A site for sore eyes.

Total Eclipse

Reason and Law

Posted by Shay on Apr 4, 2007 • (1)

In the past I’ve already ranted here about how pissy I get when legislation fails to do the minimum gesture towards a reason-based society. It’s as if we’ve accepted the scientific method as a matter of course for every aspect of our lives except the most important one: How our society should run.

Laws are passed in this country and others without even a semblance of empirical evidence that the law will assist in reaching it’s declared goal. Sometimes (at least in Israel), they fail in basic logical coherence, not to mention a vast array of logical fallacies any Philosophy freshmen should be able to spot.

Plato spoke of a government of Philosophers. I can only wish scientists took a more active role in politics.

With this in mind, I bring you the following (surprisingly) good news from the old gray island we like to call Britain (or “Tesco”);

Scientists want new drug rankings.

One of my pet peeves is the legal status of drug (ab)use. Being a big proponent of negative liberties, I’m of the general opinion that people should be informed of the risks, but allowed to do as they please with their own bodies, taking into legislative account only the tangents where the rest of society is affected.

For those of you who are too lazy to read the article, here’s a few select snippets, emphasis mine:

“The current system is not fit for purpose. Let’s treat people as adults…”
“The current ABC system was too arbitrary..”
“It is a real step towards evidence-based classification of drugs.”
“The new system [...] assesses drugs on the harm they do to the individual, to society and whether or not they induce dependence.”
“The new ranking system places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the league table, ahead of cannabis and several Class A drugs such as ecstasy.”

If this actually comes to be, it will be a triumph for reason in this field. Britain is an important player in the world political field. I can only hope the old empire will be able to infuse the new empire with it’s “radical” progressive thinking. So many lives have been ruined by “zero tolerance” policies. Would a little bit of tolerance in the New World be such a bad thing?

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1 Comments

  1. Isaac says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 10:10

    I have little faith in legislative solutions to social problems. The proliferation of laws is utterly pointless, and I find it amusing and sad that politicians do not even read the bills they propose (see Read The Bills Act).

    Be that as it may, you may find Susan Haack’s On Logic in the Law: “Something, but not all” interesting. The article is based on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s argument that `a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries.’ The following is a particularly insightful quote from Holmes’s The Common Law (cited in Haack 2005):

    It is something to show that the consistency of a system requires a particular result; but it is not all. The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

    On a related topic, the philosopher Paul Suber has what seems to be a very interesting study about the self-amendment clause in the constitution of the United States: The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law, Logic, Omnipotence, and Change (one of the appendixes of the book describes the game Nomic).

    Finally, I found the folowing story curious (from Hao Wang’s Reflections on Kurt Godel):

    In connection with the interview for his US citizenship, he once told me that for this occasion he had studied how the Indians had come to America. Einstein and O. Morgenstern were his witnesses, and Morgenstern has told different people about aspects of the event. The following account is given by H-Zemanek and E. Kohler (see Zemanek’s report, Elektronische Rechenanlagen, vol. 5, 1978, pp. 209-211). Even though the routine examination G was to take was an easy matter, G prepared seriously for it and studied the US Constitution carefully. On the day before the interview G told Morgenstern that he had discovered a logical-legal possibility of transforming the United States into a dictatorship. Morgenstern saw that the hypothetical possibility and its likely remedy involved a complex chain of reasoning and was clearly not suitable for consideration at the interview. He urged G to keep quiet about his discovery.

    The next morning Morgenstern drove Einstein and G from Princeton to Trenton. Einstein was informed; on the way he told one tale after another, to divert G from his Constitution-theoretical explanations, apparently with success. At the office in Trenton, the official in charge was Judge Philip Forman, who had inducted Einstein in 1940 and struck up a friendship with him. He greeted them warmly and invited all three to attend the (normally private) examination of G.

    The judge began, ‘You have German citizenship up to now.’ G interrupted him, ‘Excuse me sir, Austrian.’ ‘Anyhow, the wicked dictator! but fortunately that is not possible in America.’ ‘On the contrary,’ G interjected, ‘I know how that can happen.’ All three joined forces to restrain G so as to turn to the routine examination.

    It seems that no one knows what exactly Godel had in mind.

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