Or did I miss where you EXPLICITLY said these were not to involve legal rules?
That's not how burden of proof generally works. You're essentially proving my point, which is that nothing in my post advocated for government intervention. All legal rules will have a moral basis - as being morally desirable, or morally undesirable. So, to label a set of rules as "moral" is better than not providing any label at all - a lot better - but it still doesn't rule out implied legal rules.
Not really. Do sugar subsidies have a moral basis? Does the monopoly of the U.S. Post Office over the mail have a moral basis? The latin/legal term for such laws is malum prohibitum - wrong because it is prohibited. But even if it were true that all laws have a moral basis, you're still adding an extra layer of argument that appears nowhere in my post. If my aim were truly to get some law passed (a particularly absurd assumption in this case, given the subject matter), isn't it more likely that I would have stated it outright? Immediately after discussing laws, and tyranny and lawbreakers and state control, you say "we need rules" which naturally leads to the assumption of laws and rules being the topic de jour. So the first two paragraphs were about laws, then in the very next paragraph you start to discuss "discretion" as if to contrast "laws" with "discretion" --- And you DON'T see why someone would misinterpret you!!!
This is tortured logic. I specifically *contrasted* public laws versus private conduct in my first paragraph to make it clear that I wasn't talking about the public sphere. Note the word "but," which contrasts public versus private in my argument. I said: We all grasp the importance of having fair notice of public laws. Law enforcement without notice is tyranny that can turn even the most docile citizens into lawbreakers at the whim of state control. But what about rules on private property, such as a home, business, or internet forum? Why do we need rules in these contexts, and is it moral for a property owner to operate solely through discretion?
From a plain reading of this introduction, the reader can logically conclude: 1) This post IS NOT concerned with public laws. 2) This post IS concerned with private (non-government) behavior 3) It is the property owner who decides whether to operate through rules or discretion. In case that was at all unclear, I concluded my topic with the following: Since all rule-based systems will leave some matters to discretion and vice versa, the property owner's choice is really where on the spectrum he wishes to operate. In light of the considerations above, property owners - especially owners of community-based properties such as online forums - should try to maximize rule-based decision-making to the extent they can, and only use discretion when necessary to deal with the unavoidable ambiguities present in any social arrangement.
This reaffirms that it is the property owner's "choice...where on the spectrum he wishes to operate." And in case the concept was *still* unclear to the reader, the following sentence again states that it is property owners who "should try to maximize rule-based decision-making" (not the government).
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