[Gormo]

Do you think prescriptive rules are necessary, or is it better to handle these kind of situations on a case-by-case basis?

Most social systems seem to be based on a maximin decision rule, and try to minimize the impact of imagined worst-case contingencies (there was an interesting thread on HN last week discussing this) - but perhaps we would realize our objectives more effectively and minimize the entropy that accumulates by too often adding new rules if we instead optimized the system to the general case, and dealt with outliers (as catastrophic contingencies necessarily are) specifically and individually.