Moral bindingness and levels of jurisdiction

In the US, you are sometimes told that something “violates federal law”, and it is said in a way that suggests that violating federal law is somehow particularly bad.

This raises a moral question. I will assume, contrary to philosophical anarchists, that valid and reasonable laws are in some way morally binding. Other things being equal, is it morally worse to violate the laws that operate at broader levels of organization. In the US, an affirmative answer would imply that federal law is morally worse to break than state law, and state law than county law, and county law than city law.

One might think this: the power to make laws belongs to more local levels of organization by delegation from broader levels of organization, and hence violating the laws of a more local jurisdiction is less morally bad. But this argument does not fit with what I understand is the US consitutional system’s idea that sovereignty starts with the states which permanently delegate some of their authority to the federal system. And, in any case, it is not clear why it would be less bad to go against the laws of a more delegated authority: if x delegates some authority to y, then relevant disobedience to y is also disobedience to x.

A perhaps more plausible argument in favor of the laws of broader jurisdictions being morally more strongly binding is that in violating a law, one offends against the body of citizens. With a broader jurisdiction, that body of citizens is larger, and hence the offense is worse. But this can’t be right. It is not morally less bad to commit federal tax fraud in Canada than in the US just because in Canada the population is smaller! (This observation perhaps suggests that if we do adopt the view that violating the law offends against the body of citizens, we should not view the “offense against the body of citizens” as meaning an offense against the citizens taken severally—to offend against a body is different from offending against the body’s constituents taken severally, or else punching a bigger person would be a worse thing than punching a smaller, just because the bigger person’s body has more cells. Or, perhaps, we have to say that the offensiveness of a law breaking is diluted among the citizenry, so that in a larger body, each citizen is less offended against.)

I want to suggest that the idea that it is worse to offend against broader jurisdictions is backwards for multiple reasons:

1. An offense against a narrower jurisdiction is an offense against a body of citizens who are more closely related to one, and hence is a greater breach of the duties of civic friendship.

2. The laws of narrower jurisdictions can be reasonably expected to be on the hwole better fitted to the community, because there is less variation in circumstance within a narrower jurisdiction.

3. One has a greater say in the laws of the laws of the narrower jurisdiction, and hence they better fit with the autonomy of the governed.

4. It is typically less burdensome to choose which narrower jurisdiction one lives under than which wider one: it is easier to move to a different city than to a different country. Therefore, any implied consent to local laws is greater than to wider laws.

These considerations suggest that offending against a narrower body is worse. Interestingly, (3) suggests that in my earlier example of tax fraud in the US and Canada, it is even worse to commit tax fraud in Canada, because doing so violates laws one has a greater say in. That actually sounds right to me, but I do not feel the difference in moral badness is a very big one, so (3) is probably not a major factor (of course, in the special case of tax fraud, a lot of the immorality comes from the immorality of lying, which precedes law).

(These same considerations support the principle of subsidiarity.)

So far I have been thinking about geographically defined jurisdictions. But consider a very different jurisdiction: the body of a profession, such as physicians or lawyers or electricians. The standards of such a body have a great deal of moral force. When a doctor says that disclosing some information about a patient violates medical ethics, that carries a great deal of moral force. And yet it really is “just” a violation of the law of a body, because there would be no such moral duty of confidentiality without the standards of the body of physicians (there would be more limited duties of confidentiality, say when the doctor specifically promised the patient not to disclose something). The laws of the professional jurisdictions have a lot of moral force, and it is not implausible that 1-4 are at least partly explanatory of that force.

Gutting on Church authority

Gary Gutting has an interesting opinion piece where he argues that the Bishops don't have the right to define the teachings of the Catholic Church for the purposes of American political discussion, because most American Catholics disagree with them on matters like contraception.

Imagine the Tall Persons' Club, where by well-established and generations-old tradition, the executive council is made up of the three tallest members, and the president is the tallest member. I voluntarily join the Tall Persons' Club, because I love many of its traditionally established activities, such as the annual cleaning of the giraffe enclosure in the local zoo, the discounted tickets to basketball games and the spectacular fireworks on Robert Pershing Wadlow's birthday.

However, I believe that the governing structure is an unfortunate one, because I think (a) height does not correlate with intelligence, (b) a focus on absolute rather than group-relative height is unfair to some ethnic groups, and (c) we should also do more for ostrich conservation than the present leadership does. Moreover, many members are with me on this. But nonetheless, by voluntarily joining the club, I have given its three tallest members a certain right to speak on my behalf on club-related matters. This is particularly true if there are other clubs that engage in similar activities but have a governing structure closer to what I like.

There are a number of important disanalogies, of course. For instance, one might believe that membership in the Catholic Church is necessary for eternal salvation. If one believes that, then one will have a very serious reason to be a member of the Church no matter how much one disagrees with the Magisterium, and the voluntariness that was essential to my story about the Tall Persons' Club is decreased. However, I don't know of any Catholics who disagree with the Magisterium on contraception who think that membership in the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation.

Another disanalogy is that many people become members of the Catholic Church not by their own choice, but by infant baptism (which, as I think Augustine notes, emphasizes that salvation is not by works). However, given a pluralistic society like ours, they are at least typically remaining in the Church voluntarily.

What counts as "the opinion of a group" is a really tough question. But it certainly isn't determined by looking at what the majority believe. For instance, it is false to say that it is the opinion of the Music Department that the earth goes around the sun, though no doubt that is the opinion of the majority of the members of the Music Department. It is not the opinion of the Music Department because the Music Department has not come to this view by the established methods for forming a corporate view of a matter proper to the Music Department. So majority opinion is not a sufficient condition for group opinion. Nor is it a necessary condition for something to be the opinion of a group that the majority believe it, even in the case of an institution whose traditional governance is by simple majority vote. A group can come up with a joint compromise proposition, approved by a majority vote, where in fact no one individual in the group endorses the proposition in its entirety (whether it is ever morally licit to vote in favor of a group resolution to endorse a proposition one takes to be false is a different question).

(Also, the following rather interesting thing can happen in a group. There may be two groups with the same or almost the same membership but with different governance structures, and opinions, preferences and decisions will then be differently attributable to the two groups. For instance, there may be the Music Department as an academic department and the Music Department as a social group. Perhaps the Music Department as a social group likes a particular brand of beer, but that preference is not of the Music Department as an academic group unless they vote for it in a Department meeting. It could be that there is the Tall Persons' Club as such and the Tall Persons' Club as a majority-governed group of individuals. We should then say that ostrich protection is a goal of the second group but not of the first.)

Furthermore, those of us who at least in principle like the idea of constitutional democracies (or monarchies, for that matter--I am Canadian, after all) should not say that the authority of a group derives from synchronic endorsement by the members. For it is a crucial feature (and very important for protecting minorities) of a constitutional system that it persists in authority even when at a particular time the majority fail to respect that authority (in this way, it is like marriage; one also thinks of Ulysses tied to the mast). The military oath in the United States is, importantly, an oath to protect the Constitution, not the present preferences and choices of the American people.

But I am out of my depth in the social/political philosophy stuff.

A reason why voting methods are compromises

Voting involves compromise on two levels. On the ground level, a vote involves coming to a compromise decision. But on the meta level, a voting system embodies compromise between different desiderata. Arrow's Theorem is a famous way of seeing the latter point. But there is also another way of seeing it, which in one way goes beyond Arrow's Theorem: while Arrow's Theorem only applies where there are three or more options, what I say applies even in binary cases.

We suffer from both epistemic and moral limitations. Good voting systems are a way of overcoming these, by combining the information offered by us in such a way that no small group of individuals, suffering as it may from epistemic or moral shortcomings, has too much of a say. It is interesting to see that there is an inherent tension between overcoming epistemic and moral limitations.

Consider one of two models. On both models, a collection of options is offered to a population.

1. Model 1: Each voter comes up with her honest best estimate of the total utility of each option, and offers a report of her estimate.
2. Model 2: Each voter comes up with her honest best estimate of the utility for her of each option, and offers a report of her estimate.

On the assumption that (a) the voters' errors in their estimations are independent Gaussians with mean zero and we have no information as to who has bigger variances, and that we want to maximize total expected utility (which will be approximately true) and (b) the voters accurately report their estimates, there is provably an optimal voting system under both models: we simply arithmetically average the voters' estimates and select the option with the highest average utility estimate (see my earlier post on this for some computer simulation data). Any voting system whose departs from this will be inoptimal under these circumstances.

Assuming that whatever people are going to say in a vote is going to be somehow based on their estimates of utility on the whole or utility to them, this averaging system is the best way to leverage the information scattered in the population. Unfortunately, while this is a good way to overcome our epistemic limitations, it does terribly with regard to our moral limitations. If one lies boldly enough, namely comes up with utility estimates that are far more inflated than anybody else's, one controls the outcome of the vote. Let's say that option 2 is the best one for me. Then I simply specify that the utility for option 2 is 10^100000000 and for option 1 is −10^100000000. And of course, there will be an arms race in the population to specify big numbers if there is more than one dishonest member of the population. But in any case, the dishonest will win.

In other words, the optimal system in the case of honest utility estimates is pretty much the worst system where honesty does not generally hold. A good voting system for morally imperfect voters must cap the effect each voter has. But in capping the effect each voter has, information can will in general be lost.

This is most clear in Model 2. We can imagine that an option moderately benefits a significant majority but horrendously harms a minority. Given honest utility reports from everyone and the averaging system, the option is likely to be defeated, since the members of the minority will report enormously negative utilities that will overcome the moderate positive utilities reported by members of the majority. But as soon as one caps the effects of each voter, the information about the enormously negative utilities to the minority will be lost. Model 1 is more helpful (presumably, civic education is how we might get most people to vote according to Model 1), but information will still be lost due to the differences in epistemic access to the total utility. On Model 1, capping will lose us the case where one individual genuinely has information about an enormous negative effect but is unable to convince others of this information. But capping of some sort is necessary because of moral imperfection.

(The optimal method of utility estimation also faces the problem that we are better at rank orderings than at absolute utilities. This can in principle be overcome to some degree by giving people additional hypothetical options to rank-order and then recovering utility estimates from these.)

A brief way to make the point is this. The more trusting a voting system is, the more information it brings to the table; but the more trusting a voting system is, the worse it does with regard to moral imperfection. A compromise is needed in this regard. And not just in voting.

Beating Condorcet (well, sort of)

This builds on, but also goes back over the ground of, my previous post.

I've been playing with voting methods, or as I might prefer to call them "utility estimate aggregation methods." My basic model is there are n options (say, candidates) to choose between and m evaluators ("voters"). The evaluators would like to choose the option that has the highest utility. Unfortunately, the actual utilities of the options are not known, and all we have are estimates of the utilities by all the evaluators.

A standard method for this is the Condorcet method. An option is a Condorcet winner provided that it "beats" every other option, when an option x "beats" an option y provided that a majority of the evaluators estimates x more highly than y. If there is no Condorcet winner, there are further resolution methods, but I will only be looking at cases where there is a Condorcet winner.

My first method is

• Method A: Estimate each option's utility with the arithmetical average of the reported utilities assigned to it by all the evaluators, and choose the option with the highest utility.

(I will be ignoring tie-resolution in this post, because all the utilities I will work with are real-numbered, and the probability of a tie will be zero.) This method can be proved to maximize epistemically expected utility under the

• Basic Setup: Each evaluator's reported estimate of each option's utility is equal to the actual utility plus an error term. The error terms are (a) independent of the actual utilities and (b) normally distributed with mean zero. Moreover, (c) our information as to the variances of the error terms is symmetric between the evaluators, but need not be symmetric between the options (thus, we may know that option 3 has a higher variance in its error terms than option 7; we may also know that some evaluators have a greater variance in their error terms; but we do not know which evaluators have a greater variance than which).

Unfortunately, it is really hard to estimate absolute utility numbers. It is a lot easier to rank order utilities. And that's all Condorcet needs. So in that way at least, Condorcet is superior to Method A. To fix this, modify the Basic Setup to:

• Modified Setup: Just like the Basic Setup, except that what is reported by each evaluator is not the actual utility plus error term, but the rank order of the actual utility plus error term.

In particular, we still assume that beneath the surface—perhaps implicitly—there is a utility estimate subject to the same conditions. Our method now is

• Method B: Replace each evaluator's rank ordering with roughly estimated Z-scores by using the following algorithm: a rank of k (between 1 and n) is transformed to f((n+1/2−k)/n), where f is the inverse of the cumulative normal distribution function. Each option's utility is then estimated as the arithmetical average of the roughly estimated Z-scores across the evaluators, and the option with the highest estimate utility is chosen.

Now time for some experiments. Add to the Basic Setup the assumptions that (d) the actual utilities in the option pool are normally distributed with mean zero and variances one, and (e) the variances of all the evaluators' error terms are equal to 1/4 (i.e., standard deviation 1/2). All the experiments use 2000 runs. Because I developed this when thinking about grad admissions, the cases that interest me most are ones with a small number of evaluators and a large number of options, which is the opposite of how political cases work (though unlike in admissions, I am simplifying by looking for just the best option). Moreover, it doesn't really matter whether we choose the optimal option. What matters is how close the actual utility of the chosen option is to the actual utility of the optimal option. The difference in these utilities will be called the "error". If the error is small enough, there is no practically significant difference. Given the normal distribution of option utilities, about 95% of actual utilities are between -2 and 2, so if we have about 20 option, we can expect the best option to have a utility of somewhere of the order of magnitude of 2. Choosing at random would then give us an average error of the order of magnitude of 2. The tables below give the average errors for the 2000 runs of the experiments. Moreover, so as to avoid between different choices of resolution methods, I am discarding data from runs during which there was no Condorcet winners, and hence comparing Method A and Method B to Condorcet at its best (interestingly, Method A and Method B also work less well when there was no Condorcet winner). Discarded runs were approximately 2% of runs. Source code is available on request.

Experiment 1: 3 evaluators, 50 options.

Condorcet	0.030
Method A	0.023
Method B	0.029

So, with a small number of evaluators and a large number of options, Method A significantly beats Condorcet. Method B slightly beats Condorcet.

Experiment 2: 50 evaluators, 50 options.

Condorcet	0.0017
Method A	0.0011
Method B	0.0015

So we have a similar distribution of values, but of course with a larger number of evaluators, the error is smaller. It is interesting, however, that even with only three evaluators, the error was already pretty small, about 0.03 sigma for all the methods.

Experiment 3: 3 evaluators, 3 options.

Condorcet	0.010
Method A	0.007
Method B	0.029

Method B is much worse than Condorcet and Method A in this case. That's because with three options, the naive Z-score estimation method in Method B fails miserably. With 3 options Method B is equivalent to a very simple method we might call Method C where we simply average the rank order numbers of the options across the evaluators. At least with 3 options, that is a bad way to go. Condorcet is much better, and Method A is even better if it is workable.

Experiment 4: 50 evaluators, 3 options.

Condorcet	0.0003
Method A	0.0002
Method B	0.0159

The badness of Method B for a small number of options really comes across here. Condorcet and Method A really benefit from boosting the number of evaluators, but with only 3 options, Method B works miserably.

So, one of the interesting consequences is that Method B is strongly outperformed by Condorcet when the number of options is small. How small? A bunch of experiments suggests that it's kind of complicated. For three evaluators, Method B catches up with Condorcet at around 12 options. Somewhat surprisingly, for a greater number of evaluators, it needs more options for Method B to catch up with Condorcet. I conjecture that Method B works better than Condorcet when the number of options is significantly greater than the number of evaluators. In particular, in political cases where the opposite inequality holds, Condorcet far outperforms Method B.

One could improve on Method B, whose Achilles heel is the Z-score estimation, by having the evaluators include in their rankings options that are not presently available. One way to do that would be to increase the size of the option pool by including fake options. (In the case of graduate admissions, one could include a body of fake applications generated by a service.) Another way would be by including options from past evaluations (e.g., applicants from previous years). Then these would enter into the Z-score estimation, thereby improving Method B significantly. Of course, the down side of that is that it would be a lot more work for the evaluators, thereby making this unworkable.

Method A is subject to extreme evaluator manipulation, i.e., "strategic voting". Any evaluator can produce any result she desires by just reporting her utilities to swamp the utilities set by others. (The Basic Setup's description of the errors rules this out.) Method B is subject to more moderate evaluator manipulation. Condorcet, I am told, does fairly well. If anything like Method A is used, what is absolutely required is a community of justified mutual trust and reasonableness. Such mutual trust does, however, make possible noticeably better joint choices, which is an interesting result of the above.

So, yes, in situations of great trust where all evaluators can accurately report their utility estimates, we can beat Condorcet by adopting Method A. But that's a rare circumstance. In situations of moderate trust and where the number of candidates exceeds the number of evaluators, Method B might be satisfactory, but its benefits over Condorcet are small.

One interesting method that I haven't explored numerically would be this:

• Method D: Have each evaluator assign a numerical evaluations to the options on a fixed scale (say, integers from 1 to 50). Adjust the numerical evaluations to Z-scores, using data from the evaluator's present and past evaluations using some good statistical method. Average these estimated Z-scores across evaluators and choose the option with the highest average.

Under appropriate conditions, this method should converge to Method A over time in the Modified Setup. There would be possibilities for manipulation, but they would require planning ahead, beyond the particular evaluation (e.g., one could keep all one's evaluations in a small subset of the scale, and then when one really wants to make a difference, one jumps outside of that small subset).

An optimal voting method (under some generally implausible assumptions)

Let me qualify what I'm going to say by saying that I know next to nothing about the voting literature.

It's time for admissions committees to deliberate. But Arrow's Theorem says that there is no really good voting method with more than two options.

In some cases, however, there is a simple voting method that, with appropriate assumptions, is provably optimal. The method is simply to have each voter estimate a voter-independent utility of every option, and then to average these estimates, and choose the option with the highest average. By a "voter-independent utility", I mean a utility that does not vary from voter to voter. This could be a global utility of the option or it could be a utility-for-the-community of the voter or even a degree to which a certain set of shared goals are furthered. In other words, it doesn't have to be a full agent-neutral utility, but it needs to be the case that the voters are all estimating the same value—so it can depend on the group of voters as a whole.

Now if we are instead to choose n non-interacting options (i.e., the utilities of the options are additive), then we just choose the n with the highest averages. Under some assumptions, these simple methods are optimal. The assumptions are onerous, however.

Voting theory, as far as I can tell, is usually conducted in terms of preferences between options. In political elections, many people's preferences are probably agent-centered: people are apt to vote for candidates they think will do more for them and for those they take to be close to them. In situations like that, the simple method won't work, because people aren't estimating voter-indepenent utilities but agent-centered utilities.

But there are cases where people really are doing something more like estimating voter-independent utilities. For instance, take graduate admissions or hiring. The voters there really are trying to optimize something like "the objective value of choosing this candidate or these candidates", though of course their deliberations suffer from all sorts of errors.

In such cases, instead of thinking of the problem as a preference reconciliation problem, we can think of it as an estimation problem. We have a set of unknown quantities, the values of the options. If we knew what these quantities are, we'd know what decision to take: we'd go for the option(s) with the highest values. Instead, we have a number of evaluators who are each trying to estimate this unknown. Assume that each evaluator's estimate of the unknown quantity simply adds an independent random error to the quantity, and that the error is normally distributed with mean zero. Assume, further, that either the variances of the normal errors are the same between evaluators or that our information about these variances is symmetric between the evaluators (thus, we may know that evaluators are not equally accurate, but we don't know which ones are the ones who are more accurate). Suppose that I have no further relevant information about the differences in the values of the options besides the evaluators' estimates, and so I have the same prior probability distribution for the value of each option (maybe it's a pessimistic one that says that the option is probably bad).

Given all of the above information, I now want to choose the option that maximizes, with respect to my epistemic probabilities, the expected value of the option. It turns out by Bayes' Theorem together with some properties of normal random variables that the expected value of an option o, given the above information, can be written Aa₀+Ba(o), where a₀ is the mean-value of my baseline estimate for all the options and a(o) is the average of the evaluators' evaluations of o, and where both A and B are positive. It follows that under the above assumptions, if I am trying to maximize expected value, choosing the option(s) with the highest value of a(o) is provably optimal.

Now there are some serious problems here, besides the looming problem that the whole business of numerical utilities may be bankrupt (which I think in some cases isn't so big an issue, because numerical utilities can be a useful approximation in some cases). One of them is that one evaluator can skew the evaluations by assigning such enormous utilities to the candidates that her evaluations swamp everyone else's data. The possibility of such an evaluator violates my assumption that each person's evaluation is equal to the unknown plus an error term centered on zero. Such an evaluator is either really stupid, or dishonest (i.e., not reporting her actual estimates of utilities). This problem by itself is enough to ensure that the method can't be used except in a community of justified mutual trust.

A second serious problem is that we're not very good at making absolute utility judgments, and are probably better at rank ordering. The optimality condition requires that we work with utilities rather than rank orderings. But in a case where the number of options is largish—admissions and hiring cases are like that—if we assume that value is normally distributed in the option pool, we can get an approximation to the utilities from an evaluator's rank ordering of the n options. One way to do this is to use the rank ordering to assign estimated percentile ranks to each option, and then convert them to one's best estimate of the normally distributed value (maybe this can just be done by applying the inverse normal cumulative distribution function—I am not a statistician). Then average these between evaluators. Doing this also compensates for any affine shift, such as that due to the exaggerating evaluator in the preceding paragraph. I can't prove the optimality of this method, and it is still subject to manipulation by a dishonest evaluator (say, one who engages in strategic voting rather than reporting her real views).

I think the above can also work under some restrictive assumptions even if the evaluators are evaluating value-for-them rather than voter-independent value.

The basic thought in the above is that in some cases instead of approaching a voting situation as a preference situation, we approach it as a scientific estimation situation.

Religiously-based legislation

Consider the following thesis: (*) In a liberal democratic society, it is wrong to introduce coercive legislation on religious grounds.

Here is a simple counterexample. Suppose that the vast majority of the citizens hear a voice from God, and see lots of corroborating miracles such as the clouds spelling out a disproof of the Riemann Zeta Conjecture and a proof of Goldbach's conjecture. The voice announces that prohibiting burning coal in large quantities would decrease cancer rates in 80 years by 80%. Let us suppose that a quick review of the scientific literature finds no evidence either for or against this claim. It seems that it would reasonable and not wrong to forbid the burning of coal in large quantities on the basis of this revelation, and to do so under pain of significant penalties, and, in fact, it might be wrong not to introduce such legislation. (Sure, one could do research on the question, but the long term nature of the research would dictate that one would have to act before the research was in.) Yet such a prohibition would be coercive legislation introduced on religious grounds. Hence, (*) is false.

Objection 1: Bite the bullet—the legislation would indeed be wrong.

Response: Suppose that the voice isn't from God but from an alien scientist where the aliens had a science thousands of years ahead of ours. Then plainly the legislation would be reasonable (assuming one could rule out ulterior motives on the part of the scientist). But the only reason to listen to the scientist is that its testimony is likely true, and the same reason applies a fortiori in the case of God. Hence, if the testimony comes from God, it is even more reasonable to introduce the legislation.

Objection 2: This isn't the relevant sense of "on religious grounds." The claim that stopping burning coal would reduce cancer rates is not religious in nature. Granted, the claim is epistemically based in religious claims—the revelation of God—but the claim is not itself religious.

Response: That may be. But if so, then the prohibition on religiously based legislation prohibits a lot less than is generally thought by defenders of the prohibition. For instance, this will mean that anti-abortion legislation based on a religiously based belief that embryos and fetuses are persons will not count as religiously based in the relevant sense, since the claim that embryos and fetuses are persons is not religious in nature—it is a metaphysical or ethical claim (or some combination of these). If metaphysical or ethical claims like this were automatically religious in nature, then civil rights legislation based on the conviction that members of some class are persons and should be treated as such would likewise be ruled out, which is absurd. So on this view, (*) is not violated by legislation based on metaphysical or ethical claims that are epistemically grounded in religious claims. Then, even legislation that prohibited homosexual activity on the grounds that it is immoral, with the claim of immorality being justified by means of the Bible, would not count as religiously based, at least as long as "immoral" was understood in a non-religious way. This defense of (*), thus, undercuts what typical proponents of (*) want to use (*) for.

Objection 3: In the example given, the divine-revelation justification is epistemically based in a good publicly available argument for the reliability of the revealer, based on obvious miracles. But that is an outlandish hypothetical case: the reliability of the revealer in real-world religions is not something for which one can argue in a publicly available way.

Response: If this objection is correct, the problem isn't with the religious basing of some legislation, but simply with the legislation's not being based on good publicly available arguments. Here, I inserted "good", because in fact apologists for all the major religions do publicly offer arguments for their religions, so if the objection was the lack of argument, the objection would be unsound. Rather, the objection has to be to the lack of good publicly available argument. To make this case, one has to be in a position to show that all the apologetic arguments for the different religions fail. That is a non-trivial task (and I think an impossible one, because the apologetic arguments for Catholicism as a matter of fact are successful).

It's worth noting that even though the principle that one shouldn't introduce legislation based on something lacking good publicly available arguments may be correct, it is not a principle we really want constitutionally enshrined. The consequences of striking down all laws whose introducers (or maybe the voters for which) lacked good publicly available arguments would be really scary by everybody's lights.

A counterexample to the Private Language Argument

Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument contends that it is impossible for one to form a language by oneself. Here's a counterexample. You live on an island that has no people other than yourself. You live for forty years there. Then you step in a time machine that was left there by someone else. You go back forty years. You do this 999 times. (Let's assume that the time machine also fixes up your body so you can live for a subjective length of 40000 years.) To an outsider, the island looks populated by a thousand people of remarkably similar appearance. There is a community there. But that community in fact includes only one person, you. So, it's possible to have a community with only one person. But there is no reason why such a community couldn't develop a language, since it functions just like all other communities do.

A fun question: Suppose Marcy and George join you on the island, but they don't do any time travel, and so there you are located in 1000 places on the island, and then there is Marcy and there is George. In elections, should you get 1000 votes, with each of them getting only one—there does, after all, seem to be a sense in which you have a lot more interests—or should each of the three people on the island get exactly one vote?

By the way, the clip below illustrates the wrong way of imagining the scenario. In my scenario, it is a mistake to think of first the island having you in one place, then of it having you in two places, and so on. Over the 40 year period in my scenario, you always are in 1000 places.