2009/10/21 Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com:
You're right-- we don't live in an ideal world, and people often do insist on inappropriately citing policy as a response to a reasoned argument. You might notice that usually the people who do this do it on the basis of arguments rather like the ones you are making in this thread.
I don't see the connection between blindly applying policy and observing that things don't always work the way we would like them to...
We have policies for a reason - they tend to work well and it helps us be consistent, which is usually desirable. There is no point having those policies if we don't consider them the default way to make decisions, so it makes perfect sense to me that a person deciding to go against policy should have a duty to explain why (at least if somebody asks them to - if there are no objections then obviously no explanation is needed, but there usually are objections so many people choose to pre-empt them). That explanation could take many forms, but the simplest way would usually be to explain why the situation in question is substantially different from the situations the people that wrote the policy had in mind. Then, once you've established that existing policy should be disregarded, you can explain why a particular course of action in the best idea. If you try and explain that before establishing that the policy shouldn't apply then you are essentially contesting the policy and that requires a much bigger discussion than is required to just decide what to do in a specific situation.