fallacious concept.
  There is no individualized “moral code”. A moral code depends on an understanding of yourself in terms others. To think that we can be liberated from this concern is not science fiction, it is fantasy.

• [cuvtixo]

  I’d rephrase the statement, all traditions are local. Murder (arbitrary killing, not sacrifice or dueling or honor killing) is not morally relative. And I think that “morality” may be encoded in our genes. What species of random killers could exist without its members destroying each other very quickly?
  All sexual species have at least have rules to ensure reproduction (Praying mantes are an extreme example, as females often eat the head of the male before mating… but, the male then fulfills his function without his head or brain) On this level the “laws” are more like laws of physics or chemistry and not matters of good or evil. “Thou shalt not annihilate your own species” is an example of a non-local law.

  • [zio_donnie]

    Before talking about genetically encoded ethics read this:

    http://www.doublex.com/blog/oystersgarter/dark-secrets-dolphins-dont-want-you-know

    There is at least one species that practices infanticide for no reason. I think i read something similar about apes or monkeys but i can’t find a link right now.

    • [cuvtixo]

      I’d argue its not “for no reason.” Vicious, bloodthirsty by our standards, perhaps even evil. “Nature red in tooth and claw” but perhaps there’s very specific even elaborate rules for infanticide. “laws.”

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    As far as I can tell, the closest to a universal human morality around killing is that it’s hunky dorey to kill outside your tribe.

• [Kosmoid]

  “It is the freedom to invent your own ethics from the ground up, knowing that the larger social code you’re rejecting is no more or less right than your own…”

  Once he escaped on the raft Huckleberry Finn realized he needn’t turn Jim in as a runaway slave.

  Post-modernism appears in fiction as early as 1884.

• [kateling]

  This is interesting. It sounds like pure moral relativism: my law is no more inherently right than your law, and if you think killing people and taking their stuff is wrong, well, my “invented from the ground up” ethics disagree. I suspect that’s not actually what you’re saying, and probably I should read the whole column…

  There needs to be some recognition that your right to do whatever you want doesn’t extend to infringing on my freedom to do the same.

  • [Tynam]

    @kateling: The point is that morality is invented, and always has been. At least if we invent ethics from the group up we’re aware that we invented them, and can improve and change them as better ideas come along.

    (For example, your final sentence expresses perfectly one simple, workable ethic.)

    The problem with morality is that humans frequently behave as if their local customs and arbitrarily-imposed morals had some kind of ethical meaning.

  • [shadowfirebird]

    “There needs to be some recognition that your right to do whatever you want doesn’t extend to infringing on my freedom to do the same.”

    In order to get that, just keep thinking about moral relativism. If my law is not intrinsically worse than yours, then it’s not not better, either.

    If your system is equal to my own, but different, I had better not include anything in my system that assumes otherwise … and neither should you.

    Practical example: “thou shalt not kill” no longer applies in the world of moral relativism. But I had better not make a rule that says I have the right to kill anyone else out of hand, because my rules are no better than yours, and you might just conceivably have a rule that says “don’t kill me”.

    Put simply: taken to it’s logical conclusion, moral relativism implies equality and co-operation, not sociopathy.

    • [Anonymous]

      By that logic I can’t kill, but I also can’t get married, because someone might have a rule about people like me marrying. There is a step missing between that and equality.

  • [Anonymous]

    This is interesting. It sounds like pure moral relativism: my law is no more inherently right than your law

    The error in “moral relativism” is the assumption that because “rightness” is subjective and not “inherent,” that rightness and wrongness should not matter to educated and enlightened people.

    We’re talking about literature here, not debating public policy. There’s no need to get offended about the unethical behavior of imaginary people.

    There needs to be some recognition that your right to do whatever you want doesn’t extend to infringing on my freedom to do the same.

    Oh give it a rest. This argument has been advanced to defend everything from beating your kids to dumping toxins in a river because some you think you “own” it, and can justify or excuse anything you could imagine.

• [legionabstract]

  Well, we’re talking about two things here, right? One, social conventions, and two, ethics and morality and cultural relativism.

  I think that Cory was mostly talking about social conventions, which are neither right nor wrong; from a moral or ethical point of view they’re trivialities, and why shouldn’t we decide them on our own?

  Like many other people, I’m pretty sure I know the difference between right and wrong, and that it applies to all humans. But that doesn’t mean that everybody shouldn’t go through the same process of figuring that stuff out, and coming up with their own approximation of Good. Chances are there’ll be enough overlap that we can all get along.

• [Javier Candeira]

  If you haven’t read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s rationalist fable The Baby-Eating Aliens, you are in for a real treat. It’s all about all ethics being local, meaning that “universal” ethics are local to your species.

  Fantastically well done with lots of throwaway twists. It even has two endings, in a bit of a j’adoube where he wrote one and later realised he had a better one.

• [TooGoodToCheck]

  ha. I saw the title of this post, and at first I thought it was going to be some awesome physics conjecture. Like, that maybe the universal constants aren’t actually constant or something.

  To hear that the rules of human behavior are subject to context seems like a bit of a letdown now by comparison.

• [Rayonic]

  If all moral and social codes are equal then that includes the cosmopolitan view. Thus it’d be hypocritical to look down on the “yokels” of the world for not sharing your beliefs.

  I’m mostly just arguing, but you get the idea. Personally I’d say that some laws are “local” to the human race. None come to mind that haven’t been culturally broken at some point, but that might just be because they’re so pervasive. Most authors are human, after all.

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    That reminds me of the classic objection against logical positivism — that it is inconsistent because the requirement that meaningful assertions must be verifiable is not in itself verifiable. Such objections seem more like rhetoric than serious arguments.

• [Goblin]

  Cory, you still haven’t explained what you mean by “all laws are local” and “no law knows how local it is”, and I think I know why.

  You are ignoring the timeless and ever present law of violence that has ruled, and still rules, human society.

  In my measure, this is the one social norm that never changes either through time or through culture. What changes are the social norms evolve around this lowest common denominator. Law is based on dispute resolution prior to engaging in pure violence as a means to settle disputes. You can reject as much of the second-tier, or “moral” if you will, norms of your peers, but you cannot reject the omniscient norm of violence. And therefore you cannot reject law which is based on the principles of dispute resolution and prevention of this shared violence.

  No once cares about your sweater, but we do care if you place someone else in danger or injure them as a result of your actions. If you do, you may have also placed yourself at risk to retaliation from that person’s family and the process of dispute resolution is there to keep that violence from escalating.

  In ignorance of this common denominator, your article purely concerns itself with the part of norms that are not the lawful part. Your opening suggests that you are were going to discuss law yet your article deals purely with societal norms and not lawful ones. Is this intentional? You suggest a true cosmopolitan has no need for others’ society as he/she is only accountable to him/herself? Does this extend beyond their mode of dress? Does it mean they have re-claimed their right to decide when violence is and isn’t appropriate?

  I have no problems with strange and off-kilter social norms, but lawful norms and the ever vigilant presence of violence leaves me wanting more from your initial assertions. How exactly are laws ignorant of their own locality? Last time I checked the laws couldn’t think for themselves. It’s a strange turn of phrase that you fail to explain completely and I am asking you to elaborate. Just how are all laws local? And how are they also somehow ignorant of that fact?

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    “Just how are all laws local?”

    If you wish to know “What is the Law?”, then you must first specify both the place; and also to specify the time. The question must needs be “localized”, to be capable of a response.

    For example, what is the law of the inheritance of real estate: do the children share equally, or does the eldest child take all? Does the sex of that child matter? Or its age?

    To answer the questions, the discussion must specify where and when, which society, is being discussed: for the laws as to such questions differ from nation to nation, and from time to time, as ages pass.

    • [Goblin]

      Ahh, so you chose the less interesting first half. If that is indeed true, then the second half of Cory’s contention is complete posh! Since the lawyer has indeed studied the “local” law. Thus the law “knows” that it is localized. There is actually an official terms for this locality, it is called jurisdiction.

      So if this is the case how can the law not know what jurisdiction it pertains too? What laws are we talking about? See why I asked for clarification?

      • [Ugly Canuck]

        I must confess…I’ve not RTFA, I just responded to yer post #43….I am not capable of defending whatever theses Mr Doctorow was seeking to advance.

        I just wanted to point out, that it is a fact that all “law” – “law” in the juridical sense (as distinct from, and in this sense differing from, the use of “law” in the scientific sense) – is ALWAYS specifiable to a certain place, at a certain time.
        And in that juridical sense of the word, all “law” is local.

        While with scientific laws the case is very much the opposite – such laws are universal and timeless.

    • [Ugly Canuck]

      And if you need to know the law as it is here and now, you’ll have to seek out and retain a competent lawyer – one competent in the present laws of your local jurisdiction, of course.

• [DoctorMantis]

  >>is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local

  It’s not that they don’t know or have forgotten, for the most part they either disagree or don’t care. It’s not like explaining it will change their minds. Torturers are not pie in the sky idealists, they’re sociopaths, they could care less about laws.

• [Kosmoid]

  Cory, I think you use of the word “invent” is causing the problems.

  It suggests that people can ignore their moral codes if it is expedient for the situation.

• [gwailo_joe]

  OK, OK. . .

  Thank you Cory for interesting article: well written and written Mad -the best way-

  And kudos to #1 for bringing up Twain. . .that fella was an American genius.

  I like these comments, mix it up: write what you think!

  My take: all this moral relativism is moot. I never read Theodore Sturgeon’s ”If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”. . .and I will. But for this argument; just by reading the title and looking at the date written it so obviously had a huge Civil-Rights sub-text. But it questions such ‘basic’ human sociological interests as “don’t muddy the gene pool!”

  Though the premise brings to mind some dark examples of post-war Japanese cinema. . .but no indeed I won’t give them here.

  No, my laws and my beliefs and my personal or cultural superstitions may or may not be the end all and be all (God forbid). . .but don’t let the high-falutin-writers-mind-imagining-worlds-unimagined distract from the basic premise: it’s a human thing.

  We are human ape-type folks evolved to the Nth degree right here right now. But cultural mores are a mutha: “To be cosmopolitan is to know that all laws are local, and to use that intellectual liberty to decide for yourself what moral code you’ll subscribe to.”

  Aye. THERE’S the rub. . .

  Only in our ModernRich, FirstWorld, InterSphere where the Powers That Be are too busy feathering nests and calling shots the plebs don’t care about is such Freedom allowed. Enjoy it.

  It won’t always be this free and easy. . .I’ve read enough sci-fi AND history to know that much.

• [Anonymous]

  Actually “invent” is probably the best word. It makes it clear that moral systems are constructed by humans. But it at least allows for the possibility that they can be better or worse as systems. Say in the same way that some human-built cars are better or worse than others: moral absolutism is thinking everybody needs the same vehicle, but the key problem with moral relativism is not recognizing that Pintos aren’t good to use.

  • [redsquares]

    You, user of goofy – yet practical – isomorphisms, deserve an applause.

• [Anonymous]

  I mostly agree. I understand morality simply to be a set of mores imposed (like everything else) by some combination of genetics and upbringing, and this is understanding frees me to choose my own guiding principles.

  The simple rule I’ve decided upon is that there is a certain kind of world I want to live in, and I act in such a way as to (try to) bring this about. This choice of world is not special or better than anyone else’s. But it is mine, and one nice thing about recognizing one’s principles as one’s own is that you don’t need anyone else’s approval or agreement to enact them or impose them on others. If there were something wrong with that, after all, that would itself be a global law.

• [GuidoDavid]

  That Sturgeon story strikes me as a really, really poor choice for this argument. Yes, the planet was certainly unique, but the reaction of other people to that planet was almost completely unanimous condemnation. I had heard a lot of good things about the story, but I thought it was naive and artificially making the whole planet martyrs. That story assumed that a whole galaxy of people, except the ones from that special planet would behave in exactly the same way.

  I mean, people are going to turn down cheaper raw materials and awesome tech, because they do not like that the people from that planet fuck their daughters consensually? really?. Yes, right, that is why nobody makes commerce with Saudi Arabia or China. Oh, wait.

  I hated the story in the end, I thought it was incredibly narrow minded while trying to be transgressive. In a galaxy full of worlds with unique cultures such a thing would only be a peculiarity and assuming everybody is going to have our morals in 20 thousand years is absurd.

  To me, the perfect illustration of the point of the article would be pretty much any book of the Culture series by Banks. There we have local laws that vary wildly and indeed a society where there are no laws at all, but still manages to try to impose its moral code on lesser civilizations with barbaric customs.

• [zio_donnie]

  While i think that it is an interesting exercise to think that everything is local or subjective (which most probably is) i do not think that SciFi is an example of objectiveness.

  Your example:

  “Behind every torturer’s mask, behind every terrible crusade, behind every book-burning and war-drum is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local.”

  My exact opposite example

  “Behind every volunteer doctor’s mask, behind every life saving crusade, behind every charity and help campaign is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local.”

  You choose to use some situations as “negative” examples while the same thing is valid for the “positive” ones. Ergo your whole argument is based on some kind of ethic where there is “good” and “evil”. Which by itself means that the out of earth observer is partial.

  A cannibal has good motives to eat human flesh pretty much as Lord Byron had to give his life for the Greek independence.

  The Sci-Fi example just takes a “standard good” (as in killing people for profit is bad) ethic and makes it universal contradicting the point of the exercise. If all laws are local there is a place where “killing people for profit” is good.

  • [shadowfirebird]

    “Behind every volunteer doctor’s mask, behind every life saving crusade, behind every charity and help campaign is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local.”

    You’re saying that people only do altruistic acts because they have a concept of absolute good? Sorry, I don’t buy that.

    It sounds like the tired old argument that without an external moral system, people would only act selfishly. “Without the ten commandments, murder would be commonplace.”

    People act altruistically for a lot of different reasons, but ultimately, they do it because they think it is the right thing to do. That sense of rightness does not have to come from some external moral code.

    • [zio_donnie]

      Nop i was not saying that. I said that if all is relative (“local” in the original post) doing “good” is equal to doing “bad”. There is not good or bad just local perception or individual drives to act in a way or another. What seems “bad” to you seems “good” to somebody else.

    • [IsolatedGestalt]

      @shadowfirebird:

      It sounds like the tired old argument that without an external moral system, people would only act selfishly. “Without the ten commandments, murder would be commonplace.” People act altruistically for a lot of different reasons, but ultimately, they do it because they think it is the right thing to do. That sense of rightness does not have to come from some external moral code.

      On the contrary, that “sense of rightness” very much comes from “some external moral code”. The original point was that “some external moral code” is not necessarily the same as “my external moral code”.

• [Satellite Direct]

  All laws are bound by the morals practiced by society. Even though we hate to admit, it all boils down to what and where the laws are dictated. true story! =)

• [IsolatedGestalt]

  I’d have to say that there’s a pretty big difference between a law being merely “local” (i.e. tied to one place/time/culture) and “arbitrary”. Just because a set of mores exists in place A but not in place B does not mean that it is necessarily invalid in place A (it doesn’t imply the opposite, either, of course).

  @Tynam, @kateling: I disagree that “morality is invented“; I propose that morality is derived. Those who share the basis will share the morality, and those who don’t will have difficulty recognizing the value metrics within that morality. This is why the idea of local laws is not moral relativism; the claim is not, “all laws are equally valid”, but rather that different laws may have similar validity when measured by local metrics.