Edhjhhhgsgucgbh wrote:
Thanks for the support, but it's a conceptual issue, a matter of definitions and logic, not merely word choice. Humans reasoning terms of concepts and definitions, and if you want to have contradictions like the concept of a law imposed by a non-government entity, it means you want to be irrational.
I'm with you 99% of the way. We definitely reason by use of concepts with particular definitions, but the problem is that those definitions aren't static or universally agreed upon. When I say it's a semantic debate, I'm not trying to minimize its importance. Indeed, political debates often hinge on the the ability to appropriate or impose particular vocabulary on analogous but slightly different things. For example, the recent debate over whether the Democrats were "packing" the D.C. Circuit. They weren't packing that court in the sense of increasing the number of seats (as FDR had intended with the Supreme Court), but they were certainly filling seats that didn't need to be filled based on the court's very light caseload, and they were doing so in order to influence the ideological makeup of the court. We know what "packing" was in historical terms, and there's a general consensus that it's a bad thing. This new debate was over something that was like packing in one sense, and unlike it in another. Although it was a semantic debate, it was meaningful and both sides had rational arguments.
The notion that "law" has to be imposed by government--your definition--has never been axiomatic. For example, the medieval Irish had a highly developed legal system that existed--in many ways--independently and above their political system of petty kingdoms. There's also a long Enlightenment tradition of "natural law," i.e., that we are "endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights." And of course, many religions speak of "laws" which are not imposed by governments. It would be ridiculous to claim that these are all misuses of the term, just because these laws differ in character from the kinds of laws you talk about when you use the word.