There is some incredible insight hovering in the background here but I cannot put my finger on it.

I am am trained as a lawyer and therefore "disputes" are my livelihood. That being said, I have engaged in all sorts of "dispute" resolutions over the years from jury trials to bench trials to arbitrations to mediations to just simply getting people together and trying to work things out.

The schoolyard fight example is intriguing. We speak of many things when dealing with dispute resolution. I think, if asked, most people would claim that one of the prime goals would be justice or fairness. You are correct that the goal of the teacher is to end the fight. However, in that circumstance, he or she is merely playing "cop" as opposed to "judge." I think it is fair to say that if a fight is occurring we want our police to stop it and not really worry about blame. Likewise, if there is a genocide occurring I would think that the initial priority of our government is to stop it.

However, therein lies some of the insight. We would probably be outraged if the police suddenly started "judging" on the spot and were not trying to merely "stop" the fight but perhaps assist those in the "right" as it may be.

The issue of "judging" is therefore different from the initial policing of an event.

Interestingly enough, I think that we would not actually want the policeman to also be the judge. While we would insist on "neutrality" in responding to the fight, we would probably not be happy that the policeman also judged the "fault." You would think that this person would be in the best position. However, in fact, he or she may not be. This person may have come along at a time when the victim appeared to be the aggressor. This makes he/she now a partial witness and therefore comes to the dispute with a predisposed "bias."

This now poses the question of what kind of "judge" do we want.

What is interesting is the social status involvement. I had not really thought about it that way. While judges are (as you point out) willing to make decisions (within constraints as I will discuss in a bit), I have noticed that arbitrators (ostensibly private judges) are somewhat less willing to do that. They sometimes try to play the "wise neutral" and come down with decisions that are ambiguous. Mediators are arguably there to "mediate" and therefore should be neutral. Nevertheless, that "neutrality" seems to get in the way sometimes. The best mediators sometime resort to tricks to get agreements. They give the appearance of leaning your way in order to get you to agree.

What I can say is that getting to a decision in our system is a long and difficult task. Even in situations where both parties are eager to get a decision, any decision, at times judges may try to dodge the decision. There are, in fact, constraints on judges that are separate and distinct from those on layers or lay people. Judges are worried about being overturned by appellate courts. They have their own reputation for efficiency to consider. They also have judicial precedent to consider. These are al "other" outside factors that serve to limit their decisions or provide some other basis aside from just personal whim. (A "proxy" for neutrality?).

This is a bit of a meandering discussion. However, the insight that an individual does not want to appear to "lower" themselves to the level of the disputants is an interesting insight that bears further thought. The "false" neutrality based on consideration of social standing could be a bar to achieving optimal dispute resolution. Perhaps there are situations where attempts to achieve resolution have failed not because the involved individual were not "high" level enough but maybe they were, in fact too high up the social scale and that we can expect their reaction to be "neutral."

After all, the concept of a jury trial originates as a jury of our "peers" not our overlords or those less than us. I had always thought that this was concerned with "bias" or perhaps knowledge of similar circumstances. I thought it was a system designed to "protect" those being judged. However, maybe it is really more than a "fairness" issue. Maybe it intuitively recognizes the inefficiency of having those higher (or lower) than us make decisions? Those higher than us may be less inclined to really appreciate the importance of those decisions and thereby default to "neutrality." Those lower than us may be too eager to make decisions to establish their standing in society.

[sorry if this is a repost; my original attempt to post this was blocked as comment spam because it had too many links to other OB posts]

I've always hated that Dante quote. The hottest place in Hell is reserved for brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and people who use flamethrowers on puppies - not for the Swiss.

I came to the exact opposite conclusion when pondering the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Most of the essays I've seen in newspapers and on bulletin boards are impassioned pleas to designate one side or the other as Evildoers and the other as the Brave Heroic Resistance by citing who stole whose land first, whose atrocities were slightly less provoked, which violations of which cease-fire were dastardly betrayals and which were necessary pre-emptive actions, et cetera.

Not only is this issue so open to bias that we have little hope of getting to the truth, but I doubt there's much truth to be attained at all. Since "policy debates should not appear one-sided" and "our enemies are not innately evil", it seems pretty likely that they're two groups of people who both are doing what they honestly think is right and who both have some good points.

This isn't an attempt to run away from the problem, it's the first step toward solving the real problem. The real problem isn't "who's the hero and who's the terrorist scumbag?" it's "search solution-space for the solution that leads to the least suffering and the most peace and prosperity in the Middle East" There is a degree to which finding out who's the evildoer is useful here so we can punish them as a deterrent, but it's a pretty small degree, and the amount of energy people spend trying to determine it is completely out of proportion to the minimal gains it might produce.

And "how do we minimize suffering in the Middle East?" may be an easier question than "who's to blame?" It's about distributing land and resources to avoid people being starved or killed or oppressed, more a matter for economists and political scientists then for heated Internet debate. I've met conservatives who loathe the Palestinians and liberals who hate all Israelis who when asked supported exactly the same version of the two-state solution, but who'd never realized they agreed because they'd never gotten so far as "solution" before.

My defense of neutrality, then, would be something like this: human beings have the unfortunate tendency not to think of an issue as "finding the best solution in solution-space" but as "let's make two opposing sides at the two extremes, who both loathe each other with the burning intensity of a thousand suns". The issue then becomes "Which of these two sides is the Good and True and Beautiful, and which is Evil and Hates Our Freedom?" Thus the Democrats versus the Republicans or the Communists versus the Objectivists. I'd be terrified if any of them got one hundred percent control over policy-making. Thus, the Wise try to stay outside of these two opposing sides in order to seek the best policy solution in solution-space without being biased or distracted by the heroic us vs. them drama - and to ensure that both sides will take their proposed solution seriously without denouncing them as an other-side stooge.

A "neutral" of this sort may not care who started it, may not call one side "right" or "wrong", may claim to be above the fray, may even come up with a solution that looks like a "compromise" to both sides, but isn't abdicating judgment or responsibility.

Not that taking a side is never worth it. The Axis may have had one or two good points about the WWI reparations being unfair and such, but on the whole the balance of righteousness in WWII was so clearly on the Allies' side that the most practical way to save the world was to give the Allies all the support you could. It's always a trade-off between how ideal a solution is and how likely it is to be implemented.