The Economics of Social Punishment and the three kinds of morality

According to a poster on Quora there are 3 different kinds of morality.

De facto morality
De jure morality
Theoretic morality

De facto (/deɪ ˈfæktoʊ/), Latin for "in fact", describes practices that exist in reality, even if not legally authorized.[1][2][3] It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with de jure ("in law"), which refers to things that happen according to law. Unofficial customs that are widely accepted are sometimes called the de facto standard.

De facto morality is the morality dictated by public opinion, authority, and the defacto mores of the older generation. To adhere to de factor morality means to adhere to public sentiment using devices like opinion polls (what is currently thought to be right is morally right).

In law and government, de jure (/deɪ ˈdʒʊrɪ/; Latin: de iure, "in law") describes practices that are legally recognized by official laws.[1] In contrast, de facto ("in fact" or "in practice") describes situations that are generally known to exist in reality, even if not legally authorized.[2] The terms are often used to contrast different scenarios, for example, "I know that, de jure, this is supposed to be a parking lot, but now that the flood has left four feet of water here, it’s a de facto swimming pool".[3]

De jure on the other hand are the written laws, as interpreted by the courts, which in my opinion may or may not reflect de facto morality. In general, de facto morality is the basis behind voter sentiment as well.

To simplify, de facto represents the unwritten laws of society. De jure represents the written laws of society. What must be understood is that:

Extrajudicial punishments do exist in society
Not all laws are knowable in advance

According to law enforcement: "Ignorance is no excuse". Yet it doesn't change the fact that almost everyone is ignorant of the law.

The rationale of the doctrine is that if ignorance were an excuse, a person charged with criminal offenses or a subject of a civil lawsuit would merely claim that one was unaware of the law in question to avoid liability, even if that person really does know what the law in question is. Thus, the law imputes knowledge of all laws to all persons within the jurisdiction no matter how transiently. Even though it would be impossible, even for someone with substantial legal training, to be aware of every law in operation in every aspect of a state's activities, this is the price paid to ensure that willful blindness cannot become the basis of exculpation.

In the case of ethics it's even worse because most people don't know public sentiment and if they discover it then it's only after having enough life experience. Even people who know it do not have the ability necessarily to track every change in real time.

If we look at examples from history we can see that racism for example produced written and unwritten laws in the US south which were enforced both judicially and extrajudicially (by terrorist groups like the KKK). What this shows is that ultimately public sentiment has the greatest sway even over the written laws as all who are elected must in effect win a sort of popularity contest.

The economics of social punishment

Social shunning, rejection, are forms of regulatory behaviors which enforce social norms. Reputation ultimately is what people wish to maintain and certain behaviors come at a cost to that reputation. A paper which may show itself to be critical to the future development of many cryptocurrencies is titled: "The economics of social punishment" and this paper explains a few concepts listed below:

The paper studies the problem "tragedy of the commons"
Analyzes the effect of network structure on the agents (participants)
Compliers are participants who comply with the social norm
Defectors are participants who do not comply with the social norm
The goal is to manage a renewable natural resource controlled by the social network
A sufficiently high share of compliers is required for the efficient management of the resource but this isn't sufficient in itself
The range of critical mass is high, between 0.4 and 0.96, which shows the share of compliers alone isn't a precise indicator for evaluating cooperativeness
Social pressure is an intangible good which can be given a monetary valuation

Eventually from the look of the paper we might develop a metric for determining the cooperativeness of a social network. That in itself will be a significant breakthrough.

References

Marco, Jorge and Goetz, Renan-Ulrich, Tragedy of the Commons and Evolutionary Games in Social Networks: The Economics of Social Punishment (July 7, 2017). FEEM Working Paper No. 35.2017. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2998546

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