The word “clear” is important. The vast majority of laws lack clear evidence for or against them. Perhaps it would be good to rescind all such laws, but the confidence one could reasonably have in such a position isn’t remotely like the confidence one could reasonably have in mild atheism.
My confidence in the claim that it would be good to rescind all laws that do not have clear evidence in favour of them stems from my own personal mental analogy of the legal system (something I have a layman’s knowledge of) with software engineering (something I have a professional knowledge of).
I see both as a complex system of interacting rules that can often produce unintended consequences (bugs in software). It is a general principle of good software engineering that all else being equal, simpler is better. Duplication of functionality is bad and should be removed. Code that exists for no apparent purpose is often best removed. By analogy, laws that duplicate functionality should be removed and laws that do not seem to have benefits should be removed.
This is clearly an imperfect analogy, and analogical reasoning in general is something to be wary of, but I find it instructive to see the ever-growing complexity and inefficiency of the legal system (where laws are far more often added than removed) with the very common phenomenon in software engineering of systems over time becoming unmaintainable and inefficient due to a tendency to add and never remove code.
The flawed nature of analogical reasoning clearly sets the level of confidence I can derive from this way of thinking well below confidence in atheism but there are other supporting arguments for the position to be made from other directions and overall I have a moderately high level of confidence that the legal system would be improved by a rebalancing of the rate of accretion of new laws and the rate of pruning of old laws.
The word “clear” is important. The vast majority of laws lack clear evidence for or against them. Perhaps it would be good to rescind all such laws, but the confidence one could reasonably have in such a position isn’t remotely like the confidence one could reasonably have in mild atheism.
My confidence in the claim that it would be good to rescind all laws that do not have clear evidence in favour of them stems from my own personal mental analogy of the legal system (something I have a layman’s knowledge of) with software engineering (something I have a professional knowledge of).
I see both as a complex system of interacting rules that can often produce unintended consequences (bugs in software). It is a general principle of good software engineering that all else being equal, simpler is better. Duplication of functionality is bad and should be removed. Code that exists for no apparent purpose is often best removed. By analogy, laws that duplicate functionality should be removed and laws that do not seem to have benefits should be removed.
This is clearly an imperfect analogy, and analogical reasoning in general is something to be wary of, but I find it instructive to see the ever-growing complexity and inefficiency of the legal system (where laws are far more often added than removed) with the very common phenomenon in software engineering of systems over time becoming unmaintainable and inefficient due to a tendency to add and never remove code.
The flawed nature of analogical reasoning clearly sets the level of confidence I can derive from this way of thinking well below confidence in atheism but there are other supporting arguments for the position to be made from other directions and overall I have a moderately high level of confidence that the legal system would be improved by a rebalancing of the rate of accretion of new laws and the rate of pruning of old laws.
That’s an unreasonably high bar—there is very little I am as confident of as atheism.