Its philosophical.  Note how you discuss if the CoC is controversial, not the maintainer wanting to enforce it, or how you phrase it as &quot;there is a CoC&quot; rather than &quot;the maintainer will apply force as necessary&quot;.<p>Folks with agency or autonomy will personally act to eliminate harassment, without need for rules, for example.  Troll on my turf, I will ban you.  Not some set of rules taking action, a human (that being me) will exert authority (that being the mighty banhammer) and that&#x27;s how it will be. There are no abstract rules or rule lawyering involved.<p>The CoC view is passively sugar coating some abstract set of rules which will enforce itself, kinda.  Its very weird because the person applying the CoC is too passive and has too little agency to, say, wield the banhammer and eliminate the threat without need of formal rules and regulations.  Yet, has enough agency to force everyone else to work under a CoC, which simultaneously implies the same people that can&#x27;t autonomously be trusted to exhibit common sense will none the less be forced by the rules to apply the rules they were too timid to apply by themselves without the CoC.  Its very weird logic twisting.<p>If you trust individual leaders, the CoC is useless because the have the agency to wield the banhammer with no need for rules.  If you don&#x27;t trust the leaders, the CoC is useless because they won&#x27;t enforce it.<p>So what is the use of a CoC?  Well, for one thing instead of banhammer swinging we can raise awareness and have a debating party about what violates the abstract rules.  No one can be kicked out without a long painful debate.  Its a rule&#x27;s lawyer&#x27;s paradise rather than a developers paradise.<p>CoC&#x27;s are very passive, someone else will enforce the rules.  That paradoxically leads to worse behavior.  Pretending you&#x27;re not in a benign despotism merely confuses and slows down necessary responses by all concerned.<p>Its sort of a generic opposition to all that is Dilbertian, along the lines of not requiring casual IRC &#x2F; SMS message conversations to be conducted as per &quot;Robert&#x27;s Rules of Order&quot;  Its not that the rules are in themselves bad, its that if you think you need Roberts Rules of Order for IRC something is hopelessly off the tracks and you can only hope you don&#x27;t show up as a satire in a Dilbert or xkcd cartoon.<p>Maybe a bad bar analogy is the bartender tosses out obnoxious drunks.  Installing a set of formal rules that drunkards must be formally recognized by the chair of the meeting before speaking as per Roberts Rules and if you don&#x27;t then an abstract someone should toss you out implies you&#x27;re probably in one messed up bar.