For at present’s put up, additional ideas impressed by Barry Lam’s e-book Fewer Guidelines, Higher Folks.
When Lam places forth arguments in favor of legalism in his e-book, one of many most important values he argued legalism seeks to protect is the concept justice requires we deal with like instances alike. If you happen to and I have interaction in the identical conduct, however you might be punished for it whereas I’m not, that’s arbitrary and unfair. Up to now, so good.
Nonetheless, there’s an issue. Legalism requires clear and constant definition for guidelines of conduct so these guidelines might be understood by each residents and enforcers. Sadly, understanding 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 all the time find yourself considerably arbitrary, and there will likely be clear instances the place that line defines issues incorrectly.
This isn’t simply the case with defining mammals. Michael Huemer wrote an complete e-book in regards to the nature of information, operating over 350 pages. And within the opening line of the primary chapter after the introduction, Huemer writes “On this chapter, we are going to attempt to fail to outline ‘information’.” He begins with the essential first-pass definition of information as a justified true perception, then exhibits that there are conditions the place somebody can have a justified true perception that X, however nonetheless not really know X – and this seems to be true for the entire ever extra complicated definitions of what information is. He makes an identical level in is e-book 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 regardless of how fastidiously they try and craft a definition, you’ll be able to nonetheless discover situations of issues which can be clearly tables that don’t match the definition, and issues that match the given definition that also clearly aren’t tables.
This isn’t to say that trying to outline issues is pointless, or that the inevitably inexact nature of definitions exhibits the utter meaninglessness of the phenomenon these definitions try to explain. However we must be conscious that for any definition, if we drill down sufficient, there will likely be instances 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 USA.” Nonetheless, merely saying “the waters of the USA” is simply too imprecise – that time period required a extra exact definition. So regulators tried to just do that, including amongst different clauses that it included areas “enough to help, and that below regular circumstances do help, a prevalence of vegetation sometimes tailored for all times in saturated soil situations.”
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 sometimes tailored for all times in saturated soil situations.” Thus, by introducing sand and fill grime on that plot of dry land as a part of establishing the cabin, they had been responsible of “discharging pollution into the navigable waters of the USA.” 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 “could have some saturated-soil vegetation, as is the state of affairs right 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 the USA.
(As a postscript, after their launch, they had been instructed to take away these “pollution.” On this occasion, they managed to persuade the decide presiding over that case to truly go to the positioning. Upon doing so, the decide was agreed that it made no sense in any respect to name the world a “wetlands” constituting “navigable waters,” and described the authorized definitions used on this case as “a reversal of phrases that’s worthy of Alice in Wonderland.”)
And this is usually a case the place the bounds 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 instances are handled alike. One the one hand, you’ve a prototypical case of somebody dumping waste right into a river. Then again, you’ve the Mills putting some fill grime on a driveway on dry land. For a decide to have a look at each of these instances and say “Yep, the folks in each of those conditions should be despatched to federal jail – in spite of everything, justice requires that I deal with these like instances alike!” would virtually appear to be a Monty Python sketch if it wasn’t really true. This wouldn’t be treating like instances alike – it will be a case of pretending that fully unalike instances are literally alike, and treating the act of placing grime on a driveway on dry land as the identical as dumping chemical substances right into a river. This appears as arbitrary as something legalism needs to keep away from.
If justice requires that we deal with like instances alike, we also needs to keep in mind {that a} by-the-book legalism that refuses to make distinctions or exceptions also can end in us treating wildly and clearly unalike instances as in the event that they had been alike.