[mindslight]

> Society only functions because we respect the informal intentions of other people.

I agree wholeheartedly, in the local scale person-to-person sense.

But your argument is knocking down a straw man, by coming at it from the other direction. I'm not advocating for being an asshole via finding loopholes, but against the ridiculousness of creating a second set of half-formal rules to repair deficiencies in the fully formal ones.

> Under the 'code is law' doctrine, just because you could do something, you can do something. This is incompatible with anything resembling civilized society.

Yet this is exactly how the legal system does work. If an action is "wrong" but not illegal you can't actually be sanctioned for it. See: pretty much any large company in the news over some kind of outrage that will ultimately go unpunished.

[vkou]

> If an action is "wrong" but not illegal you can't actually be sanctioned for it. See: pretty much any large company in the news over some kind of outrage that will ultimately go unpunished.

Law is subject to human interpretation, evaluation of intent, and error correction. Every case has a number of unknowns that judges and juries are supposed to clarify. This is a feature, not a bug.

Code does not. The source for any non-trivial program encodes an uncountable number of unknowns that frequently lead us to absurd conclusions, with no ability to sanity check or correct them.

[mindslight]

This flexibility is a feature for human-scale situations (eg it's really nice to distinguish between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder), but it doesn't scale - either to larger organizations, or across different cultures.

[IntronExon]

Law is interpreted by the courts, which creates jurisprudence. The letter of the law is subject to the interpretation of the courts to a very great extent.

Edit: I misread the comment I responded to, and as the poster rightly pointed out, my comment is just stating the obvious. Sorry about that.

[mindslight]

How is that aspect not already incorporated in what I've said?

[IntronExon]

You’re absolutely right, I misread your comment.