Humans influence each other in virtually every way imaginable. With every piece of behavior, we set precedent for the humans around us. The way we walk, whether we smile, whether we do someone a favor, whether we like someone and how we treat them, the people we talk to and the people we don't want to talk to, the exact amount of sternness applied when talking to someone who we think did something bad. Now, most of our behavior lives largely in a vacuum - our brain sends billions of signals to our facial muscles every day, it is unlikely that each and every one of them is intended to actually be signal to someone else. Our brain just does that as part of the survival routine.

However, some of our behavior is directed by our moral judgement - if someone said a mean word to you before leaving yesterday, that will influence how you speak to them today, or if you approach them at all in the first place. What you are doing here is enacting a type of Social Jurisdiction. Fitting things are encouraged, while unfitting things create friction or drag (“social friction”), which discourages such behavior in the future. When someone in your group makes a clearly inappropriate joke and you respond instinctively with an annoyed “uuughhh”, you are exerting a push away from that joke. By pushing inharmonious things away and pulling in harmonious things, your environment will naturally gravitate towards a sort of stable, social “equillibrium”. By changing your behavior in response to the behavior of the people around you, you create a harmony¹⁾.

Social Jurisdiction and harmonies become most apparent in groups: Groups, when faced with a new person, will very quickly find a sentiment on how they feel about that person - they will either take them in, sort them out, or live in an uncomfortable superposition where nobody is really sure what to do with each other (or they just don't care). Being sorted out, as the best example here, is a process of collective cultivation, where the actions (or inactions) of individual group members shape an overarching dynamic between the new person and the group as a whole. Classically, this happens by individual group members talking about the new person and saying things about them that are either received positively or negatively. Other members then take that knowledge in for themselves while also forwarding it to others. This way, a narrative about the new person is generated fast and has an extremely strong pull (or push) on the new person in question, making it very easy or very hard for that person to find a way into the group.

In short, the easiest possible description for social jurisdition is: “My behavior towards a person changes based on whether I like them or not.”

Most social jurisdiction is exerted in the form of completely unconscious, unintentional jurisdiction, or by basic harmony “I like this person, I don't like this person”-jurisdiction. However, there is Ethics Jurisdiction, a much more complex, “useful” type of social interfacing that is important to know about. Ethics jurisdiction is behavior in response to what a person perceives as right or wrong. For a philosophically minded person like me, this topic hits pay dirt. Much of basic jurisdiction can be considered ethics jurisdiction, but much of basic jurisdiction is also based largely, primarily or exclusively on sympathy. Ethics jurisdiction is exclusively about behavior in response to things that are morally relevant to that person.

Now, personal ethics is a very complex topic and different from person to person. What a person believes to be ethically right, questionable or downright wrong always depends on the person, and most people don't even really know themselves - much less so why they think of things as right or wrong. But, for each person the basics are pretty easy to either observe or infer. When you do something a person considers morally wrong, a person will probably respond to that in some way. The range of possible behaviors is extremely large, but some easily recognizable examples are 1) “the silent treatment”, 2) some sort of confrontation in which a person will confront the perceived offender with their crime and demand an explanation and/or apology, 3) cutting off contact etc. etc..

In either case, the procedure here is similar to many formal (or less formal) legal jurisdictions. A crime is committed, the person is confronted and consequences (of any severity) ensue. The order is not fixed. Lots of modern society relies on collective, social jurisdiction to maintain harmony - the actual, proper legal institutions are last resorts for crimes and offenders which exceed the collective reconciliatory/rehabilitative capabilities/responsibilities of the society.

As an individual, you may agree with and recognize another individual's jurisdiction and - at least partially - enforce their jurisdiction on top of your own. This is called an Extended Jurisdiction. When your partner tells you about a colleague at work who is slacking off, and - in case you happen to meet him someday - you approach him much more coldly, you are extending the jurisdiction of your partner. Jurisdictions can be extended at various strenghts: To some degree we extend the most basic jurisdictions of everyone, but the closer and more important a person is to us, the more strongly we tend to extend their jurisdiction.

If you've been understanding everything so far, you'd probably notice that this is a lot like the example in Basic Jurisdiction, where I talked about group dynamics. Yes, this is pretty much the same, but now we're looking at it from a more analytical and individualized standpoint. It's less about groups being weird.

Since this is an ethical system, the system is largely guided by feelings (ie. utility) - therefore, anything capable of eliciting emotion is a candidate for being “a crime”. And, in fact, that's how I use it and how it was ultimately intended. If your friend pisses you off because they're annoying, this could eventually become relevant for processing through the ethical jurisdiction system. “Crime” is a large, cumbersome word for what I am trying to describe and I don't really want to use it. The point is that I am trying to refer to actions that cause unnecessary loss in utility - relevant to the ethical jurisdiction system as anything ranging from “someone is annoying you unnecessarily (on purpose, for example)”, “someone is, due to inattention or lack of care, causing minor to major inconveniences to the people around them” over “high school bullying” or “cheating” all the way to “murder” or “sexual violence”. All of these are what I am trying to encapsulate with the word “crime”. But, ultimately, what I am really trying to say is “an act that causes you to rethink your relationship with the person/friend/family/loved one, etc.”.

For advanced readers: Social jurisdiction works on a Claim-basis. Doing something illegal generates a Claim for witnesses and affected people, which they can choose to enforce. That's basically the “jurisdiction” part in basic or ethical jurisdiction - people are enforcing claims. A person cannot be confronted or otherwise be held liable for an action if such a claim was never generated, and doing so would be illegal itself and generate a claim for the alleged offender.

For my specific implementation, see ULTRACOMFY Ethical Jurisdiction System