[blml] 40B3?

[Herman De Wael]

Eric Landau wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2008, at 9:38 AM, Alain Gottcheiner wrote:
> 
>> Eric Landau a écrit :
>>
>> ISTM that this is not the right way to look at Law. The right way  
>> is to
>> consder as permitted everything they permit, and consider as forbidden
>> everything they forbid.
>> If they forbid two different courses of action in some specific
>> situation, then two differentl courses of action are forbidden.
>> If this result in a Moton Fork situation, then Morton (er, the
>> Lawmakers) should do something about it.
>>
>> BTW, in real life, such situations lead to discharges.
>> "I know A was disallowed, but I did A because B, the only other
>> possibility, was disallowed, too" is a valid argument.
>>
>> One way out of the woods, of course, is to state explicitly a  
>> priority.
>> Despite many claims that this priority exist, it isn't written in  
>> TNFLB.
> 
> There are two ways to look at the Law, which is why we are having  
> this debate over interpretation.  One interpretation produces  
> Morton's fork situations in which a player cannot continue to play  
> out a deal without breaking one law or another.  The other  
> interpretation raises no such difficulty.  One could argue from the  
> principle of reductio ad absurdum that that is a sufficiently  
> definitive difference to dictate which interpretation must be  
> correct.  Alain subtly assumes his conclusion, as it is only if we  
> accept the "Morton's fork" interpretation that the question of  
> "priority" between "forbidden" actions arises.
> 
> 

No Eric, what you are doing is this:

We both realize there is one law out of two to break. I look at it and 
choose the law which seems to me to be the strongest, and leads to the 
best game. I then break the other one.

You OTOH, choose one law as the higher one, a priori, and then 
reinterpret the laws such that this law is not broken by your actions.

And the law you arbitrarily selected as the higher one is precisely 
the other one from the one the WBF has already once selected (when 
they wrote the predecessor to L20F5).

-- 
Herman DE WAEL
Antwerpen Belgium
http://users.skynet.be/hermandw/index.html