> Like I said, I'm fine with discussing ideals, and exploring the full range of possibilites that we might aspire to, but let's at least clear up semantic ambiguity by not using the same words that already refer to extant things to also refer to idealized hypotheticals.

Then let's talk about ideals, because re-iterating the last few thousand repetitions of HN Snowden-the-hero is going to bore me pretty quickly.

> And, I've got to wonder: if some institution is indeed somehow speaking for all of humanity, who could they possibly be speaking to?

There are several groups. The most obvious is the hypothetical alien culture. The other is ourself: past, present, and future. I hope, for instance, that we'll one day look at our history of space flight by trimming back on the competitive Cold War motivations and just call it different groups making attempts towards the achievement. That kind of reframing is useful and inspiring.

The institution is a platform for such speech. Arguably, the closest thing we have to that right now is YouTube.

> Again, every particular grouping of people is a society unto itself; the actual participants in a business transactions are the ones involved in that social context, which has nothing to do with the religious congregation (unless the religious congregation is trading with them, anyway).

This is a logically cogent notion, but it's not borne out in reality. Let's say there's two persons who have some relation, friends or enemies or whatever. These two people might (1) be in the same family, (2) work in the same business, and (3) attend the same church.

By your model, any disagreements that arise between them would be settled between them. But this is only how it happens in ideal cases. Real people often use their shared contexts as proxies for their disagreements. Estrangement, office politics, religious condemnation: these can all be motivated by such a smaller upset. For every particular grouping of people, you have the possibility of such spillage occurring. The "culture war" that you decried upthread, even if you stripped away all legislative efforts from it, is a demonstration of exactly this kind of spillage.

By your dislike of the legislative model, I find it hard to believe that you'd support larger social contexts imposing upon smaller social contexts, such as a religious group or business specifying the relationship between two persons. Yet such downward pressure is the only way, aside from a magical blessing of maturity, that larger social contexts can protect themselves from spillage from smaller ones. And this is assuming a model of the world where everyone exists in a perfect hierarchy.

This seems like a good time to bring in the problem of a third party observer.

If you're out on a walk and you see imminent murder, I'd say that you have an obligation to intervene, assuming no mitigating circumstances. Would you consider that a case of law being manifested right there? That seems a little bit too fast and loose for me: it justifies any and every action, as long as no one objects when the dust settles. That isn't law in any sense of the word, common or otherwise.

> As I mentioned earlier, we have many centuries of effective use of common law and equity as evidence that such a system works quite well; the experiment with supplanting law with legislated policy over the past century hasn't worked out quite so well

Can you be more specific about the references you're making here? Who has been using common law and equity, which centuries, when and how do you pinpoint the beginning of legislated policy? I don't think I'd be able to fully appreciate your arguments even with answers to these questions, but I'd at least have some context with which to Google.

> because the ideology of democracy was successfuly leveraged to justify exercise of power, instead of regarded as a mechanism to constrain power.

But if we posit that no state exists, whose power are we constraining? The typical construction of democracy that talks about "constraining power" usually presumes a distinct state/gov't: a subset of the population that exercises power over the entirety. But in our ideal imaginings, there doesn't exist such a state. What then democracy?

Thought experiment: let's say we are gods and have the power to package up a bunch of ideas and that package is called democracy. We magick up ourselves some humans on an Earth-like that we made, and then download the package into their brains. Can they create, or even aspire to create, a democratic society? Should they? I say yes, as that's how I'm packaging up my bundle.

> not the maximization of universal participation in politics.

I'd wager this is because the notion of participating in politics leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It does mine. But everyone has always participated in politics. This is where we'll likely get into a disagreement over definitions again. You mention earlier that every particular grouping of people is its own society with its own manifested law. I contend that the process of manifesting this law is politics.

As such, "man is a political animal". From this, I think you can deduce why I'd want to maximize active participation in politics: the alternative is passive participation.

> For me, the fundamental goal of politics ought to be the maximization of human freedom,

Alright. Here's a scary statement for you: I don't believe in freedom. I don't find it to be a meaningful concept on its own. To make a pop culture reference, "Free from what?" "Freedom." (The answer is the villain's, in The Avengers, if you haven't seen it.)

You can't maximize freedom, because freedom isn't merely unquantifiable, it's an idea that can't stand alone. You can have freedoms to do, freedoms to be, and you can have freedoms from this, freedoms from that, but you can't just have "freedom". Loki (the villain noted above) proposes the project of maximizing human freedom from the stress of decision-making; I can't imagine you agree with that.

Which leaves us with the question... which human freedoms do you want to maximize? As noted in my link, I like Nussbaum's Ten Central Capabilities as a minimum; not something to maximize, but a threshold that we need to cross.