up vote 6 down vote favorite

Yesterday I posted a question to the worldbuilding stackexchange asking for help working out how a law banning the possession of certain supernatural abilities (which are granted on a weekly basis and can be voluntarily given up) could be enforced with minimal violation of civil rights. The question can be found Here.

It was apparently closed as "primarily opinion based", which as I understand it means that the answer to the question is mostly a matter of personal opinion and there is no knowledge or expertise that would be relevant to giving an accepted answer. I'm confused as to how this applies here, as a good answer to the question would involve knowledge about law and law enforcement. I didn't receive a single comment that explained any problems with it, it was just voted primarily opinion based. What did I do wrong, and how can I fix it?

share
up vote 2 down vote

When a question is closed as primarily opinion based, it means that it lacks the possibility of having an objective metric to evaluate all the answers.

In your case,

a workable method to enforce a law

is a rather weak metric.

One option for you is to make clear what are the criteria that you will use to evaluate the answers.

share
  • What would you propose as an example? – Jason Clyde Aug 7 at 20:35
  • 2
    I understood "as unobtrusive of a way as possible with the fewest violations of civil liberties" to be the metric. – user49466 Aug 8 at 2:51
  • @user49446 so violating one major civil liberty like the the right for abortion is objectively better than violating two minor ones such as the right to own a gun and the right to use drugs, just due to the raw amount of civil liberties violated? – Renan Aug 8 at 15:41

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .