Why Every Procedural System Needs a Moral Override

By John-Michael Kuczynski

Procedures are essential. Rules, systems, protocols—they scale. They let us govern large populations, enforce contracts, process legal claims, and run economies. Without procedures, we get chaos, favoritism, or tyranny.

But here’s the problem:

A purely procedural system will always fail in the end.

Why? Because no rule set can account for every situation. Eventually, something happens that wasn’t anticipated. Something human. Something real.

And when that happens, a purely procedural system has only one option: follow the rule anyway.

That’s when proceduralism becomes monstrous.

The Manual Override Principle

Every scalable system of law or ethics must include what we might call the manual override clause:

A structural way to say: “Yes, that’s what the rule says, but come on. Let’s be human about this.”

Some legal systems make space for this explicitly. They allow for mitigating circumstances, sentencing breaks, or moral exemptions in extreme cases. The Anglo-American system, however, resists this. It exalts procedural purity.

And when judges grant mercy, they often do so unofficially. Quietly. Because the system, as written, offers them no authority to do it.

It has to be smuggled in.

Why This Matters

If a person kills their spouse’s murderer in a fit of grief and rage, do we really want a system that punishes them as if they were a cold-blooded serial killer?

Most people would say no. But a purely procedural system doesn’t ask what people would say. It asks what the rules say.

And the rules are silent on the fact that the person is a human being.

This is the deepest weakness of proceduralism:

It can be followed perfectly and still produce inhuman outcomes.

Which means that if we care about justice, we must build into our systems a way to step outside of them when necessary.

Can You Do That Without Chaos?

Yes. But it’s not easy. The challenge is to temper procedural systems without undermining their legitimacy. That requires:

• Narrowly defined moral overrides

• Clear thresholds for exception

• Institutional humility

Because without that, all we have is:

• Judges forced to break the rules to do what’s right

• Or worse: judges forced to obey the rules and do what’s wrong

Neither is acceptable.

Final Thought

If a legal or ethical system cannot recognize when its own rules are leading to horror, then it is not a system of justice.

It is a machine.

And every machine, if left unchecked, will eventually do what machines do: follow its logic off a cliff.

The override clause is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

It is the last defense of the human against the procedural.