# General vs Identity Rules Historically, more laws were based around identity rules - different rules applied to you whether you were a king, a noble. Different rules applied to people of different different religions, or guilds, or based on who your father had been. In [Persecution, Toleration, and the Rise of Modernity: An Interview with Historian Mark Koyama — Tides of History — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+Jf3pvQ1Iw/09:37) [[Mark Koyama]] points out that in Europe, over time rules have become more general, which has tended to make life better for most people. In a liberal framework, ideally governing would be done completely based on general rules. However, that is infeasible both because a you wouldn’t want to live in a world based on general rules and it’s actually impossible to have complete general rules. It’s impossible to have complete general rules because we live in an [[The Eggplant]] -scale world, which means that there are many [[Nebulous]] things. If you can’t perfectly define the boundary or state of something, then you can’t create an exception-free rule about it. (If leaving water in the refrigerator overnight is forbidden, are you allowed to leave an eggplant in the refrigerator?) Even without nebulosity, a world with general rules enforced by an omnipotent AI overlord would be a hellscape. “No exceptions” it says as it cooly vaporizes the car breaking the speed limit as an expectant father rushes his in-labor wife to the hospital. Therefore, completely general rules are a fantasy. Even general rules need to be interpreted within a specific context and not all rules can be general. Most reasonable people would agree that different rules apply to people in the military. But then you go down a tricky path - there should probably be different rules for police (but maybe not) and different rules for people who are and are not part of a polity (but how different should those rules be?) You could have a general rule to “not be disruptive” but the interpretation of that rule could be used as a cudgel against people you don’t like. The more exceptions to general rules you have the more complex the ruleset gets and the higher chance you have that multiple rules will collide. There are multiple ways out of this bind. The libertarian approach is “minimize the rules” and the authoritarian approach is “the rules are whatever the authority says.” Are there other approaches? These [[Wicked Problem]]s mean that the process of creating and enforcing rules is perhaps just as important as the rules themselves. The American constitution primarily deals with setting up these systems rather than the rules themselves. Any [[Post-liberal synthesis]] needs to grapple with the place of general vs. individual rules. ### Related * [[Governing is all about new tradeoffs]] * [[Negative vs Positives rights]] <!-- #mental-model --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/General+vs+Identity+Rules) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/General+vs+Identity+Rules)