What is Nostr?
Tovarich EmmyNoether /
npub1tmn…dsh9
2024-08-23 11:46:24
in reply to nevent1q…7nu9

Tovarich EmmyNoether on Nostr: I don't know about law, but in moral philosophy there used to be a rule of thumb ...

I don't know about law, but in moral philosophy there used to be a rule of thumb "ought implies can," i.e. you cannot say someone *ought* to behave in a certain way if it is *impossible as a matter of fact* for a person to behave that way.

So for example you should not try to impose a moral rule which says "a truly virtuous person must fly everywhere" because as a matter of physics and physiology, people cannot fly.

This principle really should (ought?) to apply to the law. But it rarely does.

(There was an infamous case - though it didn't make it onto the statute book - where someone in one of the US states sought to legally define pi as exactly 3 because 3.14 blah blah - it's an irrational real - was so inconvenient. This is the same thing, but applied to human reproductive biology.)
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