Re: Re: Re: National ID card
karl said:
... Every rule that involves a must can also be put in terms of may not and vice versa...
Is it possible that you are subjectively labeling rules with must or may not just as a way to rationalize your dislike or approval?
True story:
It's a hot day, and Donald has some yard work that needs doing which he'd rather get his 3 nephews to do for him, so he goes up to them and proposes a bet: they'll do the yard work for him if he can prove to them that even though they think they are in the yard with him they are really somewhere else. They look around, convince themselves they really are there, and take the bet.
Donald asks them,
Are you in New York? They answer,
No.
Donald asks them,
Are you in San Francisco? They answer,
No.
Donald asks them,
Are you in Chicago? They answer,
No.
Well, he says to them,
if you're not in any of those places, then you must be somewhere else...
Now, if you'll recall, I said at the outset that this is a true story. And it is. That story of Donald Duck and his 3 nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey
genuinely appears in an old Disney comic. That makes it a true (or genuine) Donald Duck story, as opposed to one I just now made up using the Disney characters and simply pretended had once appeared in a comic.
Because words have various meanings and shades of meanings, it is possible to do many fun things with them. Some early Greek philosophers were great at showing, through clever manipulation of words, that black is white, night is day, 1 = 2, and
motion is impossible.
So yes, you are correct that it is possible to put any
must statement in
may not terms, and vice versa. Nevertheless, just as the nephews actually were in the yard and not somewhere else, just as 1 does not really equal 2, and just as the arrow in motion really does move, so there are indeed two distinct and useful categories which are not simply arbitrary ways I choose to separate laws I don't like from laws which I do.
There are many different labels one can stick onto things. Another way I could have labelled the concepts is
positive calls (i.e. calling for me to do a particular action) and
negative calls (i.e. calling for me to refrain from a particular action, without specifying any particular action I should do in its stead). I'm not sure if that will be a more useful way for you to envision what I'm talking about or not, but I'll add that in case it helps clarify the idea.
There are several areas of life in which it is useful for people to recognize and be able to draw a distinction between a
positive action and a
negative one. Since the topic of national ID cards calls it to my mind, I'll use non-violent resistance as an example.
Not only am I (generally) willing to go along with negative requests, but even if I were not these are generally things which a stronger party can
directly impose on a weaker one. For instance, if you tell me I
may not enter a certain building or walk onto certain property, it is possible to put up enough physical barriers and post enough guards that I am physically not able to. If I try to bring more force to bear on my side, you can bring greater force to bear on your side. Assuming you have greater physical resources to call on, you'll win. (Which is why I'm not going to engage in such a tug-of-war contest in the first place. I have no desire to engage in contests that are settled solely by who has more might.)
In contrast, it is not possible to
directly make someone comply with a positive request. You can prevent me from walking onto some site where you don't want me, and you can put me in prison to assure I continue to be unable to go there, but once you have put me in prison there are a great many things you cannot
directly make me do. I'll give some examples. (I have no idea why these things should be a big deal, since in almost every case the person requesting action could obtain the apparent object of the request more simply and easily by doing something themself rather than trying to get me to do something. But all of these are things people have, in the past, tried to make me do and gotten upset about when I didn't.)
-- you can't make me give you my fingerprints.
-- you can't make me pose for a picture.
-- you can't make me walk.
-- you can't make me sign papers.
-- you can't make me eat.
-- you can't make me shave.
If you arrest me and want me in a cell, I have no strong objection to someone carrying me there. (Nor am I going to engage in a tug-of-war struggle over it, even in the unlikely event that I happen to be stronger than the person delegated that chore.) Likewise, I have no strong objection to someone inking my fingers and pressing them onto a pad of paper, or holding me up while someone snaps a picture. So those ends can be easily accomplished; but in order to get them accomplished, someone else has to actually carry out the action, because
these are not things I choose to do. You can get my fingerprints, you can get a mug shot, you can get me into a cell. But you can't
directly get me to do those things for you.
If you think you can, then you likely are misunderstanding the difference between
directly and
indirectly. You can do many things which will
indirectly cause me to do any or all of the things listed above. (If, for instance, you got hold of one of my cats and threatened to torture it until I complied, I would almost certainly acquiesce.) But that is not the same as being able to apply force
directly to get your way, as is possible in the example of stopping me from trespassing.
And that -- in real life -- is an important distinction. If you direct someone (a soldier, a deputy, whomever) to apply force to
prevent someone from doing something which is deemed to be obnoxious, it's not hard to find people willing to apply force that way. Even if they personally don't find the offending act is all that obnoxious, application of force in this way feels straightforward and reasonable to most people. And they will generally be willing to keep on applying force, as much as it takes, until they succeed, even if in the process they wind up whomping the tar out of someone.
In contrast, if you ask someone to apply force to
compel someone to do something that has been deemed desirable, my experience is that when they realize what they are doing most people do become uncomfortable with this, especially if the level of force called for escalate to high levels. It's one thing to apply punishing levels of violence to someone who is
doing something. It's quite different to apply those same levels to someone who
isn't doing anything.
It isn't simply that the person to whom force is being applied isn't doing anything obnoxious (although that is a factor). It's also that the force being applied is no longer directly related to the ostensible problem. In the first type of situation, force can be applied directly in order to physically achieve the end result. To the average person, that feels straightforward and comfortable. In the second type of situation, force is being applied in order to indirectly achieve that, by causing the offending person enough pain or discomfort that they will take actions that will achieve the end result. At a gut level, that doesn't feel nearly as straightforward or comfortable.
The first time I went limp and refused to give fingerprints, I had my thumb put into a desk drawer and the drawer was slammed shut repeatedly. (The thumb remained partially numb for about 6 months.) The people who did this were not intentionally trying to injure me but they were pretty pissed off by my lack of cooperation. Eventually, though, they gave up. It wasn't worth it to them to escalate the amount of force they were using beyond that point. If, in contrast, I had been trying to rip up their fingerprint cards, they almost certainly would have kept on applying force until I complied with their wishes to stop.
(Ironically, by trying to compel me to do something, rather than simply doing it themselves, they made their job much harder. By the time they gave up on trying to compel me to voluntarily roll my fingers on the paper and tried simply pressing the fingers to the pad themselves, my hand was involuntarily shaking so much that I don't think they ever did get clear prints.)
I included "can't make me shave" on the list of examples above, because it illustrates why, even though it is possible on a rhetorical level to change the
must statement into a
may not statement, in real life the distinction between the two remains.
We have a positive action, shaving. Prisons, at least back when I was in them, preferred people not have long hair or beards, which meant there was a rule requiring prisoners to have periodic haircuts and to shave their facial hair. I would cast this as a
must rule, e.g "You must shave". As such, it is the kind of rule I oppose and which, if it requires an action which I do not choose to take, I will break.
It's true we could re-frame this as a
may not rule, e.g. "You may not have a beard". However, what would be proscribed then is not a behavior but an outcome. I'd probably be willing to take no conscious action toward the growing of a beard, if such actions were indeed offensive to people in my community. But that would have no real effect, as the beard will continue to grow with no conscious action on my part to make it do so. I would be committing no voluntary action which had been proscribed, and yet I would still be in violation. Regardless of whether one uses the word
must or the words
may not in framing the law, it is quite clear to me that it is lack-of-action rather than action which gets people upset in this example.
The example of drivers' licenses which you raise in your post is another case which works verbally but not actually. What you have constructed is not a command but a condition. It does not instruct me that I
must carry a drivers license. What it does say is that, if I choose to partake of a particular activity, then I must do it in accordance with certain regulations. I have no problem with that.
The point of the law is not to compel me to carry a card; it is to forbid me from driving without one. No police officer, that I know of, has ever reacted to a case of someone driving without a license by trying to force a that piece of paper upon them. Many officers, however, have reacted by removing the person from the car so they were unable to continue driving.
In contrast, there used to be a law
requiring that all males of certain ages physically carry a draft card. The purpose of that law was to compel the carrying of a card. To me that is a qualitatively different law from the drivers license law. I had no problem seeing the distinction then and have no problem seeing it now.
