‘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.
Pit Bull terriers attack people more than average dogs. Even so, the great majority of Pit Bulls do not attack people. Should it be a crime to own a Pit Bull? Would-be Pit Bull owners say that is ‘breedism’, akin to racism. If Pit Bulls are banned on these grounds, why not ban all dogs, as dogs are more dangerous than most other pets?
What about evidence? In civil cases, unlike criminal, the balance of probabilities, i.e. 51 per cent, is enough. So think about this. I am injured by a bus driven negligently in an area where 90 per cent of the buses are blue. I was too badly injured to be able to tell whether this one was blue. Obviously there is a 90 per cent chance that it was.
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