You can still use precommitment, but tie it to consequences rather than to Justice. Take Edward Snowden. Say that the socially-optimal outcome is to learn about the most alarming covert government programs, but not about all covert programs. So you want some Edward Snowdens to reveal some operations, but you don't want that to happen very often. The optimal behavior may be to precommit to injustice, punishing government employees who reveal secrets regardless of whether their actions were justified.
International espionage is probably one of the worst examples to attempt to generalize concepts like justice from. It's probably better to start with simpler (and more common) examples like theft or murder and then use the concepts developed on the simpler examples to look at the more complicated one.
We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository. It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were. Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.
I'll start us off with one simple example: The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long. I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms. (And I went to a *good* high school.) Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?
There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction. Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.
Bad concepts don't have to be scientific. Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here. There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics. But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.