Agile Treaty

A Treaty is an distinction made among peers about how to collaborate in a certain way. There's a wonderful collection of real historical Iroquois treaties collected by Benjamin Franklin at https://archive.org/details/indiantreatiespr00vand .

These were all derived through the Iroquois "Great Law of Peace" - http://www.manataka.org/page135.html . Unfortunately Iroquois laws have some glaring inconsistencies from the standpoint of a modern TheoryOfJustice. Privileging the 5 Iroquois tribes caused inequities that eventually ended the IroquoisConfederacy. Also there are rules of "Peace" that don't conform with our modern notions, such as, "If refusal steadfastly follows, the War Chief shall let the bunch of white lake shells drop from his outstretched hand to the ground, and shall bound quickly forward and club the offending chief to death".

The Iroquois treaties all seem to boil down to the familiar form of a BehaviorDrivenDevelopment scenario. In Gherkin language: Given <preconditions> When <events> Then <Responses>. To bring this inline with Rawls we add these constraints:

• Observing the VeilOfIgnorance, no treaty is permitted to refer to a specific individual or group of people by name. Instead the treaty must refer to people and groups in terms of their roles in relationships.
• In order to preserve its unanimity, a treaty may not obligate individuals or groups that have not unanimously agreed to take part in it. This is the essence of the most famous of the Iroquois treaties, the "2 row wampum" (http://www.wampumchronicles.com/tworowwampumbelt.html) that was also the basis of Gene Roddenberry's notion of non-interference.
• Likewise a treaty among a group of peers may not prevent the formation of a treaty among some subset of them. Or if the peers are groups, some subset of their members. This is what the Iroquois Law means when it says that each of the members must still tend their own fire and council - that they keep their respective autonomy. The only autonomy they surrender is by their unanimous consent.

---

CategoryAgileTng