England's dreaming equity, trust and conscience - alastairhudson.com

Taxonomy is such a masculine response to the messiness of the world, a littlelike the road-map approach to peace in the Middle East or bombing Iraq: youpress one button and all the problems in the world are solved. It’s an approachwhich has never worked before, so why do we suppose that it will work thistime?Perfect questions and perfect answersA part of the problem with relying entirely on perfect taxonomies of law andon the rigid application of rigid rules is that we cannot even come up withperfect questions, let alone perfect answers. Consider that characteristicquestion of eight year-old’s maths classes:Albert fills a bath with a volume of 150 litres with water which flows at a rate of2.5 litres per minute. How long does it take Albert to fill his bath?Well the question is hopeless. Nobody fills their bath like that. Nobody fills uptheir bath completely for a start. If you did, the water would spill out onto thefloor. So we cannot know how much water Albert uses unless at the very leastwe know how much water Albert will displace. Anyway, when people fill theirbaths, they have a routine.Maybe they run their bath for as long as it takes them to shave or tobrush their teeth or while waiting for the bread to toast. In most bathroomsyou have to put in a little cold water first, or else the bathroom mirror steamsup. Waiting for the bath to fill is boring if you are not doing something else inthe meantime, so you are likely to start doing something else and – becauseit’s early in the morning and you’re not yet properly awake – you will oftenaccidentally put in too much cold, and then it will take longer to put in enoughhot water.Maybe you have to empty some cold water out. Maybe the pilot light foryour water-heater has gone out, requiring you to hop from foot to foot on thecold kitchen tiles as you wait for it to catch. Maybe, in your wandering earlymorning mind-set, you put in too much hot. Maybe, you just get into the bathwhen it’s neither full nor perfectly warm because you are in a hurry (becauseyou’ve spent so long getting the pilot light going, or simply because you’renormal and you stayed in bed as long as possible hitting the snooze buttonagain and again until you were late). So, the reason why this seemingly perfectquestion is difficult to answer, is that the perfect mathematical answer takesno account at all of how people actually live.This is, in essence, my point tonight: because people often do notbehave in predictable ways, it is important never to assume too much nor torequire too much rigidity in our expectations of them.The importance of equityThat is why equity is so important.Only through equity are we able to measure each case according to its ownfacts and against a set of principles based, in all honesty, on contested value20www.alastairhudson.com | © professor alastair hudson