Is Law Truth or Truth Law?

A day or so ago I posted an article about law, that has lead to a discussion on moral absolutism. In response to my article, Paul made a thoughtful comment that included this:

Not so sure about the Moral Absolutes. Your moral absolutes are derived, or seem to be derived from a religious belief. What if we have different gods but live in the same society? And just for hypothetical example, they share some morals, but not others. Which ones get enshrined as law?

Thanks for coming past, Paul; no offense taken. I hope you take none at my response. It helps to remember that I am a rabid right-winger; I am bound to think outrageous things.

Paul is dead right. My "moral compass" is set by my religion. However, the rest of his comment rather misses the point.

My views on law are based on my views on epistemology: I believe that certain things are absolutely, objectively true (eg. that there exists a God who sets standards for human behaviour) and that therefore certain things are absolutely and objectively right or wrong (eg. that murder is wrong).

Paul however, seems to assume a relativist epistemology, and then point out that my conclusions on law are not consistent with it. This is only to be expected; we disagree on something more fundamental than which set of laws should be enacted.

Paul writes, "What if we have different gods but live in the same society?" The assumption implicit in this question (and correct me if I am wrong, Paul) is that each of those gods "exists" (for a given value of "exist") just as much as the others. That is to say, no religion is absolutely and objectively true or false; their trueness depends on who is assessing it.

As I have said before, I think this is wrong. There are many theoretical reasons to be given, but I think the most telling is a practical consideration: The central claim of Christianity is one that can be tested, and found true or false. Did Jesus Christ physically, bodily, rise from the dead?

This is a question that has a right and a wrong answer. There is no way that it can be true for me that he rose, but false for you. We are not talking about "spiritual" or "faith" truth here; we are talking about historical fact.

This is not the place to explore specific consequences. Rather, I will say that I am convinced that Christianity is true because I find the evidence in favour of it very persuasive. And if Christianity is objectively true, then other religions are necessarily objectively false, because (at least some of) their claims contradict those of Christianity.

So Paul, "What if we have different gods?" Then I am convinced that actually one of those Gods exist and the others do not; one of those Gods sets standards that are worth following and the others do not. Either you or I believe in a false god who is not worth following at all. And I think the evidence is in my favour.

Law: True or not?

Those of you who live in Australia and haven't had your head buried in the sand will know that a lot of people are talking about Aboriginal customary law just now.

Tony Abott and Mal Bruft think that we should be rid of Aboriginal customary law; it should have no place in our system of law. Many disagree. But not me, 'cause I'm a rabid right-winger, remember?

What's at stake?

Currently, a number of jurisdictions in Australia recognize some aspect of customary law. The area where it is most commonly used, and where the most heat is being generated now, is in sentencing criminals. If someone from an Aboriginal community is found guilty of a crime, a judge may (or may be compelled to) take customary law into consideration. This often involves elders from the convicted's tribe taking part in proceedings and "helping" the judge to decide an appropriate sentence.

This all started about a decade ago when it was noticed that there were an inordinate number of Aboriginal persons in prison, and that quite a lot of them tended to kill themselves while there. A better way of dealing with criminals of Aboriginal descent was needed. The suggestion made, and one which seems to have had some success, was introducing customary law into sentencing.

And now we want to do away with it. Why?

There have been a couple of high-profile cases where the result of customary law has been "obviously wrong". Most sensationally, a man who slept with a 14-year-old girl was given a very light sentence because, under customary law, she was promised as his wife, and customary law gave him the right, or at least the expectation, that he could sleep with her.

But to my mind this is probably an aberration. The vast majority of cases seem to benefit from the application of customary law. My objections go deeper.

One of the basic principles of the law is that it must be the same for everyone. This is not really codified anywhere (that I know of) but it is still a powerful force in our law. Courts will very readily appeal to this principle to decide a question. The NSW supreme court, for instance, rejected the application of Aboriginal customary law for this very reason, requiring that parliament legislate before it could bE used. In other jurisdictions it is explicitly codified; the US constitution has several provisions ensuring that the law is the same for all.

On first glance, it appears that application of customary law to cases involving Aboriginals breaches this fundamental principle of law. It is an area of law that is available only to a few; I will be treated with a different body of law to an Aboriginal person. But I heard a very curious quote in a news report last night. I didn't catch who said it, and I don't remember it word for word, but it amounted to this:

In order to ensure that everyone is the same before the law, it is necessary to apply different sets of law to persons from different cultures.

It seems bizarre at first, but when you understand where he is coming from, it makes a lot of sense. It all depends on your idea of truth.

For most of history, most people have accepted as absolutely obvious that a proposition is either true or it is false. "The sky is yellow" is a proposition that is either true or false, and all other propositions can equally be sorted into those that are true and those that are false. Furthermore, this "trueness" of a proposition does not depend on who does the sorting (so long as the proposition does not concern the sorting process itself). The sky is not yellow, no matter who assesses whether it is or not. In fact, the trueness of a proposition exists and is defined even if no-one assesses it. The sky is not yellow, even if no-one ever looks at it or questions what its colour is.

If you accept this version of truth, then the law you come up with will decide that some things are wrong, and some things are right. They may be right or wrong only in certain situations, but it will not matter who does them; they are either right or wrong. Murder is wrong; wrong for you, wrong for me. Rape is wrong; wrong for you, wrong for me. Sleeping with a 14-year-old girl is wrong; wrong for you, wrong for me.

Of course, there is another idea about truth out there. That idea is that truth depends on who you are. Something is not true simply because it is, but because I assess it to be true. The sky is not blue just because it is blue, but because I go and look at it and see that it is blue. Someone else might see that the sky is yellow; for them it is yellow. The fact that so far no-one has decided the sky is yellow (except in Mexico City some days) does not matter; the blueness of the sky is just my assessment of the truth.

If you accept this version of truth, then you will come up with a very different type of law, and this is where my unknown quote source is coming from, I expect. Since nothing is absolutely true then nothing is absolutely wrong, either. Therefore when our law forbids something, it does so only because our society has agreed that we won't do that. Murder is not intrinsically wrong, but we have agreed not to kill each other, and to discourage people from doing it. Sleeping with a 14-year-old is not intrinsically wrong, we have just agreed that it won't happen in our society.

Then you come across someone from a distinctly different cultural background. How can we impose our law on them? It is only true for us, not necessarily for them. So, for them, sleeping with a 14-year-old in these circumstances is not really wrong. How can we impose a harsh punishment on them if it's not really wrong in the first place?

Under this system of law, to treat all people the same means to treat them as their own cultural group would treat them.

This is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. A few reasons why:

1. While people say they believe this in theory, I don't think many people believe it in practise. Many people might be persuaded that different cultural groups should have their own standards of behaviour and that we should respect them, but I don't think many people would be ready to accept and respect the views of a tribe of cannibal head-hunters. If a group of such people fetched up on Australian shores as refugees, would we be prepared to respect their way of life? I doubt it, not after the first few skeletons were found. It is no good to scoff and say this is an extreme example; such groups of people have existed and do exist in the world. How will we deal with them, if we can't tell them that head-hunting and cannibalism are wrong?

2. There is no obvious place to draw the line. What defines a community with a culture that should be respected? One of the problems of applying Aboriginal customary law is that each tribe had its own, slightly different, version of that law. So we are not accepting a single body of law into our system, we are accepting a different body of law in each different place. Why stop there? Each family has its own traditions and rules; why not take them into account? Each person has his own views on what is right and wrong; why not take them into account? It sounds stupid, but if you are going to accept that right and wrong is a relative thing then you are inexorably lead to it. It is entirely artificial to divide society into certain groups and say that everyone within that group is the same; they are not. They will all have slightly different views on what is right and wrong, so how do you determine at what level views are allowed into law? Some headhunters might only like to collect heads, while others like to rape their victims and eat them afterwards. Do you now have a different division of law?

3. (This is where we suddenly swing waaay out into the right wing.) In the end, what is right or wrong does not depend on what people think is right or wrong, but on what God thinks is right or wrong. If you don't believe in a sovereign God then you will not believe this, but it is true nonetheless. Your assessment of its truth does not affect its truth. If a transcendent, sovereign God exists, then his existence is independent of whether you accept it to be true. If he says something is right, then its rightness is independent of whether you think it is right or want it to be right. Each culture and government does not have liberty to artitrarily decide what is right or wrong; they are placed by God to restrain evil. Laws are made and enforced to prevent evil from spreading; this leads naturally to the good order of society.

Why, oh why?

In various capacities, one of the things I do with my life is write software. I am of the (increasingly rare) variety of engineers who believe that things on computers should just work, and that when they don't work, you should be able to dig as deep as you like to figure out why.

My employer has just purchased two Dell Latitude D820 laptop computers. Let me say first that they are, on the whole, really nice boxes. Lots of disk, lots of RAM, fairly light, nice big hi-res screen, good touchpad, every type of interface you can imagine. Even (if you want to pay for the service) the ability to connect to 3G phone networks for data.

But when it comes to the wireless network connection it fails my expectations (outlined above) on both counts. I have just spent a very frustrating six hours (yes, 6 hours) trying to get the stupid thing to connect to our wireless network, including two and a half hours on the phone to Dell technical support, with no success.

We have other Dell laptops in our office, even of quite similar models, and they can access our network fine. But not these new ones. They appear to connect, but can only hold the connection for about six seconds, then drop it. Then appear to connect again, and so on, ad infinitum. Grrr.

The worst of it is, I brought one of them home, and tried connecting to my home network. It uses the same security setup, and I use a very similar model router... and it just works. Why??? What's different?

The worst of it is, Windows assumes I have no clue and wouldn't want to know what's going on in the network stack, and so will not let me see. I can't dig around and figure out what's going on; I just have to trust Micro$oft. In this case, the trust is badly misplaced.

The only humour to be found in all this is that the Windows service that tries to do the configuration is called "Wireless Zero Configuration." You can say that again...

Good things not to do

Here's a trap for young players:

You take a saucepan out of the oven, where it has been sitting at about 200 degrees for over a hour. You use oven mits to do this, because the saucepan is hot. You take the oven mits off, then try to lift the lid off the saucepan with your bare hands...

I swear I heard my flesh sizzle.

The upshot of this is that I have blisters on four of my fingers. Suprisingly, after the first night they haven't really given me much pain. I suspect this is because I cauterized the nerve endings, and when they grow back the pain will start in earnest. But for now I just have blisters. They are even odd blisters; the layer of burnt skin over them is quite hard, feeling almost like a callous from playing the guitar.

And that's the worst thing about it; there is no way I can play guitar with four fingers on my right hand out of action. I am deeply distraught.

Oh yes, I did it, and it's good, and I don't regret it one little bit...

One of the things I do in my spare time, which I enjoy a great deal, is play my guitar.

My guitar is a Cole Clark Fat Lady. Let me say, these guys know how to make guitars. When I was shopping, I played a lot of guitars, and didn't find many better than this... not even those three times the price. There were one or two that I thought were maybe better guitars, but they were in the very serious money range, and I wasn't going there. Compared to other guitar in their price range (AU$1400 for my model) they are just way ahead of all the rest.

But...

When I bought it, it had nice Elixir strings on it. They sounded good, but only lasted about three months before I broke one. When I went to buy a new set, I looked at the Elixirs and discovered they were about twice the price of a basic set of strings. What's more, the marketing hype on the box looks so gimmicky, I nearly laughed in the shop. Apparently, these strings have the "Critical Zone of Tone." If that doesn't put you off, nothing will. So, foolishly, I bought the cheaper strings and put them on my guitar.

Never again.

It is astonishing how much difference nice strings make to a guitar. I don't know what Elixir do differently to those other el-cheapo brands (appart from the critical zone of tone, of course) but whatever it is, it is well worth the extra $20, even if I spend it every three months. They just sound fantastic.

I put up with my other strings for about three months. I figured I couldn't just throw them away straight away, and besides, maybe I was just imagining the difference? Maybe they were not really that much better.

Never again.

My guitar is, once again, the beautiful, stunning, delectable sounding instrument it was when I bought it, and it's only getting better as the timber ages a bit. I love it. The sound is just sensational. I can't describe to you how good it is. But I'll have a go.

It has a grunty bottom end. Muted, this makes a wonderfully crunchy sound I didn't think was possible without a distorting amp.

Played gently, it is delicate, wonderfully sustained; it just sings. This is where it shines above every other guitar I have ever heard. I have a friend who owns a $4500 Martin; for gentle plucked work, I'd rather play my Cole Clark any day of the week. The sort of thing I'm thinking about is Paul Simon's arrangement of Scarborough Fair. This delicacy has a down-side; it is very sensitive to tuning. It is painfully obvious when the tuning is not exactly right, in a way that other guitars tolerate better. But it is worth it. It is also pretty picky about how you strum chords; any slight fault in how you finger them is painfully obvious. But it is worth it for that glorious sound.

When played nearer the bridge, it gains a very pure, almost choir-like tone that is gorgeous. I wouldn't want to play a lead part from a rock song on it, it would be all out of place, but that's not what I want it for.

All in all, I think my guitar is the final proof of the existence of God; how could a random universe produce something so beautiful?

My brain is like... like... something...

OK, for the third time in two weeks, I remember thinking last night, "Gee, that'd be a great thing to rant about on my blog," just before I went to sleep. Now, the day after the night before, I remember that thought, but not what I had that thought about.

This suggests to me that I tend to think through things deeply after I get into bed but before I go to sleep. But my wife assures me that when I lie down to go to sleep, I go to sleep, often with less than one minute's lying awake.

Do other people do this, or am I particularly scatter-brained where it comes to blogging?

Unemployment

Unemployment is generally considered a problem in our society. It seems that one of the chief goals of politicians is to make this number as small as possible. Australia currently has about 4.9% unemployment. This is considered very good, and historically very low. What it basically means is that one out of every twenty people who are looking for a job can't find one.

That seems to me still a worryingly large number of people. Suppose I know about 1000 people well enough to remember their names (I think this is about right). Fifty people I know can not find a job (at least statistically). Politicians don't seem worried about it, though, so I guess it must be OK.

However, what politicians seem to completely fail to realize is that it is not possible to remove unemployment completely, and in fact trying to do so can lead to some awful consequences. Let me explain why.

The first thing to realize is that in Australia, as in most economically liberal countries, the job market is essentially a free market. That is, there is little or no regulation on where you work and how much you get paid to work. Of course this is not quite true, because there are regulations that require minimum standards, but my main point here is that there is no upper limit on what you get paid.

As in all free markets, there is a supply and demand curve. For a given supply of labour, employees are prepared to work for a given sum of money. If the supply increases, competition increases and wages go down. If the supply decreases, competition decreases and wages go up. Similarly, employers are prepared to offer more money when there is a higher demand for labour, for the same market-based reasons.

Now realize this: the unemployment rate is a measure of the supply of labour. As the unemployment rate drops, the supply of labour is dropping; there are less people available to fill any new vacancies. This shorter supply of labour leads to higher wages. And it's not just those unemployed who get jobs that get the higher wages; increased competition for labour means that people already in jobs will be offered more money by another company to move, or by their present employer to stay.

This all sounds great for employees; as we approach full employment (ie 0% unemployment), we all get paid more. However, what I produce by my labour has not changed; I just charge more for the same amount of work I used to do for less. The effect of this is that my employer will have to charge more for whatever it is he sells. This is OK in a one-off incident, but when it is repeated throughout the economy, the cost of everything goes up to match the increase in labour costs.

What we have produced is not prosperity but inflation. This is the other number that governments are desperate to keep low, for reasons which I won't explore here. It's result is a slow-down in the economy and therefore increased unemployment.

This is a fundamental problem; low unemployment drives inflation up, and inflation drives unemployment up. So any time you start to get unemployment low, inflation will increase and start to drive unemployment up again.

Of course there are other things that drive inflation up, so if you can control them then you can get closer to full employment without causing trouble. But that just moves the problem a bit further away, it doesn't remove it.

What solutions are there? The obvious one is to regulate to control wages; set by law the wage that each occupation earns. But this has a number of serious flaws.

Firstly, it will be wildly unpopular, and any government that tries it will be voted out in short order. Legislating to cut wages is political suicide and no government will ever do it (at least not again).

Secondly, if you do that then workers will just leave and go to other jurisdictions where they can get paid more. This doesn't help the problem.

Thirdly, it has been consistently shown through history that any attempt to legislate to distort a market will end up causing more problems than it solves. See eg. the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971, the wool crash of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sugar crash of the early 2000s... the list goes on and on. For the classic example, see the South Sea Bubble (although market distortion is probably only a smallish component of that story).

Fourthly, the irony would be just too much. Many governments have legislated to increase wages, and the ALP still argues this is vital to the Australian economy. But it seems what we really need is to legislate to decrease wages. Ironic, huh?

So, anyone got any clever ideas? How do we solve this fundamental problem of a deregulated labour market?

Music

For me, music is an intensely personal thing. The sort of music I listen to is tightly connected to my character and personality, and when I go to put music on my choice will nearly always reflect my mood and what I'm thinking in some way.

My theory is that this is generally true, and you can see it all around, especially in musicians. Classical musicians are generally orderly people with firm ideas about things. Jazz musicians are generally vivacious, exciting people. Choirs that sing African music tend to attract people who dislike structure and rules, because the music itself is spontaneous and free. And of course our bland, nothing culture has produced the bland nothingness of what is "dance" music today.

Am I on to something here, or do I stereotype people badly? Are my sweeping generalizations generally true, or do I impose my preconception of how music works on people who are connected with it?

I was discussing this with my wife a few days ago and discovered that she does not work like this at all. She has music that she likes and dislikes, both performing and listening, without there being any particular connection with who she is and what she feels.

What about other people? Do you live your music?