another little piece of local colour is that the city councillor for my ward has an ongoing battle against "magnet fishing" in the Exe, because troops who were training here for D-Day tended to be quite careless with their ammo and grenades, and the quayside residents are getting sick of having to evacuate their houses when somebody who was hoping to find a shopping trolley or bike frame picks up something dangerous - https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/frightened-exeter-residents-say-unusual-8459579
Well, one philosopher here who reads your substack (and recent book) as philosophy. I think the problem is that analytic philosophy, much like orthodox economics, is too influenced by models based on individuals in ideal situations. Your views, and really any social philosophy of organizations, fall much more into the category of institutionalist approaches. These recognize that in reality organizational forms sharply constrain rationality and information, and indeed institutions can be conceptualized as the bearers of knowledge and ratioanales. Rather notoriously, social and political philosophy was a backwater in analytic philosophy in the post-war period. Even Rawls is hardly a departure from idealizing individualist modelling (and directly borrows from game theory). The result is that post-war analytic philosophy has always had interaction with psychology and (neoclassical) economics, but very little with sociology, anthropology, or history. Ernest Gellner's career is instructive here.
Wonderful case. Though proximate cause as a legal concept is famously baroque. In the U.S. at least (can’t speak to modern U.K. law) it was reconceptualized in the early 20th century not as causation in a scientific or philosophical sense but instead as a policy judgment about who should bear the risk of a given type of loss. So here the question should be: is this the type of risk that we should want to be excluded from this type of insurance coverage, and why?
my understanding, as neither a lawyer nor a philosopher, is that as long as one of the jointly necessary "proximate" causes is an act of war, the claim is excluded, so there is no need for a separate policy clause covering war reparations, historic territorial claims, hyperinflation, complacency on the part of social democrats &c
I'm a former analytic philosopher (PhD) planning to take tax and accounting classes soon, so let's see what results! Maybe a second-career glow up. It's definitely true that your stack scratches a lot of my philosophical itches related to social epistemology and philosophy of action. If you aren't already keyed into their work, you might want to check out Elijah Millgram's work on hyperspecialization and almost anything by Thi Nguyen.
He certainly deserves the higher salary he'd win :) but in my experience academic philosophers still look a bit too askance at the business world -- they are in the end of the humanities, for better and sometimes for worse!
Interesting that nobody in the proceedings seems to have cited the actual event of negligence by a UK actor, ie when either the university's or their contractor's 1960s surveyors failed to spot the bomb on the bomb site they were building on
might have been a case to separately sue the surveyor (if you could find them and their professional liability insurance was current), but failing to spot the bomb is not remotely colourably a proximate cause of the insured loss and ExU didn't have a separate policy covering them against surveyor mistakes, so there's no need for the court to consider it.
You have to love the subtle perversity of the judge's reasoning. Most of us surely would stick with "the 2021 event could not have happened without the 1942 event".
The judge may or many not be correct, and may or may not be verbose, but is not perverse. The judge is trying to solve a different problem than you are. An example: I personally would not exist but for Germany's invasion of Poland, because my parents would never have met. Germany's invasion of Poland is, of course, an act of war. Suppose I get into a car accident. The accident could not have happened if Germany had not invaded Poland, because I would not have been there. But it would be absurd to say that an insurer would not have to pay for the accident because the accident was caused by an act of war. So if you think the insurer should not pay for the bomb explosion, you're going to need a legal standard that can tell the difference between the car accident and the bomb explosion. Just saying "it wouldn't have happened but for the war" won't do the job. And that's the problem that takes 17 pages (or at least 5 or 6) to solve if you show your work.
Respectful disagree on accounting, tax, and management science more broadly being branches of analytic philosophy.
I very much do agree that they are the practical, actually-existing ways we deal with what were, previously, philosophical questions. But precisely because they now work*, they are no longer philosophy.
It's the same process that saw natural philosophy become science. If it moves, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; if we can't agree whether it even exists, it's philosophy.
* What we mean by 'work' in this context is of course a very debatable one in philosophical terms, but less so in accountancy: reasonable people can come to different views on whether the proposed changes to the Charities SORP/FR102 regarding long-term leases are a good idea or not, but once the final guidance is out following the consultation, there will be effective consensus on what the rules are. Which is my main point.
Actual lol, and then decided to take it seriously. Would you grant that, for example, double-entry bookkeeping, and/or taxation only by written legislation, work better than what preceded them? I would argue substantially and obviously so.
Decision theorists, at least, do worry about exactly this kind of thing. Simon Grant and I had a nice presentation* on ambiguity in insurance contracts using the opening scene from Bridge of Spies where Tom Hanks is arguing about whether a car crash (pretty clearly faked, I think) was one accident of five (one for each victim), and hence whether the damages limit was x or 5x. In real life, this came up with the 9/11 attacks. And I recently went to a workshop where the kind of causal issues you mention were being discussed.
I've published once or twice on in philosophy and management science, but there is, as you say, a pretty big gap between the two.
Now that I am back from physical therapy (the full catalogue of the causes for its necessity I couldn't tell you, but the Great War, but for which my grandfather would never have emigrated from Germany, certainly numbers among them), I will attempt to elaborate on this, not of course speaking as a lawyer and really it would be inappropriate to claim the mantel of philosopher at this date, so more merely as an extremely opinionated person.
I deem the judges' reasoning deficient as demonstrating that the dropping of the bomb constitutes a "concurrent proximate cause" of the damage, rather than (as Emanuel Derman suggests elsewhere in these comments) simply a background condition enabling the damage to occur. The reasoning appears to be nothing other than "well you wouldn't have had to detonate it if it weren't there, wouldja?", which is true enough but suggests rather that the "but-for" analysis may not be what's called for.
First of all, one risks falling into absurdity if "occasioned by war", read as "(jointly) proximately caused by war" (with the given understanding of proximate causes), is read as broadly as it seems to be being read.
(a) I imagine that there must be a few war museums in England; insofar as they commemorate wars, similar reasoning as the judges apply would seem to indicate that no damage to the building can fail to be caused by war: but for whatever war is in question, no building to damage, so the war must be a contributory cause of the damage, right? This of course would render insuring it pointless (at least with such a clause), and also seems pretty ridiculous: yes, the war is in the causal net of the damage, and no damage could have occurred but for the war, but surely that isn't right: in this case surely the war is part of the, as the judge says, status quo ante, the background conditions.
(b) Suppose I work in an industry dependent on some rare mineral hailing from foreign climes whose supply is, alas, severely disrupted by a far-off war (entirely between foreign parties). My industry in decline because of the war, I am laid off (because of the war), and in despair and rage I return to my place of former employment and blow it up. Was this consequential loss *occasioned by war*? I mean, surely in some sense yes (jointly with what appears to be my mental instability), but can this be the kind of thing the war exclusion clause should be read as excluding?
(c) More generally, I think you would be hard pressed to find a single event that took place in England in the past 70 years that was not occasioned by war, in the sense that it would not have taken place in the absence of some war or other.
So it really is necessary to get clear on what will count as background conditions (ie what belongs in the status quo ante) and what won't. The judge just doesn't! It's ironic that he chides Pliener occasionally for making only superficially plausible arguments, when Pliener is essentially saying 'this should not count as an agent of change" and Coulson is replying, in ¶65, "but you could think it should". Yeah. And you could think it shouldn't; indeed, I think you could think that so easily that if someone deciding a case thinks otherwise they owe us a positive argument for that conclusion. That argument can't just be "no bomb, no damage", because it's in the nature of enabling background conditions that without them, the effect doesn't happen (they enable it), but they are nevertheless not proximate causes (and, again, if you don't allow for this distinction war exclusion clauses render insurance pointless). And I think there are some reasons supporting my intuitive sense that it should be background:
(i) perhaps the fact that this doesn't come up at all should be a clue that it's legally irrelevant, but the policy was issued in 2020! Aren't they insuring *this* building with *this* history in *this* place with *this* bomb that (hard cheese) they simply didn't know about? If the policy had been written in 1935, with provisions for automatically updating the figures involved, I would think otherwise!
(ii) §8.4 concerning inevitability again insists that the joint causes are the presence of the bomb and the attempt to make it safe. The mere presence of the bomb of course could not have made the loss inevitable, not (only) for the reasons that Pliener gives, but also because the buildings did not exist at the time the bomb was dropped, and the residence halls could have been erected elsewhere or not at all. So I think you can say that what made the loss inevitable was jointly erecting a building atop a bomb, and the failed attempt to defuse the bomb; how the bomb got there in the first place isn't relevant, and all that matters is its presence. If some (non-warlike) malefactor had constructed the bomb in situ, same causally relevant story.
Second, and I realize that this was apparently stipulated to by the parties so it isn't really on the judge, I don't really understand the move from "occasioned by war" to "jointly proximately, but possibly quite distantly in time, caused by an act of war". Surely it suggests, or can be argued to suggest, that the occasion of the damage is war? The *occasion* of this damage was manifestly not war, though indeed it involved the detritus of war.
If the right answer was obviously right, it wouldn't have needed 17 pages of justifications!
That's why they call them "opinions."
I was sitting at a stoplight the other day when my car got bumped from behind. I pulled over to inspect it. No visible damage, but the other driver never admitted his responsibility or expressed concern for my welfare. I had to remind him: "You hit me. I did not hit you."
As soon as they bring in professional bullshitters (aka lawyers) the simple is made complex. And when the professional BSers, paid by industry, help write the laws, guess what happens? You can't turn around with saying "I AGREE" (a lie) to a "contract" between one party with all the power, and the other with none. Why do they call these con-jobs con-tracts? Because they can.
Funny nobody thought to hire a lawyer to sue Germany: they put the bomb there. Germany attacked Britain, not the reverse. Just like Russia attacked Ukraine, not the reverse. Or does the law of war say that no individual may sue for reparations? And if so, why?
If you want to go all the way back to who hit whom first, ever (Cain and Abel? Sounds like a law firm)...you are a candidate for law school! There they will teach stuff like that "great cases make bad law," but when you start to practice you will just pick up any available stone at hand to smite your opponent. The rest of us use the smell test: does it smell fair and just? I know this judgement, like all the rest, could be full of biases.
BTW, if you see me on the road, please don't hit my car!
They built their campus on a bomb site (likely owned during WW2 by a farmer or absentee landlord), it's not that they had their existing buildings bombed
As someone with what’s officially considered a philosophy degree I can bring in a particular example which happens to be relevant to both these cases. A famous issue in the philosophy of knowledge is that of the Gettier Case - there are tons of examples of these you can find online, but basically the gist of it is a situation in which something/someone gives a correct answer to something, but where the reason for it giving a correct answer is fundamentally different from what makes that answer correct.
This is effectively LLM style AI in a nutshell, because what it is using to deliver answers which may or may not be correct (a tonne of complicated probabilities), is completely different to what actually makes the answer correct (being derived from logical principles). The analogy I’d use is substituting a computer for a pinball machine - the outputs may be superficially similar but the underlying mechanism is completely different and you can never be sure that some lucky bugger isn’t going to stumble onto a jackpot and bankrupt you. It’s also part of why I’m so sceptical of AI achieving magic things - the nature of the pinball machine is such that although you can make changes to its design which adjust the overall behaviour of the machine, it’s pretty much impossible to precisely fine tune specific inputs to certain outputs (try getting an AI image generator to make the subtle specific changes you want if you want to see this in action in AI). You can solve this by directly adding in mechanical elements, but this is essentially just turning it back into a computer which is something we already have already - I’m fairly sure there will be a significant number of ‘AI startups’ just selling bog standard automation with a fancy label.
Regarding this specific example however, I’d say we’re dealing with a totally different case of ‘right answer wrong reasons’; here, the correct process for reaching the answer would be “which pot of money is best configured to pay for damage from WWII bombs”, yet we’ve instead ended up with “What philosophical definition most appeals to a lawyer who spent way too much time hanging out with English grads at uni”. I’m sure there’s a useful point you can make here regarding the problems with UK legal processes.
Stop making sense; the professionals will get upset! Especially the ones who do silly things like wear special clothes and fake hair, sit on their high chairs, and throw in foreign-language words like spitballs, all of which probably signify "good judgement" only to the town fool. For fun, go read Dan Wang's new book "Breakneck" about why China can build stuff and we (the US) cannot. In a nutshell: China is run by engineers, and the US (following the UK) is run by lawyers tying us all up in knots like Gulliver in Lilliput.
Ah, legal thought: makes sense, once you unlearn how to think holistically like a human, and learn to think narrowly legalistically, like Rudy the AI "RuleBot" having a good time. Rudy the RuleBot sez: "Wasn't there some kind of a rule, or at least a precedent, created in the distant past that could apply? Then pick it up and throw it at someone."
Two moms dispute whose child the infant is. Rudy sez: "Work out a way to split the child in half, and call it a day." But if you cut Solomon in half, what do you get? Two halves of a dead wise man. If you cut a whole in half it ain't whole anymore, duh.
BTY, correct me if I am wrong, I didn't go to law school, but I gather that our common-law legal tradition here is not universal. At least this is what my Swedish relative, a lawyer, tells me. Could this have any bearing on our problem? Maybe we should revert to Herr Giuliani's preferred method: trial by combat. It's already on the way. They have scheduled a cage match at the White House. Civilization marches on in triumph.
This problem has been bothering me, so I decided to come back to it. I agree with the judge that the explosion should be excluded from insurance coverage, but I do not think the opinion explains the result well. I would explain the result as follows.
(1) Insurance is primarily a matter of contract, so the court should construe the contract as the parties agreed to it. This is an important general rule because future insurers and insureds can then change their contracts to include or exclude risks of this kind, if they so desire.
(2) The parties have agreed to apply the standard of proximate cause. Proximate cause, as I noted in an earlier comment, is a standard for deciding who reasonably should be held responsible for which losses.
(3) Dropping the bomb was an act of war.
(4) Accordingly, applying the standard to which the parties agreed, we should ask whether it would be reasonable to hold the person who dropped the bomb responsible for the explosion.
(5) The answer to that question is yes. When you drop a bomb, you should recognize that among the possible consequences of your action is not just that people will be hurt and property will be damaged right away, but that people will be hurt and property will be damaged later (perhaps much later) after an unsuccessful attempt to render the bomb harmless.
(6) We should also check to make sure this result is not obviously absurd or socially harmful. If general insurance policies with boilerplate act of war exclusions do not cover unsuccessful attempts to render bombs harmless, then going forward people will need to pay for special insurance when they face such risks, or else the government will need to step in. That is not an obviously absurd way to handle such situations.
There was no war when the policy started, and no war began during the lifetime of the policy. I don’t like giving insurance companies this much leeway, they are supposed to be the experts on the risk of things, like unexploded bombs being found.
another little piece of local colour is that the city councillor for my ward has an ongoing battle against "magnet fishing" in the Exe, because troops who were training here for D-Day tended to be quite careless with their ammo and grenades, and the quayside residents are getting sick of having to evacuate their houses when somebody who was hoping to find a shopping trolley or bike frame picks up something dangerous - https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/frightened-exeter-residents-say-unusual-8459579
Well, one philosopher here who reads your substack (and recent book) as philosophy. I think the problem is that analytic philosophy, much like orthodox economics, is too influenced by models based on individuals in ideal situations. Your views, and really any social philosophy of organizations, fall much more into the category of institutionalist approaches. These recognize that in reality organizational forms sharply constrain rationality and information, and indeed institutions can be conceptualized as the bearers of knowledge and ratioanales. Rather notoriously, social and political philosophy was a backwater in analytic philosophy in the post-war period. Even Rawls is hardly a departure from idealizing individualist modelling (and directly borrows from game theory). The result is that post-war analytic philosophy has always had interaction with psychology and (neoclassical) economics, but very little with sociology, anthropology, or history. Ernest Gellner's career is instructive here.
Wonderful case. Though proximate cause as a legal concept is famously baroque. In the U.S. at least (can’t speak to modern U.K. law) it was reconceptualized in the early 20th century not as causation in a scientific or philosophical sense but instead as a policy judgment about who should bear the risk of a given type of loss. So here the question should be: is this the type of risk that we should want to be excluded from this type of insurance coverage, and why?
The other area of overlap is the design of database schemas where elaborate ontologies and complex referential abstractions are the stock and trade!
"You see those big shiny Oracle towers on Highway 101? They would never have been built
without Tarski’s work on the recursive definitions of satisfaction and truth.”
https://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/tarskiandcs.pdf
Why stop at 1942? You could go back to German reparations, WWI, the assassination of the archduke …
Spinoza distinguishes between inadequate and adequate explanations or causes.
my understanding, as neither a lawyer nor a philosopher, is that as long as one of the jointly necessary "proximate" causes is an act of war, the claim is excluded, so there is no need for a separate policy clause covering war reparations, historic territorial claims, hyperinflation, complacency on the part of social democrats &c
I heard it was some bloke called Archie Duke who shot an ostrich.
He was close:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Austria
Thank goodness I remember something from my high school German...
I'm a former analytic philosopher (PhD) planning to take tax and accounting classes soon, so let's see what results! Maybe a second-career glow up. It's definitely true that your stack scratches a lot of my philosophical itches related to social epistemology and philosophy of action. If you aren't already keyed into their work, you might want to check out Elijah Millgram's work on hyperspecialization and almost anything by Thi Nguyen.
I met Thi at a conference last year, and ever since then I've been trying to persuade him to move to a business school!
He certainly deserves the higher salary he'd win :) but in my experience academic philosophers still look a bit too askance at the business world -- they are in the end of the humanities, for better and sometimes for worse!
Interesting that nobody in the proceedings seems to have cited the actual event of negligence by a UK actor, ie when either the university's or their contractor's 1960s surveyors failed to spot the bomb on the bomb site they were building on
might have been a case to separately sue the surveyor (if you could find them and their professional liability insurance was current), but failing to spot the bomb is not remotely colourably a proximate cause of the insured loss and ExU didn't have a separate policy covering them against surveyor mistakes, so there's no need for the court to consider it.
You have to love the subtle perversity of the judge's reasoning. Most of us surely would stick with "the 2021 event could not have happened without the 1942 event".
The judge may or many not be correct, and may or may not be verbose, but is not perverse. The judge is trying to solve a different problem than you are. An example: I personally would not exist but for Germany's invasion of Poland, because my parents would never have met. Germany's invasion of Poland is, of course, an act of war. Suppose I get into a car accident. The accident could not have happened if Germany had not invaded Poland, because I would not have been there. But it would be absurd to say that an insurer would not have to pay for the accident because the accident was caused by an act of war. So if you think the insurer should not pay for the bomb explosion, you're going to need a legal standard that can tell the difference between the car accident and the bomb explosion. Just saying "it wouldn't have happened but for the war" won't do the job. And that's the problem that takes 17 pages (or at least 5 or 6) to solve if you show your work.
Respectful disagree on accounting, tax, and management science more broadly being branches of analytic philosophy.
I very much do agree that they are the practical, actually-existing ways we deal with what were, previously, philosophical questions. But precisely because they now work*, they are no longer philosophy.
It's the same process that saw natural philosophy become science. If it moves, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; if we can't agree whether it even exists, it's philosophy.
* What we mean by 'work' in this context is of course a very debatable one in philosophical terms, but less so in accountancy: reasonable people can come to different views on whether the proposed changes to the Charities SORP/FR102 regarding long-term leases are a good idea or not, but once the final guidance is out following the consultation, there will be effective consensus on what the rules are. Which is my main point.
I see what you mean, but dispute the minor premis that they work at all!
Actual lol, and then decided to take it seriously. Would you grant that, for example, double-entry bookkeeping, and/or taxation only by written legislation, work better than what preceded them? I would argue substantially and obviously so.
Liked "Because they now work, they are no longer philosophy."
So, let's rename the Department of Philosophy "The Department That Can't Solve Actual Problems."
But it can think about them. So, it keeps a few otherwise useless people off the streets.
Of course, the other professions would also have to explain their own inabilities to solve the problems they appointed themselves to solve.
See, Davies, Dan: "Dispute the minor premise that they work at all!"
FWIW The so-called scientists still haven't solved the "chicken and egg problem," never mind the "Why did the chicken cross the road?" problem.
So there's that.
On the other hand, they can take apart atoms so we can destroy life on earth, which is more than the accountants and sociologists can do.
Decision theorists, at least, do worry about exactly this kind of thing. Simon Grant and I had a nice presentation* on ambiguity in insurance contracts using the opening scene from Bridge of Spies where Tom Hanks is arguing about whether a car crash (pretty clearly faked, I think) was one accident of five (one for each victim), and hence whether the damages limit was x or 5x. In real life, this came up with the 9/11 attacks. And I recently went to a workshop where the kind of causal issues you mention were being discussed.
I've published once or twice on in philosophy and management science, but there is, as you say, a pretty big gap between the two.
* Can't find it now
And to think, it required 17 pages of analysis and still came to the wrong decision.
interesting! I was hoping to bait a philosopher into taking the other side - I don't know if any of this lot got involved https://spspa.exeter.ac.uk/philosophy/people/
Now that I am back from physical therapy (the full catalogue of the causes for its necessity I couldn't tell you, but the Great War, but for which my grandfather would never have emigrated from Germany, certainly numbers among them), I will attempt to elaborate on this, not of course speaking as a lawyer and really it would be inappropriate to claim the mantel of philosopher at this date, so more merely as an extremely opinionated person.
I deem the judges' reasoning deficient as demonstrating that the dropping of the bomb constitutes a "concurrent proximate cause" of the damage, rather than (as Emanuel Derman suggests elsewhere in these comments) simply a background condition enabling the damage to occur. The reasoning appears to be nothing other than "well you wouldn't have had to detonate it if it weren't there, wouldja?", which is true enough but suggests rather that the "but-for" analysis may not be what's called for.
First of all, one risks falling into absurdity if "occasioned by war", read as "(jointly) proximately caused by war" (with the given understanding of proximate causes), is read as broadly as it seems to be being read.
(a) I imagine that there must be a few war museums in England; insofar as they commemorate wars, similar reasoning as the judges apply would seem to indicate that no damage to the building can fail to be caused by war: but for whatever war is in question, no building to damage, so the war must be a contributory cause of the damage, right? This of course would render insuring it pointless (at least with such a clause), and also seems pretty ridiculous: yes, the war is in the causal net of the damage, and no damage could have occurred but for the war, but surely that isn't right: in this case surely the war is part of the, as the judge says, status quo ante, the background conditions.
(b) Suppose I work in an industry dependent on some rare mineral hailing from foreign climes whose supply is, alas, severely disrupted by a far-off war (entirely between foreign parties). My industry in decline because of the war, I am laid off (because of the war), and in despair and rage I return to my place of former employment and blow it up. Was this consequential loss *occasioned by war*? I mean, surely in some sense yes (jointly with what appears to be my mental instability), but can this be the kind of thing the war exclusion clause should be read as excluding?
(c) More generally, I think you would be hard pressed to find a single event that took place in England in the past 70 years that was not occasioned by war, in the sense that it would not have taken place in the absence of some war or other.
So it really is necessary to get clear on what will count as background conditions (ie what belongs in the status quo ante) and what won't. The judge just doesn't! It's ironic that he chides Pliener occasionally for making only superficially plausible arguments, when Pliener is essentially saying 'this should not count as an agent of change" and Coulson is replying, in ¶65, "but you could think it should". Yeah. And you could think it shouldn't; indeed, I think you could think that so easily that if someone deciding a case thinks otherwise they owe us a positive argument for that conclusion. That argument can't just be "no bomb, no damage", because it's in the nature of enabling background conditions that without them, the effect doesn't happen (they enable it), but they are nevertheless not proximate causes (and, again, if you don't allow for this distinction war exclusion clauses render insurance pointless). And I think there are some reasons supporting my intuitive sense that it should be background:
(i) perhaps the fact that this doesn't come up at all should be a clue that it's legally irrelevant, but the policy was issued in 2020! Aren't they insuring *this* building with *this* history in *this* place with *this* bomb that (hard cheese) they simply didn't know about? If the policy had been written in 1935, with provisions for automatically updating the figures involved, I would think otherwise!
(ii) §8.4 concerning inevitability again insists that the joint causes are the presence of the bomb and the attempt to make it safe. The mere presence of the bomb of course could not have made the loss inevitable, not (only) for the reasons that Pliener gives, but also because the buildings did not exist at the time the bomb was dropped, and the residence halls could have been erected elsewhere or not at all. So I think you can say that what made the loss inevitable was jointly erecting a building atop a bomb, and the failed attempt to defuse the bomb; how the bomb got there in the first place isn't relevant, and all that matters is its presence. If some (non-warlike) malefactor had constructed the bomb in situ, same causally relevant story.
Second, and I realize that this was apparently stipulated to by the parties so it isn't really on the judge, I don't really understand the move from "occasioned by war" to "jointly proximately, but possibly quite distantly in time, caused by an act of war". Surely it suggests, or can be argued to suggest, that the occasion of the damage is war? The *occasion* of this damage was manifestly not war, though indeed it involved the detritus of war.
To the best of my knowledge, we didn't!
Never argue with people who are good at arguing, unless that's your idea of a good time!
Boris Johnson was allegedly good at arguing; how did that work out? Good college debater...did something go wrong?
Being good at arguing just means you are good at arguing. It's a trivial verbal skill that proves nothing.
Now I will shut up :-)
If the right answer was obviously right, it wouldn't have needed 17 pages of justifications!
That's why they call them "opinions."
I was sitting at a stoplight the other day when my car got bumped from behind. I pulled over to inspect it. No visible damage, but the other driver never admitted his responsibility or expressed concern for my welfare. I had to remind him: "You hit me. I did not hit you."
As soon as they bring in professional bullshitters (aka lawyers) the simple is made complex. And when the professional BSers, paid by industry, help write the laws, guess what happens? You can't turn around with saying "I AGREE" (a lie) to a "contract" between one party with all the power, and the other with none. Why do they call these con-jobs con-tracts? Because they can.
Funny nobody thought to hire a lawyer to sue Germany: they put the bomb there. Germany attacked Britain, not the reverse. Just like Russia attacked Ukraine, not the reverse. Or does the law of war say that no individual may sue for reparations? And if so, why?
If you want to go all the way back to who hit whom first, ever (Cain and Abel? Sounds like a law firm)...you are a candidate for law school! There they will teach stuff like that "great cases make bad law," but when you start to practice you will just pick up any available stone at hand to smite your opponent. The rest of us use the smell test: does it smell fair and just? I know this judgement, like all the rest, could be full of biases.
BTW, if you see me on the road, please don't hit my car!
Silly that it is an insurance case.
War is a government function, thus the government should compensate Exeter. Has a worm eaten Brit legal brains????
They built their campus on a bomb site (likely owned during WW2 by a farmer or absentee landlord), it's not that they had their existing buildings bombed
Wasn't half of Britain covered with Nazi bombs, V1s and V2s?
Where in the British Isles could you be sure of no bombs being present?
Seems like the whole weight of solving the "OMG we found a bomb" problem is put on the parties whose misfortune it was to find the bomb.
Shouldn't there be a general solution to a general problem?
As someone with what’s officially considered a philosophy degree I can bring in a particular example which happens to be relevant to both these cases. A famous issue in the philosophy of knowledge is that of the Gettier Case - there are tons of examples of these you can find online, but basically the gist of it is a situation in which something/someone gives a correct answer to something, but where the reason for it giving a correct answer is fundamentally different from what makes that answer correct.
This is effectively LLM style AI in a nutshell, because what it is using to deliver answers which may or may not be correct (a tonne of complicated probabilities), is completely different to what actually makes the answer correct (being derived from logical principles). The analogy I’d use is substituting a computer for a pinball machine - the outputs may be superficially similar but the underlying mechanism is completely different and you can never be sure that some lucky bugger isn’t going to stumble onto a jackpot and bankrupt you. It’s also part of why I’m so sceptical of AI achieving magic things - the nature of the pinball machine is such that although you can make changes to its design which adjust the overall behaviour of the machine, it’s pretty much impossible to precisely fine tune specific inputs to certain outputs (try getting an AI image generator to make the subtle specific changes you want if you want to see this in action in AI). You can solve this by directly adding in mechanical elements, but this is essentially just turning it back into a computer which is something we already have already - I’m fairly sure there will be a significant number of ‘AI startups’ just selling bog standard automation with a fancy label.
Regarding this specific example however, I’d say we’re dealing with a totally different case of ‘right answer wrong reasons’; here, the correct process for reaching the answer would be “which pot of money is best configured to pay for damage from WWII bombs”, yet we’ve instead ended up with “What philosophical definition most appeals to a lawyer who spent way too much time hanging out with English grads at uni”. I’m sure there’s a useful point you can make here regarding the problems with UK legal processes.
Stop making sense; the professionals will get upset! Especially the ones who do silly things like wear special clothes and fake hair, sit on their high chairs, and throw in foreign-language words like spitballs, all of which probably signify "good judgement" only to the town fool. For fun, go read Dan Wang's new book "Breakneck" about why China can build stuff and we (the US) cannot. In a nutshell: China is run by engineers, and the US (following the UK) is run by lawyers tying us all up in knots like Gulliver in Lilliput.
Ah, legal thought: makes sense, once you unlearn how to think holistically like a human, and learn to think narrowly legalistically, like Rudy the AI "RuleBot" having a good time. Rudy the RuleBot sez: "Wasn't there some kind of a rule, or at least a precedent, created in the distant past that could apply? Then pick it up and throw it at someone."
Two moms dispute whose child the infant is. Rudy sez: "Work out a way to split the child in half, and call it a day." But if you cut Solomon in half, what do you get? Two halves of a dead wise man. If you cut a whole in half it ain't whole anymore, duh.
BTY, correct me if I am wrong, I didn't go to law school, but I gather that our common-law legal tradition here is not universal. At least this is what my Swedish relative, a lawyer, tells me. Could this have any bearing on our problem? Maybe we should revert to Herr Giuliani's preferred method: trial by combat. It's already on the way. They have scheduled a cage match at the White House. Civilization marches on in triumph.
This problem has been bothering me, so I decided to come back to it. I agree with the judge that the explosion should be excluded from insurance coverage, but I do not think the opinion explains the result well. I would explain the result as follows.
(1) Insurance is primarily a matter of contract, so the court should construe the contract as the parties agreed to it. This is an important general rule because future insurers and insureds can then change their contracts to include or exclude risks of this kind, if they so desire.
(2) The parties have agreed to apply the standard of proximate cause. Proximate cause, as I noted in an earlier comment, is a standard for deciding who reasonably should be held responsible for which losses.
(3) Dropping the bomb was an act of war.
(4) Accordingly, applying the standard to which the parties agreed, we should ask whether it would be reasonable to hold the person who dropped the bomb responsible for the explosion.
(5) The answer to that question is yes. When you drop a bomb, you should recognize that among the possible consequences of your action is not just that people will be hurt and property will be damaged right away, but that people will be hurt and property will be damaged later (perhaps much later) after an unsuccessful attempt to render the bomb harmless.
(6) We should also check to make sure this result is not obviously absurd or socially harmful. If general insurance policies with boilerplate act of war exclusions do not cover unsuccessful attempts to render bombs harmless, then going forward people will need to pay for special insurance when they face such risks, or else the government will need to step in. That is not an obviously absurd way to handle such situations.
Religious Studies/Philosophy major turned CPA here... just smashed that subscribe button.
There was no war when the policy started, and no war began during the lifetime of the policy. I don’t like giving insurance companies this much leeway, they are supposed to be the experts on the risk of things, like unexploded bombs being found.