Trial by jury
Cumbersome but necessary
John Adams:
"Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty. Without them we have no other fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hounds."
Democratic societies are generally fairly hard to change. Fundamental change (like say gay rights) takes generations to accomplish. That's a good thing.
Once the change is made it would be bad if all the happily married gay couples suddenly had their rights taken away.
America these days is showing what happens radicals subvert the inertia of society when abortion rights are suddenly stripped away. Not only does it physically harm many women with problem pregnancies. Enforcing the forced birth laws requires increasing the state's surveillance of women to make sure they don't have abortions. As in authoritarian regimes it enables citizens to turn each other in to the government.
Under the rule of law, there are procedures the State must follow before they can impose sanctions on people. For criminal matters a prosecutor must assemble evidence and make a case before a judge and jury. The defence has the job of showing that the case presented by the prosecutor isn't valid.
This can take a lot of time. We're getting a glimpse at an extreme example with the many trials of Donald Trump. Trump's big lie that he actually won the 2020 election that resulted in the January 6 attempted insurrection has taken years to finally come to an arraignment and it will be years till its finally settled. This is a tad frustrating if you follow the news as I do - Trump's guilt was obvious to me. I saw it happen on CNN.
There's the rub. People in Trump's camp say that CNN is fake news and can't be trusted.
So we come to a trial. One of the purposes of a trial is to produce a conclusion that can be trusted. If a jury can be persuaded by a prosecutor to convict in the teeth of a vigorous defense then most people will accept the verdict. It takes a trial to filter out the fake news that is all around us.
A jury is supposed to be composed of ordinary open minded citizens who can respond to evidence without bias. In Canada citizens are chosen at random for jury duty. Both prosecutors and defense get to filter the potential jurors for bias. Jury duty can be onerous and potential jurors and be excused for good reasons. But the principle is that it's the jury that determines what evidence is persuasive and what isn't.
I wonder if we could create a system like that for deciding non-criminal things. A lot of disinformation is justified as being somebody's opinion and all opinions supposedly have equal weight. We could use a system that could say that Covid vaccines work and are an effective public health measure as a legal thing. To say otherwise in public would bring sanctions (after a trial of course).
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.