I also really dislike the fact that the language used would be very hard to a non-native English speaker, which makes me question how useful it is at solving the problems it is obviously addressing (cultural differences, social norms, etc.).
Reasonable Person Principle
41–50 of 120 posts
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#42What an excellent concise framework for handling interactions in a diverse undivided culture. I'm surprised I've never seen this before. There WILL be disagreements and conflict because so many things are not objective and there is no rational right answer. Guns, abortion, gender, rights everything has a gambit of perfectly reasonable and acceptable positions along its spectrum. Many of which are contrarian by nature…
The first method is the only workable one. The second is impossible: many peoples' morality absolutely requires that they impose their moral values on everyone around them. So "learning to live together" would require living by the moral codes of people you fundamentally disagree with.
Just as an example from your list: abortion. The pro-choice people would be perfectly happy to have legal access to abortions, and for anti-abortion people to simply not get any. That won't work for anti-abortion people, who will insist on legislatively banning all abortions (to varying degrees, to be fair). The only way to live peacefully with anti-abortion people is to simply give up and let them ban abortion. This obviously is unacceptable to pro-choice people. I can make similar arguments about many other moral positions, such as whether women should be allowed to drive or not.
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#43How is 'reasonable' different from 'rational'? And don't both these terms beg the question of ultimate ends and/or values?
A reasonable person gets you Ted Danson. A rational person is Larry David.
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#44"The Reasonable Person Principle is part of the unwritten culture of CMU computer science" Hmmmm.
How apt. Here is a principle that tries to define sane communication within a community and espouses flexibility and understanding. A hyperliteral reading of a statement that has a very reasonable interpretation (i.e., that it has been implicitly understood up to the point it was put to writing) is precisely why things like this exist. We are not debuggers and are expected to look beyond words and grasp intent.
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#45This just feels to me like one of those things that seems great on paper, then in practice requires a lot of things to line up to work as intended (like Communism?). I also really dislike the fact that the language used would be very hard to a non-native English speaker, which makes me question how useful it is at solving the problems it is obviously addressing (cultural differences, social norms, etc.).
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#46Expecting everyone within a group to be reasonable is not reasonable.
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#47Reasonableness requires self-awareness and an appreciation for the common good. Its staggering how absent those qualities are in many people, and how these attributes evaporate in the face of strong emotion. Regardless, the "Reasonable Person" is a staple in litigation, used as a benchmark for conduct where the specifics are too complicated or variable to consider individually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonabl…
Yep, in the US at least, I consider this a big flaw in the legal system, since "reasonable" people really don't exist in this country. The recent election is proof of this. We need a legal standard that doesn't rely on something that's fictional.
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#48It might be worthwhile to define this up front; this worthy advice seems to rest on an implicit understanding of 'reasonable' as meaning 'considerate' or 'not rocking the boat.'
Re: Reasonable Person Principle
#49What an excellent concise framework for handling interactions in a diverse undivided culture. I'm surprised I've never seen this before. There WILL be disagreements and conflict because so many things are not objective and there is no rational right answer. Guns, abortion, gender, rights everything has a gambit of perfectly reasonable and acceptable positions along its spectrum. Many of which are contrarian by nature…
>We solve this dilemma in one of two ways. Blood and fire until 'they' are gone or learning to live together despite having differing moral structures. The first method is the only workable one. The second is impossible: many peoples' morality absolutely requires that they impose their moral values on everyone around them. So "learning to live together" would require living by the moral codes of people you fundamenta…