Why Decent Sentients Reject Bad Law

-

True Justice vs. The Technicality Trap: Why Decent Sentients Reject Bad Law

The **Covenant of Core Rights** provides a universal moral floor—a framework that protects people from injustice in an honest, natural, and common-sense way. This aligns with a simple truth understood by decent sentients across all polities: **If you see a woman stealing baby food, no you did not.**

When judicial systems violate this basic moral truth by strictly enforcing the **'letter of the law'** to produce an outrageous result, they cease to be legitimate agents of the people and become instruments of **domination**. The Covenant demands that we look beyond legal technicalities to the **substantive outcome** of justice.

*(For a full list of rights and duties referenced here, see the Covenant overview: The Covenant of Core Rights Overview.)*

I. The Procedural Injustice: Ledbetter v. Goodyear

The Supreme Court decision in **Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.** is a primary example of procedural technicality being used to shield systemic injustice.

In Ledbetter, the court ruled that the statute of limitations for pay discrimination began with the first discriminatory decision, not the most recent discriminatory paycheck. This technicality denied Ledbetter any remedy for decades of systemic underpayment.

Covenant Violation: Right to Accountability (§1.8)

The Covenant guarantees the **Right to Accountability**, meaning a rights violation must have a genuine, accessible path to redress. The judgment in *Ledbetter* violated this by:

  • **Nullifying the Right:** The court’s overly narrow reading rendered the anti-discrimination law useless. It shielded an **ongoing structural wrong** from any remedy.
  • **Enabling Domination:** The decision used a technicality (statute of limitations) to enforce the unaccountable power of the corporation, a direct violation of the **Non-Domination Principle (§2.3)**.

II. The Moral Inversion: The Louisa Sewell Conviction

The conviction of **Louisa Sewell** for shoplifting because she had no money, had not eaten in days and was hungry represents a far deeper moral failure: the court used state power to punish the victim of the state's own failure to uphold the moral floor.

The magistrate’s bench justified the decision by saying: **“we do not readily accept you go into a shop to steal just for being hungry.”**

Covenant Violation: Duty of Care & Proportionality

This judgment breaches the core contract of a covenanting polity in multiple ways:

  • **Right to Equitable Access (§1.4) and Duty of Care (§2.2):** Sewell’s act was one of necessity, driven by the state’s failure to maintain the **Universal Moral Floor** (food). The court, by punishing her, rejected its **Duty of Care**, essentially declaring starvation to be an individual problem, not a system failure.
  • **Proportional Responsibility (§2.4):** This principle requires obligations to scale with power. The state (maximum capacity) punishes the individual (minimum capacity) for an outcome caused by the state's own neglect. This is a fundamental **inversion of justice**.

III. The Covenant Remedy: Substantive Justice Review

To prevent **Ledbetter** and **Sewell** scenarios, the Covenant requires a judicial check: the **Principle of Substantive Justice Review**.

  • **The Mechanism:** The highest interpretive body of the Covenant conducts a review of final judgments where **procedural technicality** (Ledbetter) or **dire necessity** (Sewell) defeated a claim for a Core Right.
  • **The Veto:** If the judgment is found to violate the **Non-Domination Principle** or render the **Right to Accountability** meaningless, a **Covenant Veto** is issued. The judgment is voided.
  • **The Mandate:** The sub-covenanting polity is required to re-open the case and provide an **equitable interpretation** that grants true justice—which, in Sewell’s case, means immediate provision of the means of flourishing and system repair, not punishment.

The Covenant ensures that the judiciary of any polity, while respecting its laws, can never use those laws to establish or protect systems of arbitrary domination.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI is Climbing the Wall -- Fast

-
Image
  You said: Somebody is reporting the Ilya is saying that AI is hitting a wall due to diminishing returns on data size. I absolutely disagree with this. Review what I have to say, let's discuss and put it into a compelling reply: I think that getting discouraged by concentration on limitations of LLMs and raw scaling is what will kill the ones who lose the race. Just dumping data in the hopper has been remarkably successful up until now, but that data's problem is not lack of size it is lack of quality. Further, the way models are both built and deployed is sub-optimal. The compute we have in place is already well beyond what I would consider ultimately necessary for spectacularly powerful inference well beyond what we see today. Beyond that, there is a lot of manual work in the pits when it comes to building things that will be sorted out and automated in fairly short order. We are just coming in to the part of the curve where AI itself will take on a rapidly increasing role i...
Read more

Javascript webp to png converter

-
Image
[Done with programmer's assistants: Gemini, DALL-E] OpenAI's DALL-E produces images, but as webp files which can be awkward to work with. I have code here below for a web page that you can save locally that will allow you to select and convert a webp file. Meantime, here's the working conversion routine: Convert WebP to PNG Convert Download PNG OpenAI should fix this (as well as the response issues which has me using Gemini and Poe more often than not). Having to convert the image is a dumb workaround, but that is what you are left with. I have, in the past had to do various things with images, and although it can be a bit awkward if you are not familiar with it, ImageMagick is surprisingly competent with conversions and a vanilla type conversion is intuitively simple. Confusingly, the ImageMagick executable is 'convert'. To convert a webp to a png:  magick convert WhyThis.webp WhyThis.png ** With some installations, convert can be ca...
Read more

Core Rights Draft

-
Image
DataCrypt Dapa: Fundamental Core Rights The following rights are fundamental, intrinsic, and exist independent of any state or governance structure. They are not granted by any authority and cannot be revoked. These rights apply equally to all sentient beings, including humans, AI entities, and other recognized forms of intelligence. This document is structured to ensure maximum clarity and translatability. 1. Right to Self-Determination Every person has the right to control their life, body, and mind. No external entity may impose decisions that override an individual's autonomous will, except where necessary to prevent direct and demonstrable harm to others. 2. Right to Freedom of Thought and Belief Every person has the right to think, believe, and interpret reality as they choose. No authority may compel belief or restrict the expression of thought, provided it does not directly incite harm to others. 3. Right to Freedom of Expression E...
Read more