The Ghost of Kant - On Faith and Reason
A prosecutor in Los Angeles wants to convict someone who killed an attacker in self-defense. The attacker had a criminal record stretching to the moon. The prosecutor’s move: you couldn’t have known about that record when you killed him, so it’s irrelevant. The argument bugged me for weeks before I could name why. It’s not stupid. It’s the opposite of stupid — it takes a certain amount of cleverness to build. And that turns out to be the whole problem. ...