First, agreement on the Legal Principle is essential.
- Factual disputes are inherently complex.
- Many of the world’s biggest and thorniest issues come down to a disagreement on facts. ‘Echo chambers’, exacerbated by social media, have caused large factions of society to have significant disagreements about basic facts on many complex issues.
- We cannot begin to converge on facts until we rebuild societal trust. This begins with establishing a voluntary global live-and-let-live community based on high trust. Eventually, as the community grows, we could expect community members to develop media companies, report as 3L scientists, and even have sufficient 3L representation in governmental positions to rebuild trust in these institutions. Until then, we must remain sufficiently humble as to the facts we do not have personal knowledge of.
- Currently, factual disputes are inherently complex to resolve. The Live and Let Live Movement does not pretend to have a monopoly on the truth. Unfortunately, A formal trial is the best way to resolve factual disputes. Obviously, this is not possible with most factual disputes.
- The key to avoiding further polarisation is to have humility with regard to the facts we believe in, especially when we lack the direct personal knowledge. It is easy to find ‘experts’ to support almost any position on any issue. It is much more important that we start from a shared acceptance of the underlying Legal Principle and leave it to the courts to weigh all evidence to resolve factual disputes.
- It may be best to posit competing facts and resolve the issue by consistently applying the LP to all sets of competing facts. Ultimately, agreeing on the underlying principle from which we reason is more important than debating which facts are true.
Steps
- Agree on the Principle, even if we do not agree on the facts (keep a lookout for factual disputes!).
- We can agree on a hypothetical and analyze the situation using each set of competing facts.
- And we can also agree on the victimless crime issues that we do share.