Law & Society Blog

…the law here seems to observe no difference between bad faith and non-good-faith, or (if it did accept there was a difference) doesn’t seem to care.

The question becomes: should it care? And why?

What are the costs of government?Organizing collective action, including, of course, the opportunitiy cost of those whose individual choices are being replaced by collective action.Enforcing the rules promulgated by the government, which requires courts, police, and an admininstrative system.The costs of providing traditional public goods such as roads and education.The primary gains from government are the reduction of uncertainty and the lowering of transaction costs for exchanges among strangers.There are certain common environmental factors that influence both the direct costs of government and the (indirect) gains from government…. The greater the population size, the higher the cost of organizing and enforcing collective action (cost) and the greater the potential benefits from trade.Diversity.

He could be killed, mutilated, maimed, brandished, locked up, sent into exile, etc.The collapse of Aristotelian substantive ontology in the late 17th Century (brought about by Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, and others), also led to a collapse of the corresponding social ontology and its theory of punishment…. Freedom (that is, negative freedom or freedom from), replaced justice as the central criterion of legitimacy.As the new monistic ontology was unable to account for qualitative differences between individuals, the exclusion of the criminal on ontological grounds was no longer plausible.

The driving force of that change, the enabling faculty, was the marriage of mathematics with empiricism, that is, scientific reasoning as explored by Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton and others and as described by Karl Popper and the critical rationalists, taking into account the occasional dead end and a series of turf wars among an ever more highly specialized scientific community, which accounts for much of what Thomas Kuhn describes in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”Hold on,” says the formalist, “mathematics and empiricism have been part and parcel of the philosophical discourse ever since before Plato…. The defining discovery of Greek philosophy was to provide a general, ontological explanation for the ubiquitous experience of change and invariance (some things change, others don’t), that is, the discovery of matter and form, of the empirical world and the world of ideas, of body and soul. Mathematics, in particular geometry and early number theory (most of which we would see as numerology today), had immediately been identified as part of the ideal, unchanging world, whereas empiricism was the method of choice to learn about our changing environment.