This might be, and they might in fact succeed or they might fail. It seems the kind of thing someone could write a very interesting story about, and if that story is ever written, I would like to read it. But I find it unlikely in a world like this that there even would be a government with laws against this sort of thing in the first place. The propose of government is to provide a framework in which people can be sure of their fellows Cooperating in prisoner's dilemma type scenarios, and while it works most of the time, a network of Unbreakable Vows would work a lot better then any form of government. As such, it is probable that in this world, rather then there being a system of laws in the first place, it would be a system of Unbreakable Vows.
A world like that would be very different then the one described in canon Harry Potter or in HPMOR, and that is why EY nerfed it. In the end, I think it boils down to this: You have to think not in the form of some group trying to take over with their new but ethically dubious system, but rather think in the form of their existing form the beginning a much better system then the one we know, and so everyone uses that one instead, despite the ethical problems. (Human nature being what it is, people can accept even large amount of ethical wrongness if they benefit enough from it. Just look at the example of slavery in the real world.)
What do you mean by "this sort of thing?" There's no implication that Unbreakable Vows are illegal, although coercing a third party into being a binder for them is, for understandable reasons.
How do you envision a network of Unbreakable Vows coming into existence and being implemented in practice? Given a sufficiently sophisticated and insightful Vow drafting system, I can imagine that society would be better off under such a system than under traditional government, but society doesn't simply jump to optimums by default.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: