For at this time’s put up, additional ideas impressed by Barry Lam’s guide Fewer Guidelines, Higher Individuals.
When Lam places forth arguments in favor of legalism in his guide, one of many major values he argued legalism seeks to protect is the concept justice requires we deal with like circumstances alike. When you and I have interaction in the identical conduct, however you might be punished for it whereas I’m not, that’s arbitrary and unfair. To date, so good.
Nevertheless, there’s an issue. Legalism requires clear and constant definition for guidelines of conduct so these guidelines may be understood by each residents and enforcers. Sadly, figuring out a constant definition that precisely classifies each case seems to be a useless finish. As I mentioned in my put up on Daniel Dennett’s Prime Mammal thought experiment, strains drawn will at all times find yourself considerably arbitrary, and there can be clear circumstances the place that line defines issues incorrectly.
This isn’t simply the case with defining mammals. Michael Huemer wrote an complete guide in regards to the nature of data, operating over 350 pages. And within the opening line of the primary chapter after the introduction, Huemer writes “In this chapter, we will try and fail to define ‘knowledge’.” He begins with the essential first-pass definition of data as a justified true perception, then reveals that there are conditions the place somebody can have a justified true perception that X, however nonetheless not truly know X – and this seems to be true for the entire ever extra advanced definitions of what information is. He makes the same level in is guide Moral Intuitionism about defining one thing so simple as a desk. He’ll have his college students try and work out what the definition of a desk is – and irrespective of how rigorously they try and craft a definition, you may nonetheless discover situations of issues which can be clearly tables that don’t discover the definition, and issues that match the given definition that also clearly aren’t tables.
This isn’t to say that making an attempt to outline that is pointless, or that the inevitably inexact nature of definitions reveals the utter meaninglessness of the phenomenon these definitions try to explain. However we ought to be conscious that for any definition, if we drill down sufficient, there can be circumstances when it falls aside, and when that occurs, sticking to the definition for its personal sake can severely lead us astray.
One instance that involves thoughts is the Clear Waters Act handed by Congress. The aim of this act was easy sufficient – to place limits on pollution being dumped into “the waters of the United States.” Nevertheless, merely saying “the waters of the United States” is simply too imprecise – that time period required a extra exact definition. So regulators tried to do exactly that, including amongst different clauses that it included areas “sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.”
This turned out to be an issue for a father and son duo named Ocie and Carey Mills, who had been constructing a cabin on a wooded plot of land in Florida. Sadly for them, this wooded lot, with no standing water, contained throughout the property line a small patch of marsh grass – and marsh grass constitutes “vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.” Thus, by introducing sand and fill filth on that plot of dry land as a part of developing the cabin, they had been responsible of “discharging pollutants into the navigable waters of the United States.” The decide presiding over the case agreed that the Mills couldn’t have realistically been anticipated to know that dry land constituted “navigable waters” on the premise that it “may have some saturated-soil vegetation, as is the situation here.” Sadly, The Guidelines Are The Guidelines™, and Ocie and Carey Mills spent 18 months locked up in a federal jail for polluting the waters of america.
(As a postscript, after their launch, they had been instructed to take away these “pollutants.” On this occasion, they managed to persuade the decide presiding over that case to really go to the location. Upon doing so, the decide was agreed that it made no sense in any way to name the world a “wetlands” constituting “navigable waters,” and described the authorized definitions used on this case as “a reversal of terms that is worthy of Alice in Wonderland.”)
And this could be a case the place the boundaries of drawing strains and establishing authorized definitions can find yourself working towards the worth legalism is supposed to protect – the avoidance of arbitrary therapy by guaranteeing like circumstances are handled alike. One the one hand, you may have a prototypical case of somebody dumping waste right into a river. However, you may have the Mills inserting some fill filth on a driveway on dry land. For a decide to have a look at each of these circumstances and say “Yep, the people in both of these situations ought to be sent to federal prison – after all, justice requires that I treat these like cases alike!” would virtually seem to be a Monty Python sketch if it wasn’t truly true. This wouldn’t be treating like circumstances alike – it might be a case of pretending that utterly unalike circumstances are literally alike, and treating the act of placing filth on a driveway on dry land as the identical as dumping chemical compounds right into a river. This appears as arbitrary as something legalism needs to keep away from.
If justice requires that we deal with like circumstances alike, we also needs to keep in mind {that a} by-the-book legalism that refuses to make distinctions or exceptions also can lead to us treating wildly and clearly unalike circumstances as in the event that they had been alike.
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