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Matt R wrote:
"James D. Forrester" james@jdforrester.org wrote:
Are you saying that the ArbComm should be amoral?
Hmm. Did you mean "amoral with respect to the participants' nature", or "amoral with respect to the participants' activities on Wikipedia"? It rather changes the question, and my answer to it...
Oops, yes it was ambiguous. I meant amoral with respect their activities on Wikipedia. I do agree with your theoretical comments about Hitler and Mother Theresa. I was more worried about situations that might occur like the following (completely made-up, honest!):
User A gets into conflict with User B. Both behave *equally* badly, breaking various policies and just being gits in general. However, User A is also an outstanding scholar and prolific contributor of high-quality content, whereas User B only pops in every now and then for some light editing (and mostly outside of the main article space to boot). User A hints darkly that, if sanctioned, she would quit the project for good. A pragmatic, amoral ArbComm might be tempted to place heavier sanctions on User B than User A, even though that would be (morally speaking) unfair, because User A is evidently more valuable to the project than User B.
Of course, the term "fairness" can be used in both its Proceduralist and it can be Distributionalist meanings (pure Communism is arguably the latter but not the former, and pure Capitalism is the inverse thereof), as well as the Correctialist meaning followed by the Committee, but I will stop having fun with critical thinking and word-play (;-)), and instead answer the question directly:
In said circumstance, yes, I personally would go for the amoral option over the "just" course of applying exactly the same censures to each. The project would be better-served by the continued presence of User A than of User B, though in your example you didn't say that User B had threatened to leave, in which case the decision is betwixt one user leaving or none, which tilts the balance of pragmatism still further in favour of placing "heavier sanctions" on B than A, as you put it.
In reality, we normally find that one of the two (or more) parties started it, or should have known better, or something else, which allows us to properly differentiate between them in terms of how to correct the issue, so this purported situation is unlikely to come up in reality in a wholly applicable fashion.
Perhaps this way that the Committee works disappoints some people; I can certainly understand how that might be. Nevertheless, this is how it has operated for the past 20-odd months.
Yours sincerely, - -- James D. Forrester Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] E-Mail : james@jdforrester.org IM (MSN) : jamesdforrester@hotmail.com