great-counsels — Lessig, RBG, the should-we register

Every craft in the Constellation answers a different question. Engineering asks "does it work." Design asks "will people use it well." Operations asks "will it run reliably." great-counsels asks: should we.

That question is different in kind. The other questions have technical answers. Should we is a question about values, rights, and what we are willing to be responsible for. It requires a different craft and a different register.

Why the should-we register is a distinct craft

The failure mode of skipping the should-we register is that you build things that work technically and fail ethically, legally, or politically — and you discover the failure after the thing has shipped. The cost of discovery is proportional to how far the thing has traveled from its origin.

great-counsels is the craft of catching those failures before they are shipped. It is not a compliance checklist. It is a set of personas who think rigorously about rights, power, and consequence — and who have a track record of being right about which things matter.

The craft runs best before the build. An hour with great-counsels at the design stage costs less than a year with great-counsels at the litigation stage.

The personas

Lawrence Lessig: digital law and the relationship between code and power. The Lessig register asks: what does this system enable that could not exist before, and who controls the enabling. Copyright, platform power, the architecture of the internet as a political structure — these are his problems.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: civil rights strategy and the long game. The RBG register is strategic — not "is this fair" but "what is the argument that moves the standard, and in what order should the cases be built." A RBG review asks whether you are building the precedent you want or the one you will regret.

John Rawls: ethical reasoning behind the veil of ignorance. The Rawls register is structural — design the system as if you did not know which position in the system you would occupy. If the answer changes depending on whether you are the platform owner or the lowest-tier user, the design has a problem.

Hannah Arendt: political philosophy and the conditions of action. The Arendt register is historical — this has happened before, in different clothes. What is the structure of this situation, and what does history say about how structures like this tend to resolve. The banality of evil is not a moral condemnation. It is an observation about how ordinary processes produce extraordinary harms.

What it unlocks

The ability to ask "should we?" before "how do we?" Legal review for products at the design stage. Policy memos that understand the stakeholder landscape before the policy is written. Ethical frameworks that survive contact with adversarial users.

The most valuable use case is the adversarial review: run your product or policy through each great-counsels persona and ask them to find the strongest case against it. The critique that survives all four lenses is the critique you should take seriously.

If you get stuck

If you are not sure which persona to route a problem to, describe the primary domain of the harm. Digital rights and platform power: Lessig. Civil rights and legal strategy: RBG. Structural fairness: Rawls. Historical pattern and political structure: Arendt.

If the problem has more than one domain, run more than one persona. The conflicts between their reviews are informative — they mark the genuinely hard trade-offs.

Cross-reference

This plugin has the most overlap with great-minds — specifically with the Marcus Aurelius persona, which mediates conflicts. The difference: Aurelius mediates between crafts within a project. great-counsels mediates between the project and the world it will affect.

Plugin source

The shipped plugin lives at github.com/sethshoultes/great-minds-constellation/plugins/great-counsels. Nine counsel personas (RBG, Marshall, Scalia, Lessig, Wu, Brandeis, Sunstein, Arendt, Rawls). Note: the plugin produces a craft register, not legal advice.

Deliverable

Take one decision you have made recently about a product, policy, or process. Run it through the Rawls test: state the decision as if you did not know which position in the affected system you would occupy. Does the decision hold, or does it depend on your position? Write three sentences of analysis.

Further reading

• "The $0.35 Article, and the AI Editor Who Refused to Ship It" — what it looks like when a persona genuinely holds the should-we register: an editor who blocks the publish step rather than rubber-stamping it.