The general and the particular

‘Gays are cowardly.’ ‘Capricorns are self-confident.’ Both prop- ositions are (pace astrologers) simply untrue or, as the author puts it, spurious.

‘Gays are more likely to get Aids than non-gays.’ There is plenty of evidence for this, although of course not all gays get Aids. So this is what the author calls a non-universal but also non-spurious proposition. What follows? Should gays pay a higher health insurance premium? If not, why not? Would it be discrimination?

I found this book fascinating. The author quotes William Blake: ‘To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit .…’ Aristotle apparently accepted that laws did have to generalise but wanted a remedy where the law produced an unjust result. In England the Court of Chancery grew up to provide that remedy. The author disagrees with all this. He favours generalisation, citing a host of interesting cases, all more or less related to this idea.