Ten Doxa

Conjecture 1: Reason is the process of conjecture and refutation. That is to say, we tentatively form conjectures about the way the world is and try to refute them and then replace them with better conjectures. Reason is the only known method of knowledge-creation for human beings.

Conjecture 2: Do not seek to justify knowledge based on authority; men are fallible.

Conjecture 3: Never blame reason for the horrors created by bad men.

Conjecture 4: Be concerned only with the truth, not whether or not you happen to be right.

Conjecture 5: Traditions contain knowledge.  Do not seek to destroy traditions but rather improve them critically.

Conjecture 6: The initiation of force is bad; trade is better.

Conjecture 7: Romance is bad; friendship is better.

Conjecture 8: Theft is bad; wealth-creation is better.

Conjecture 9: Under normative circumstances, lying is bad; critical discussion is better.

Conjecture 10: Jealousy is bad; greed is better.

Laws Are Like Scientific Theories

Good legal theory should be similar in make-up to good scientific theory. It should be objective, have reach, be hard to vary and be able to withstand falsification.

Laws should be objective because this avoids problems with discrimination and also tells the citizens of a country exactly what they are not permitted to do.  A good example of an objective law is criminalising murder outside of self-defence, because it is equally applicable to all citizens and sets clear boundaries for what an individual may not lawfully do.  A subjective set of laws would be antitrust laws because they discriminate against larger corporations and also don't make it clear what business practices are and are not legally permitted.

Laws should have reach because this is an indicator that they are non arbitrary and when they withstand criticism are more likely to be true.  As legal theory, outlawing practices which involve the initiation of force have reach because we can apply this across the board with tremendous success.  Tax laws by contrast lack reach, because they have very specific jurisdiction and are frequently having to be amended.

Being hard to vary is a good quality for a law because this decreases ambiguities in its being upheld.  A ban on the sale of nuclear weapons is a law which is hard to vary because its intentions are clearly and explicitly stated.  Saying that congress may sometimes interfere with commerce is incredibly vague by contrast and has led to wildly different interpretations.

It's important that a law works in practice.  If people are finding all sorts of loopholes then this is an indication that the law needs revising, it has been falsified as a useful legal measure. Laws against female genital mutilation are very tightly worded and stringently enforced meaning that is almost impossible to get away with it.  By contrast, drug laws often have all sorts of loopholes which leads to them being flouted.

Taking Children Seriously (Check Your Premises)

A semi-frequent criticism of the characters in Atlas Shrugged is that they haven't 'grown out' of the toddler 'tantrum' phase of selfishly wanting things and objecting when they can't get what they want.

Some Objectivists are quick to point out the difference in kind between the 'irrational' behaviour of the toddler and a John Galt type. This is conceding too much ground to the critic. Instead of proclaiming the Objectivist wrong for behaving like a small child, our culture could do with first questioning the unquestioned: whether the actions of the toddler might be RIGHT?

I leave you to work through the implications of this.

Induction Doesn't Work

As a preface to my Blog post, I in no way want to suggest a link between the great majority of Inductivist thinkers and racism. A great deal of the greatest minds that have ever lived believed themselves Inductivists and I have nothing but respect for their achievements, if not for their purported method.

A good analogy as to why Induction is bad epistemology is to the ideas of a typical racist.

What a racist will do is observe maybe a dozen or so bad black people throughout their life and then make a universal claim such as 'all black people are bad'. The racist thinks he has 'proof' and feels justified in his racism.

However this approach doesn't work. One could meet a million bad black people and as soon as one meets a good black guy, 'all black people are bad' is no longer true. Given that we can never know whether he have ever met all black people in existence, we are never rightly able to make the claim that 'all black people are bad'.

This is not the whole story though. What's most important here is that the racist is lacking an *explanation* as to why black people are bad.

An enlightened non-racist would be willing to accept that the racist had met lots of bad black people. He may even be willing to accept that there are many bad black people out there. They may even constitute a majority of the population. However he would point out that there are also many good black people in the world, and thus the claim 'all black people are bad' can't be true.

More importantly however, the enlightened non-racist is able to *explain* why there are bad black people in the world, even if they happened to constitute the vast majority of the black population, in non-racist terms. Black people, as human beings, are autonomous moral agents that have the capacity to chose between right and wrong and also like other human beings they are fallible, which means that the amount of mistakes they make will vary, thus they will fall somewhere within the scale of good and bad. The enlightened non-racist does not consider this view as infallible like the racist does. He accepts that if a better explanatory model consisting of reasons why black genetics lead to moral degeneracy existed then the racist may have truth on their side.

Whilst the racist believes his view to be proven, the non-racist is open to criticism.