Few people ever bring up say Dworkin, Hart, Rawls, and the Natural Law (Rule of Law) vs Positive Law (Rule by Man) debate, or even Hayek and Epstein, or Milsom (or Black) or how many know the constitution, the Magna Carta, germanic law, roman law, and instead, they all fuss with philosophers and essayists who are mostly the people too ridiculous and absent responsibility to practice law and government. And so, instead, all of this history was so obvious to me, because I’ve been so deep in programming, law, cognitive science, and economics, for so long, that it’s sort of unimaginable to me that no one goes anywhere near the law at all. But no one does. Instead we learn shallow moralizing, opinion, sophistry: philosophy.
AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
Why is that? Well, that’s because the Natural Law (bottom up) and Political Law (top down) are spoken in even WORSE sophistry than philosophy. Seriously. I mean, the law is argued as rules, general rules (principles) and sets of cases. And law is taught and practiced as an apprenticeship trade over generations, where procedure and these rules like social norms and traditions, don’t require a comprehension of the underlying logic of the law (jurisprudence, legal philosophy, juridical science), just imitation of those legal norms.
If you study the great legal debates from our present position of knowledge, the great thinkers are worse excuse makers and fantasists than the philosophers and theologians. Why? They’re trying to make excuses for political law (rule by man) to circumvent the high cost of moral law (natural law, rule of law), and it’s gotten far, far worse in the democratic age, and even worse in the postmodern age.
And that’s what P-Law solves. It produces the formal logic of natural law, and says ‘well, you can do whatever you want, but this is the law, and if you want to do something pragmatic or expedient, then you’re violating that law, regardless of your political or judicial function. The purpose of natural law is to force you (individuals, social groups, business, political groups, governments) to find solutions that aren’t irreciprocal regardless of how hard it may be to do that.
And what’s the problem? There is only one problem. We’re all trying to circumvent selection pressure: evolutionary law. And the left is additionally trying to circumvent physical law (scarcity) as well as natural law (human incentives and resulting behavior).
I am too stressed by the rate of acceleration of the revolution so hopefully I make it through it to reform our civilization so that the law is taught as just another tool next to reading, and math, and physics, and we restore our ‘european sense making’ by restoring our fairy tales, myths, legends, of aryan heroism and achievement, and teach Aurelius’ philosophy as our secular personal philosophy (religion), and teach Aristotle restated in p-prose as our method of reason.