Shades Of Reality

Chapter Nine

Many public parks have signs at their entrances proclaiming the times during which the park is open. Sometimes the hours of operation are explicitly stated in terms of clock times, such as:

Lincoln State Park Hours: 8 AM to 10 PM, Everyday

But some parks have less precise signs proclaiming their hours of operation:

Jackson City Park: Open Only During Daylight Hours

Either way, the signs indicate that there are times during which you are not supposed to be inside the park.

Now let's imagine that every park decides to incorporate a very strict rule: Any unauthorized person found inside the park after hours will be fined $100. Therefore if a person were to be caught inside Lincoln Park after 10 PM or before 8 AM the next day, they would clearly be subject to a $100 fine. But what about Jackson Park? At what specific times does daylight begin and end?

The "American way" of dealing with this kind of problem would be to simply go and change the park sign so that it presented explicit clock times! Of course the new sign would no longer reflect the original intent -- that the park is supposed to remain open during all daylight hours (since sunset and the ensuing darkness occurs at a different time each day). But then "you gotta draw the line somewhere," right?

I would like to propose an even simpler approach to solving this problem -- an approach that doesn't require the changing of any signs, and which doesn't require the "gotta drawing" of any lines.

We know that at any instant in time the question, "Is it dark yet?" has an answer that is both "yes" to some degree and "no" to some degree. Or equivalently, the question, "To what degree is it dark?" has an answer that lies somewhere between 0 percent and 100 percent. The numerical value of this degree

(Figure 9.1)

of darkness could be determined from a standard lookup table, which would express the degree of darkness as a function of time for each day of the year. Or each ranger could simply be equipped with an ordinary light meter for measuring the level of darkness at any time. Therefore, the degree to which a person would be guilty of trespassing could simply be determined by the current degree of darkness, i.e., the degree of guilt at any particular point in time could simply be equal to that time's membership value in the fuzzy set called "dark." For example if it's 25 percent of the way to becoming totally dark, then a person caught inside Jackson Park might be 25 percent guilty of trespassing, and he might therefore be fined 25 percent of the total fine (i.e., $25.)*

*[Footnote: As a practical matter, the degree of guilt of trespassing would not necessarily have to be linearly proportional to the current level of darkness. Instead the guilt curve could still remain low even for moderate levels of darkness, and only begin to rise substantially (but in a continuous manner) as it becomes significantly dark. This would allow visitors to be inside the park on dark cloudy days and not have them be significantly guilty of trespassing.]

I refer to this kind of approach to legal issues as Realistic Law, because it is based on the shades of gray of reality (instead of the blacks and whites of some mind game). Rather than trying to equify partial guilt into pseudocategories of "100 percent guilt" and "100 percent non-guilt" Realistic Law simply acknowledges the truth -- a person is only as guilty as he really is. There is no need to round off this true level of guilt to the nearest "totally guilty" or "totally not guilty."

But there is an even more important feature of this approach:

For example in Jackson Park there is no point at which the guilt and the corresponding fine suddenly get "turned on." Instead they both increase smoothly from 0 percent to 100 percent since they are both tied to the smoothly changing level of darkness. Therefore, two nearly identical trespassers will always be nearly identically guilty, and they will always pay nearly identical fines (in accordance with the Prime Directive of Equality). Contrast this with the non-Realistic law governing trespassers in Lincoln Park. A person caught in the park at 9:59 PM is not guilty of trespassing. But two minutes later, if another person is caught in the park, he is guilty of trespassing and must pay the $100 fine, clearly a violation of the Prime Directive of Equality.

Perhaps you are thinking that the Prime Directive of Equality could have been satisfied by simply offering a "grace period" to trespassers -- if someone is just a little late in leaving Lincoln Park, then merely have the park ranger "look the other way" and let him go. That way a person leaving at 10:01 or 10:02 would still be treated the same as a person leaving at 9:59. But a moment's reflection reveals that implementing a grace period resolves absolutely nothing. For then you must still face the problem of deciding where to "draw the line" between grace-period (when no fine gets issued), and non-grace period (when a fine does get issued). Implementing a grace period does nothing more than merely shift the park's closing hour to a later time. And you are then still left with the problem of satisfying the Prime Directive at this new later time.

Imagine that you are the ranger in charge, and let's suppose that there are several hundred visitors still inside the park. As dusk approaches, they all start to file out slowly, one by one, at about 5 or 10 second intervals. After which person should the grace period suddenly end? And after you've established that arbitrary cutoff point, how would you handle the valid objection from the person in line who says: "But you let the guy in front of me go out without fining him anything. So why should I have to pay a fine?" You would be stuck with a sorites problem. (You'd still be stuck with the same sorites problem in principle, even if you didn't offer a grace period.)

Realistic law is a subset of a more general concept that might be referred to as fuzzy (or multivalent) law. For example, a park trespasser might have had his level of guilt decided by a random number generator instead of by the level of darkness. While this, too, would have been fuzzy (in the sense that it would have produced shades of gray between "guilty" and "not guilty"), it would not have been a realistic solution. Realistic law is therefore based on a particular type of fuzziness known as reality. And because Realistic laws are consistent with reality, Realistic laws are more correct (see Chapter Zero) than non-Realistic laws.

Recall the Smoothness Principle of reality (see Chapter One) which states that everything in physical reality occurs smoothly. The Prime Directive of Equality therefore imposes a smoothness requirement to law. One can state a corresponding "Smoothness Principle" for Realistic law:

Realistic laws do not have sharp cutoff points defined by arbitrary black and white boundary lines. "Legal" gently blends into "illegal," just as "day" gently blends into "night."

Voting is the democratic process in which we all get to express our choices about political issues and candidates. It is a process that requires both maturity and a fundamental understanding of the issues on the ballot. But how do we determine "maturity"? How can we measure "understanding"? Should we allow absolutely everyone to vote, or do we "gotta draw the line somewhere"?

Before a person is allowed to drive an automobile, he must first pass a series of tests to prove his proficiency and knowledge of the rules of the road. Perhaps it would be a good idea to require potential voters to pass a similar kind of proficiency test to prove that they can at least understand the issues on the ballot. Otherwise, without the requirement of such an understanding, we might just as well let little children have full voting rights too!

But, once again, such is not the "American way." To be eligible to vote, the only requirement is that you be a warm-bodied citizen older than some completely arbitrary cut-off age (usually 18). You are then equified into being "totally qualified" to vote, just like every other warm body in the country, even if you can't even spell your own name. So let's, for the time being, forget about requiring "understanding," and simply focus on the requirement of "maturity."

When does a person become "mature"? Unless you are the aforementioned warm body, you are probably astute enough to see the similarity of this question to the question about the sky getting "dark." And, just as "day" does not mature into "night" at a point in time, so too does a "baby" not mature into an "adult" at any point in time. Instead, the question, "is (any person) an adult yet?" will have an answer that is both "yes" to some degree, and "no" to some degree. (The degree of maturity for the person is merely that answer's degree of "yes.")

(Figure 9.2)

Of course we can "pretend" that maturity occurs at some point, such as 18, or 21, or some other fixed number of years. But rather than playing such games of "make believe," let's instead look for a realistic solution to the voting issue. How can we use the reality of maturing (illustrated in Figure 9.2) to construct a Realistic law for voting?

The answer is obvious. In fact it utilizes the very same reasoning that we used in the park-trespassing example. (At any time, the actual fine for trespassing was some appropriate fraction of the whole fine.) Yet, almost everyone with whom I've ever discussed the matter of voting has had trouble seeing it at first. And the reason for the difficulty is that almost everyone mistakenly assumes that voting has to be an all-or-nothing process (i.e., either you do vote, or else you don't vote).

But just as we've acknowledged the concept of partial guilt, so too must we acknowledge the concept of partial voting. No, partial voting doesn't mean voting on only some of the items on the ballot. (Nor does it mean keeping at least some part of your body outside of the voting booth!) Partial voting means nothing more than assigning a weight to the vote. A weight of 100 percent would produce one whole vote, and a weight of 0 percent would be the equivalent of not voting at all. In fact this is exactly the way our voting laws already work! The only difference would be that partial voting would allow for additional possibilities besides just 0 percent and 100 percent.

Once the concept of a partial vote is acknowledged, we easily arrive at the:

For example, a teenager with a 50 percent degree of maturity would have a vote that counts only half as much as an adult's vote. (So if the adult were to vote for an issue on the ballot, it would take two half-mature teenagers both voting against that issue to result in a wash.)

It's easy to see that the Realistic Voting Law fulfills the requirements of the Prime Directive of Equality. Any two voters of nearly identical age will always have nearly identical voting rights, regardless of their ages. There will be no point in time at which voting rights suddenly switch from "off" to "on."

You might be wondering, "So who's going to determine the actual 'degree of maturity' curve that is sketched in Figure 9.2?" Let me counter with a question of my own: "What 'degree of maturity' curve are we currently using right now?" The answer is shown in Figure 9.3. It's a step function with a discontinuity at 18 years of age. So who determined that that should be the curve for "maturity"?

(Figure 9.3)

The "official" maturity curve might be determined by qualified psychologists or sociologists. Or we might establish the curve simply by voting for one. I don't so much care how the actual curve gets chosen, just as long as it's a "reasonable" curve. (The curve in Figure 9.3 is not "reasonable." It doesn't even look like reality.)

Even a quasi-realistic curve would be better than a step function. For example we might simply pick two different ages between which a person's voting rights "ramp up" from 0 percent to 100 percent, as suggested in Figure 9.4.

(Figure 9.4)

The Realistic Voting Law would be trivially easy to implement, even in our present society. When a person registers to vote, his/her birthday would be recorded by the registrar. On election day, all the ballots and the dates of birth of the corresponding voters would be put into the election computer. The computer would then simply multiply each vote by its corresponding degree of maturity before "counting" all the votes.

The notion of a weighted vote is not a new idea, nor is it even an "un-American" concept. In fact it's the very way publicly-held corporations hold elections at their stockholder meetings. Everybody who owns stock in the company does not get one vote identically equal to every other stockholder's vote. Instead, each vote is weighted in direct proportion to how much stock the voter owns. The more stock that a person has in the company, the more that person's vote counts. In a very similar sense, the Realistic Voting Law could then be interpreted as a reflection of how much "stock" each voter has in "maturity."

How mature should children have to be before we start teaching them the value of saving money? Should we require that a person be at least 18 years of age before we give them their first piggy bank? Of course not. We should encourage children to start appreciating the value of money long before that age, not because their nickels and dimes are so intrinsically valuable, but because it helps to build responsible attitudes toward money. So too should it be with voting. What better way to start encouraging civic responsibility than to offer kids a voice (or more aptly, a "whisper") in our government, not because their tiny fractions of a vote would ever amount to anything significant, but because it would help build responsible attitudes toward government and society.

How might we incorporate the shades of gray concept to create a Realistic law for income tax? Paradoxically, our black and white, all-or-nothing legal system already does handle income tax Realistically! (At least it does so in principle.) For some unknown reason (perhaps in a rare moment of sanity), the lawmakers decided to implement a "sliding scale" tax law -- the higher the income, the higher the tax. Had they decided to be consistent with the mentality they used in establishing the voting law, they might have come up with an all-or-nothing tax law like:

Everyone whose annual income is less than 18 years of
age (Oops!) I mean, less than 18,000 dollars pays abso-
lutely no tax, and everyone whose annual income is
greater than 18,000 dollars pays a fixed tax of $10,000.

In California, if you park your car near a curb that is painted red, you are subject to receiving a parking ticket if any part of your car overlaps this "red zone." A friend of mine recently had this happen to her. "I was hardly even inside it," she said. "There couldn't have been more than ten inches of my car overlapping the red zone, and they still gave me a ticket.

There wasn't much I could do but agree with her. If she parked her car only partially inside the red zone, then she's only partially guilty of being in the red zone. It's not fair to "charge her" for the entire zone. If only ten inches of her car overlaped the red zone, then she was only about 5 percent guilty of illegally parking in it. Therefore, just like the person in Jackson Park who was only partially guilty of trespassing, she should have had to pay only 5 percent of the total fine. Of course the State of California (which doesn't acknowledge Realistic law) didn't see it that way. But then neither did my friend. According to her all-or-nothing reasoning, most of her car was outside of the red zone, so she felt that she shouldn't have to pay anything!

The purpose of speed limits is to keep traffic moving at a safe rate of speed. But what is a "safe" speed? In general, the slower that all traffic moves, the safer everybody is. So the safest speed would be zero! (You can't very easily get into a traffic accident if nobody's moving.) Therefore, anybody driving at any non-zero speed is already unsafe to some degree. If one defines "speeding" as driving at an unsafe rate of speed, then everyone moving on the road is guilty of speeding to some non-zero degree! The question now becomes, how should all of these partial guilts be handled? It certainly wouldn't be practical (or socially acceptable) for police to stop absolutely everyone on the road and give them speeding tickets!

One interesting (even if somewhat impractical) idea might be to require all motor vehicles to carry the analog of an airline flight recorder in their trunks. Over the course of a year it would keep a constant record of each speed that the vehicle was driven. And since each road would have different location-dependent degrees of "safeness" for driving (for example, curves vs. straightaways), it would be necessary to record this location information as well. (This could be easily obtained from a Global Positioning Satellite navigation system.) Then, once a year, when it became time to renew the vehicle's registration, the recorder would be sent to the Department of Motor Vehicles and the owner would have to pay the accumulated total fines for the year.

A more practical (but less interesting) approach would be to adopt only a quasi-Realistic law -- establish a maximum speed limit (similar to what we currently do). But then we would simply smooth out the fines so that they comply with the Prime Directive of Equality (see Figure 9.5).

(Figure 9.5)

While we're on the topic of safety and driving speed, do you always come to a full and complete stop whenever you reach an intersection controlled by a stop sign? Or do you sometimes slow down just enough to make sure that "the coast is clear" before continuing on? Conventional law says that you must come to a complete stop. But is such an extreme stop always really necessary? (Of course it's always legally necessary. But is it always actually necessary?)

A yield sign is similar to a stop sign, except that you are only required to slow down before proceeding. So there are at least some intersections where it is considered "safe" to merely slow down before entering. In fact there are some "intersections" where it is actually safer not to even stop at all.

When California's Pasadena freeway (one of the first freeways in the United States) was built, its on-ramps were designed to have stop signs right at the point where the entering traffic was to merge with the rest of the freeway traffic! Today we know better than to require drivers to come to a complete stop before trying to merge into fast-moving traffic. It is actually safer to allow vehicles to increase their speed ("ramp-up") to match the flow of the main traffic before entering.

But this observation should apply not only to freeways, but to traffic in general. If you are driving on a road that is about to cross over a highway at an intersection that is controlled by a stop sign, you will spend more time in the intersection (and hence increase your risk of a collision) if you must first come to a dead stop, and then enter the intersection from a virtual standstill.

Whether or not you are required to stop at an intersection should be dictated by the traffic conditions that are present at the time, and not by a mindless sign sitting next to the road. You've got a brain. The sign doesn't. So use your common sense. If you are approaching an intersection that has a stop sign facing in your direction, and if traffic near (or already in) that intersection has the right of way, then you stop and wait your turn. But if you're approaching a stop sign at 3 o'clock in the morning, and if you've clearly determined that there isn't another vehicle or pedestrian in sight, then any law requiring you to continue slowing all the way down to a full and complete stop becomes nothing more than a stupid game and an insult to your intelligence.

In conclusion, we can state what should be the philosophy for all laws in general:

By going through a set of arguments virtually identical to those presented in the discussion of Realistic voting, we could develop what appears to be a Realistic law regarding the consumption of alcoholic beverages:

Everyone should have the right to consume alcoholic
beverages. But the amount that a person would be
allowed to consume (over a given period of time)
would be determined by his/her degree of maturity.

Such a law would have a slight problem, however. Perhaps you think that the problem might be how to enforce such a law. How would you prevent someone from simply visiting tavern after tavern and drinking his or her quota at each one?

There are many non-enforceable laws even in our present legal system. For example, murder is illegal -- but how does the illegality of murder prevent murder? The answer is it doesn't. All it can do is make the wrongdoer suffer the consequences after the fact. So too with the above drinking law. So, non-enforceability is not the problem.

The trouble with the above law would be that it would once again present us with an Aristotelian boundary line between what would be "legal" and what would be "illegal." For any given age there would be a hard limit specifying how much alcohol is OK. It would require a person who drank slightly more than his/her legal limit to have to suffer the legal consequences, while another person who drank almost as much (but who stayed just below the legal limit) would be free of any legal consequences. This would violate the Prime Directive of Equality.

Is an easy mistake to make when using Aristotelian thinking to try and develop laws. Just remember one simple guideline when trying to develop a law governing a specific action: Always remember that the resulting law must be able to answer the question, "To what degree is the action legal?"

A Realistic drinking law is illustrated graphically in Figure 9.6. The degree of legality (vertical axis) of drinking a "fixed" amount of alcohol is presented as a function of age (horizontal axis). Different curves would exist for different "fixed" amounts of alcohol. Two such curves are shown in the figure.

(Figure 9.6)

Notice, at any age, the more alcohol that a person consumes, the less legal that consumption becomes. However, there is no specific point at which they will have "reached their limit."

Also notice that, for any fixed amount of alcohol, the legality increases as the age increases. However, since alcohol is a drug, at no point does the legality ever reach 100 percent, except for the case of zero alcohol. (It's perfectly legal not to drink at any age!)

Similarly, we could construct "degree of legality" curves for other drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, etc. The legality curves for these drugs too would never reach the 100 percent mark. (Most of them wouldn't come close!) But just as with alcohol, there could be at least a small degree of legality to their use.

While we're on the subject of alcoholic consumption and the use of other such drugs, let's see how realism would affect the law (in the previous chapter) that prohibits a person from driving a motor vehicle while intoxicated.

As was already pointed out, driving a vehicle at any non-zero speed (even when the driver is completely sober) is still dangerous to some degree. So driving while under the influence of alcohol is really inviting disaster. But if we still want to define "intoxicated" as having a blood alcohol content in excess of 0.08, then the degree of intoxication would define the degree of guilt. (For example, a blood alcohol level of 0.06 would imply a 75 percent degree of guilt, and a level of 0.08 or higher would imply 100 percent guilt.) Once again, any two similarly intoxicated drivers will have similar degrees of guilt (in accordance with the Prime Directive of Equality).

As the degree of intoxication continues to climb, the person might almost be regarded as being even "more than drunk." Certainly a person in such an extreme state of inebriation should not be allowed to enjoy the same privileges as someone who is merely "drunk" at the 0.08 level. We might therefore want to consider the possibility of extending the concept of degree of guilt to include values even greater than 100 percent.

I could continue going through all the laws, one by one, but that would be a boring exercise. Suffice it to say that virtually all of our present-day "black and white" laws could easily be modified into Realistic laws simply by remembering to specify degrees of legality, keeping in mind the Prime Directive of Equality, and applying common sense. The resulting laws, if properly derived, should then match the "spirits" of their corresponding Aristotelian counterparts, except that the sharp edges and corners would have been rounded off. Such laws would then conform to the Smoothness Principle of reality.