Maybe. I have yet to see any actual historical evidence to indicate that there were no protests, but I would not be surprised in either case, since there was little in the way of mass media in 1797. More importantly, though, remember the context: when this treaty was signed, states continued to recognize and fund, with taxpayer dollars, state churches, and some would continue to do so for decades (particularly Connecticut, which disestablished its state church in 1818 and Massachusettes which had disestablished in 1780 but continued to fund a state Church until 1833. Many other states continued official endorsement of a particular Church in other ways). (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States#Early_history)
Again, I could not be a stronger supporter of the separation of church and state. But I think that looking at the attitudes of early Americans does not yield the clear evidence one would want and, moreover, ought to be beside the point.
I agree with you about the separation of church and state, but I never hear anyone mention the problem with the Tripoli as evidence for this: we signed the treaty of Tripoli along with sizable ransom payments to convince the Barbary pirates to stop raiding and capturing our ships in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. So, in essence, we were extorted into signing the treaty of Tripoli by a hostile power that disliked the Christian religion. Perhaps, then, something like the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom would be better evidence (it was only a Virginia state law, but it was written by Thomas Jefferson).
Or, better yet, maybe we should just stop the pointless squabbling about what our founders thought about the question. The actual meaning of the Establishment Clause at the time of its ratification is entirely clear: it prevented the federal government from creating a federal church that would supplant state churches. State churches, on the other hand, were very common. (Of course, the Establishment Clause, like the rest of the bill of rights, was made applicable against the states by the 14th Amendment. It's a un brain teaser to figure out what it would mean to apply a federalism provision like the establishment clause against the states.) (Yes, I am a constitutional lawyer.) But, fortunately, in the years since then, the idea of religious freedom in its modern incarnation has become extremely well accepted in both the U.S. both in our system of constitutional law and in the popular culture. Aren't we better off defending that cultural progress on its own merits than pointlessly, fruitlessly re-litigating the founding?
You're right that nobody is entitled to your organs. But this does not mean that there is no remaining ethical dimension to your choice. Nobody is entitled to your organs, but you ought still give them away in the absence of a very good reason not to. Unfortunately, none of the reasons you give are even iffy, let along very good.
1) "There is no saving of life, merely postponement of death." -- Sure, but isn't some additional time on earth extremely valuable? I'm assuming this isn't your attitude when it comes to matters that impact the length of YOUR OWN life. Just, apparently, the lives of others.
2) "I wouldn't want my organs going into a Steve Jobs or a Dick Cheney." -- The worst of the three. Obviously people like Cheney and Jobs make up a tiny fraction of the recipients of donated organs. If you can find some actual evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to see it.
3) "...nor do I want anyone profiting from my body parts." --The best of the three, but still terrible. Obviously you're overlooking the fact that it is not just greed that causes hospitals and doctors to charge an insane amount of money to perform a transplant. Perhaps it also requires a lot of very specialized, expensive-to-develop skills? Perhaps also some equipment? Operating room space? Peoples' time? But let all that pass. What exactly is wrong with letting someone profit off your organs? Might that not even be a good thing in and of itself? Pretend that nobody benefits medically from your organs and JUST think about the enrichment of doctors. Isn't it better if some doctor somewhere can remodel his kitchen with the earnings from your organs than if you just let them rot with you in the ground? What other than pathological bitterness could blind you to this? And really we've just been beating around the bush because none of these suposed "costs" can compare to the incredible good that just one of your organs can do in extending the life of another human being by several years. And then remember just how many organs you have...
We care because we should be worried about the reasons for the disparity. If we really did know that women didn't go into computer science (to name but one of many many fields that seem to repel women) because of the way their brains were wired from birth, then that would be one thing. But we don't know that. In the meantime it's important to figure out the cause. If it's caused by the way our society educates and otherwise shapes the minds of young girls, then we gain the opportunity to correct those mistakes and provide greater freedom of chice for the next generation of women. How would this not be an unmitigated Good Thing?
I work with the poor and take it from me: virtually none of them is still on government benefits because they do not currently have an adequate incentive to get a job. And I can also assure you that there is already plenty of stigma attached to receiving government benefits. All of them spend most of every day ether trying to get a job, taking care of their children, or dealing with the various shitty crises that seem to pop up everyday for the poor. Being poor really sucks as it is, and I for one don't see the need to make poverty even more miserable.
For example, suppose high-risk manufacturing activities are shunted into one corporation, while a second "marketing" corporation keeps all the profits. In the case that someone was injured by the manufacturing activity, a court might apply the enterprise liability doctrine to allow recovery from the marketing corporation, which holds all the assets.
Well, it's not just to benefit bankers. It's to insure that if something goes wrong and people are hurt (or property damaged, etc.) those people will be able to be compensated. An uninsured commercial space carrier not only is putting themselves at risk, they're putting everyone at risk of suffering an uncompensated injury without our permission. It's the same reason drivers have to carry insurance: to make sure they don't hurt someone that they can't compensate.
If you open a skate park, and someone gets hurt, brings drugs, a weapon, or threatens someone that you get sued so hard you can lose your property.
It's a little more complicated than this. It's true that under some circumstances you can sue the property owner for something that happens on his property, but this is really only possible if he has "invited" you there for a business transaction (in which case he has a duty to keep you safe) or, under other circumstances, if he knew that dangerous things were happening on his property and did nothing to mitigate the danger. Even in these cases, if you post good warnings, you'll often be off the hook.
You don't have a lot of private individuals opening their property for people to ride motorcycles or just chill outside with free concerts. Also car insurance is a big scam because of liability.
Well, you see lots of municipalities do it, and they typically run just as much risk of being sued as private landowners. Maybe the bigger reason is that most people would rather use their own property than open it to the public.
. Also car insurance is a big scam because of liability.
You've shown that it's expensive, but not that it's a big scam. Under your proposed system, what happens then if I'm badly injured when you hit me with your car. Can I sue for compensation? If so, you have not reduced the cost of insurance. If not, how is this arrangement just?
Ski resorts get sued when someone falls down in even ordinary skiing conditions.
They may sue, but they will lose. We lawyers are actually taught this specific case in our first year of law school.
Maybe your complaints come from how damages are computed in these sorts of cases, not the institution of tort law itself. You could be right about that but first, do me two favors: 1) look around for some actual statistics about the average damages collected in tort suits, the prevalence of punitive damages, and the victory rate of plaintiffs. Also look at the facts and outcomes of some actual tort suits. I think you'll be surprised by what you find. 2) Remind yourself that whenever there is a big tort verdict, it goes to compensate a person who was injured. Sometimes this person may be exaggerating their claim, but much more likely they are not. Any "reformed" system has to serve these people as well.
Are you sure you're not misunderstanding the problem? Commercial launches are possible today because the government has set up a risk pool. I this risk pool were to evaporate at the end of the year, the problem is that commercial spaceflight may be impossible because nobody could get insurance coverage.
I haven't looked into this particular service, but usually arbitration awards are directly enforceable in U.S. (and foreign) courts. So, instead of the expense of having the whole dispute heard over again, you would simply take your arbitration award to a court and ask nicely.
What you're running into is what philosophers of science call the underdetermination of theory by evidence (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/). The basic idea is this: no finite amount of empirical evidence can ever uniquely support a single theoretical hypothesis. But what I think you're missing (and, I think what others are trying to illustrate with examples involving elves) is that this is a problem with every theory, not just evolution.
The obvious question, then, is how to decide when you should believe a theory notwithstanding the impossibility of logical certainty. It's a debated subject, but the most promising approaches involve looking at other features of the theory itself (such as its simplicity and explanatory power). Different theories may also require rejection of different background beliefs despite being consistent with the same (finite) empirical evidence. Similar criteria can then be applied to figure out which background belief you're better off rejecting.
The point of all this philosophy is just this: you're asking too much of a scientific theory if you want the available empirical evidence to "prove" that it is correct. Empirical observation cannot work like that. And, of course, this also makes a certain skepticism valuable. I don't think any evolutionary biologist would disagree with you, for example, that it's POSSIBLE that the earth sprang into existence fully formed 6 thousand years ago. (Or, hell, 150 years ago. 5 minutes ago?) But this doesn't mean they have to profess disbelief int he correctness of the theory of evolution (or US history, or Wikipedia's Game of Thrones Season 1 episode list.)
Yeah. And here's another: the feds put someone in handcuffs and take them to jail, they call it an arrest, but if I do it they call it kidnapping! The hypocrisy! It's almost as though the government are allowed to do some things that members of the public aren't!
I've never understood people who suggest that assigning moral blame is simply the victors prerogative, as though nobody else would have an opinion. If this were the case, history would not contain episodes of "victor"-villainization. But they're actually really easy to find. In the U.S. alone, and just off the top of my head, we have slavery, genocide (or close to it) of the native americans, japanese internment, segregation, the Mai Lai massacre...the list goes on. No, I think it is cear that people can detect right from wrong (if only very imperfectly) no matter how the victor spins it. (Of course, suppressing information may be a problem; but it's a different one from the mater of moral relativism you're talking about.)
Not true. The issue of copyrightability hasn't been decided in the Oracle case; the jury has just been asked to assume it for the sake of their deliberations. That way if they conclude that the case is a loser regardless, the court doesn't have to tackle the copyrightability issue.
If the jury comes back with a finding of infringement, only then will the court attempt to decide the legal question of copyrightability.
Yep. First amendment lawyer here. I agree that the court seems actually to have held this (I was skeptical originally given tech sites' tendency to get this stuff wrong...but not this time and I also agree that this is wrongly decided. Fortunately, it is only a district court so it has no precedential value. I'm hoping the decision is appealed so the 4th Circuit can smack this down as I'm confident they would.
So, I hesitate to say "nothing to see here," since a Federal Judge was stupid enough to actually decide this. But some perspective is called for: this is very far from being the settled law in the United States, and I'm confident it never will be.
We should be clear about the problem. All this information actually is publicly available: the US Code is versioned by codification year (a new version is codified every six years with interim supplements), and you can find out who voted for or introduced what (including amendments) in the Congressional record. The Code of Federal regulations and the Federal Register serve an analogous function for agency regulations.
So the problem is not the availability of the information. It is all publicly available from multiple government sources on the internet such as the Library of Congress or GPOAccess.gov. The problem is one of formatting and presentation. This is a problem we can solve ourselves. Who's in?
True. Maybe Newt Gingrich would have been a better example. It seems pretty clear that he would have been done months ago were it not for Sheldon Adelson's cash.
Easy. Congress, in Article I, has the power to make regulations for the election of Senators and Representatives. So there's the source of Constitutional power. Next, of course, we ask whether McCain-Feingold violated the First Amendment. We had some precedent already on the books to the effect that corporations were First Amendment speakers and that spending was speech. Fair enough (although remember that it's not clear at all that the text of the constitution actually requires either of these results). Then the question is: is the regulation narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest? I think the answer is clearly yes, and we're seeing in the current election cycle why: in the absence of some sort of limit on election spending, fundraising capacity becomes functionally disconnected from popular support, allowing the candidate who has the richer supporters to more easily outlast and out advertise every other candidate until he eventually wins and everyone else is out of money. Today we call this man "Mitt Romney."
This would be a great idea if it were always easy to tell whether a law is constitutional or not. But it sure isn't for me, and I study constitutional law! So if your goal is literally zero legislation and zero legal innovation, this is a great idea. But no sane person should want either of those things. And here's a bonus: in the ensuing absence of legislation, we will have less and less guidance moving forward about what is actually constitutionally permissible, so the problem will only get worse over time. Yay? (The ACA, for example: I'm pretty convinced it's constitutional, but will the Supreme Court say it is? I have no idea!)
You're probably thinking "this is stupid: just read the constitution and it will tell you what's constitutional!" To which I reply: good luck. The Constitution is great, I make my livelihood studying it, but damn is it vague.
This does, though, reming me of something. Supposedly, when Rousseau was getting on in years he was asked for his views about how best to set up the polish government. Among his many other clever ideas, he proposed that the legislature rule by consensus. Anyone who blocked a measure would, in ten years, face trial to determine whether he should be celebrated as a national hero, or put immediately to death. I take it this would do the opposite of the effect you have in mind, but it's just as good an idea. You're in good company, at least! (http://www.constitution.org/jjr/poland.htm)
This is nonsense. Why not live one's life by tending to believe whatever is, to your knowledge, supported by the best evidence? If it was only "rational" for me to believe things that had been proven, I would believe very few things indeed. (Is that my car over there? Oh I don't know. It may be the right make, model, and color and be parked where I remember parking my car, but I haven't seen the license plate yet...) And, meanwhile, how do I choose which proposition to believe while I'm waiting for my proof?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe. I have yet to see any actual historical evidence to indicate that there were no protests, but I would not be surprised in either case, since there was little in the way of mass media in 1797. More importantly, though, remember the context: when this treaty was signed, states continued to recognize and fund, with taxpayer dollars, state churches, and some would continue to do so for decades (particularly Connecticut, which disestablished its state church in 1818 and Massachusettes which had disestablished in 1780 but continued to fund a state Church until 1833. Many other states continued official endorsement of a particular Church in other ways). (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States#Early_history)
Again, I could not be a stronger supporter of the separation of church and state. But I think that looking at the attitudes of early Americans does not yield the clear evidence one would want and, moreover, ought to be beside the point.
I agree with you about the separation of church and state, but I never hear anyone mention the problem with the Tripoli as evidence for this: we signed the treaty of Tripoli along with sizable ransom payments to convince the Barbary pirates to stop raiding and capturing our ships in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. So, in essence, we were extorted into signing the treaty of Tripoli by a hostile power that disliked the Christian religion. Perhaps, then, something like the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom would be better evidence (it was only a Virginia state law, but it was written by Thomas Jefferson).
Or, better yet, maybe we should just stop the pointless squabbling about what our founders thought about the question. The actual meaning of the Establishment Clause at the time of its ratification is entirely clear: it prevented the federal government from creating a federal church that would supplant state churches. State churches, on the other hand, were very common. (Of course, the Establishment Clause, like the rest of the bill of rights, was made applicable against the states by the 14th Amendment. It's a un brain teaser to figure out what it would mean to apply a federalism provision like the establishment clause against the states.) (Yes, I am a constitutional lawyer.) But, fortunately, in the years since then, the idea of religious freedom in its modern incarnation has become extremely well accepted in both the U.S. both in our system of constitutional law and in the popular culture. Aren't we better off defending that cultural progress on its own merits than pointlessly, fruitlessly re-litigating the founding?
Ah! Well, on that much, I think we agree.
You're right that nobody is entitled to your organs. But this does not mean that there is no remaining ethical dimension to your choice. Nobody is entitled to your organs, but you ought still give them away in the absence of a very good reason not to. Unfortunately, none of the reasons you give are even iffy, let along very good.
1) "There is no saving of life, merely postponement of death." -- Sure, but isn't some additional time on earth extremely valuable? I'm assuming this isn't your attitude when it comes to matters that impact the length of YOUR OWN life. Just, apparently, the lives of others.
2) "I wouldn't want my organs going into a Steve Jobs or a Dick Cheney." -- The worst of the three. Obviously people like Cheney and Jobs make up a tiny fraction of the recipients of donated organs. If you can find some actual evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to see it.
3) "...nor do I want anyone profiting from my body parts." --The best of the three, but still terrible. Obviously you're overlooking the fact that it is not just greed that causes hospitals and doctors to charge an insane amount of money to perform a transplant. Perhaps it also requires a lot of very specialized, expensive-to-develop skills? Perhaps also some equipment? Operating room space? Peoples' time? But let all that pass. What exactly is wrong with letting someone profit off your organs? Might that not even be a good thing in and of itself? Pretend that nobody benefits medically from your organs and JUST think about the enrichment of doctors. Isn't it better if some doctor somewhere can remodel his kitchen with the earnings from your organs than if you just let them rot with you in the ground? What other than pathological bitterness could blind you to this? And really we've just been beating around the bush because none of these suposed "costs" can compare to the incredible good that just one of your organs can do in extending the life of another human being by several years. And then remember just how many organs you have...
Good point. Better to let someone die for lack of a transplantable organ than be part of The System.
Dumbest thing ever to reach +5 Insightful.
We care because we should be worried about the reasons for the disparity. If we really did know that women didn't go into computer science (to name but one of many many fields that seem to repel women) because of the way their brains were wired from birth, then that would be one thing. But we don't know that. In the meantime it's important to figure out the cause. If it's caused by the way our society educates and otherwise shapes the minds of young girls, then we gain the opportunity to correct those mistakes and provide greater freedom of chice for the next generation of women. How would this not be an unmitigated Good Thing?
I work with the poor and take it from me: virtually none of them is still on government benefits because they do not currently have an adequate incentive to get a job. And I can also assure you that there is already plenty of stigma attached to receiving government benefits. All of them spend most of every day ether trying to get a job, taking care of their children, or dealing with the various shitty crises that seem to pop up everyday for the poor. Being poor really sucks as it is, and I for one don't see the need to make poverty even more miserable.
I probably should have seen that coming. Well played sir.
I'll just leave this here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_liability
For example, suppose high-risk manufacturing activities are shunted into one corporation, while a second "marketing" corporation keeps all the profits. In the case that someone was injured by the manufacturing activity, a court might apply the enterprise liability doctrine to allow recovery from the marketing corporation, which holds all the assets.
Well, it's not just to benefit bankers. It's to insure that if something goes wrong and people are hurt (or property damaged, etc.) those people will be able to be compensated. An uninsured commercial space carrier not only is putting themselves at risk, they're putting everyone at risk of suffering an uncompensated injury without our permission. It's the same reason drivers have to carry insurance: to make sure they don't hurt someone that they can't compensate.
FUD.
If you open a skate park, and someone gets hurt, brings drugs, a weapon, or threatens someone that you get sued so hard you can lose your property.
It's a little more complicated than this. It's true that under some circumstances you can sue the property owner for something that happens on his property, but this is really only possible if he has "invited" you there for a business transaction (in which case he has a duty to keep you safe) or, under other circumstances, if he knew that dangerous things were happening on his property and did nothing to mitigate the danger. Even in these cases, if you post good warnings, you'll often be off the hook.
You don't have a lot of private individuals opening their property for people to ride motorcycles or just chill outside with free concerts. Also car insurance is a big scam because of liability.
Well, you see lots of municipalities do it, and they typically run just as much risk of being sued as private landowners. Maybe the bigger reason is that most people would rather use their own property than open it to the public.
. Also car insurance is a big scam because of liability.
You've shown that it's expensive, but not that it's a big scam. Under your proposed system, what happens then if I'm badly injured when you hit me with your car. Can I sue for compensation? If so, you have not reduced the cost of insurance. If not, how is this arrangement just?
Ski resorts get sued when someone falls down in even ordinary skiing conditions.
They may sue, but they will lose. We lawyers are actually taught this specific case in our first year of law school.
Maybe your complaints come from how damages are computed in these sorts of cases, not the institution of tort law itself. You could be right about that but first, do me two favors: 1) look around for some actual statistics about the average damages collected in tort suits, the prevalence of punitive damages, and the victory rate of plaintiffs. Also look at the facts and outcomes of some actual tort suits. I think you'll be surprised by what you find. 2) Remind yourself that whenever there is a big tort verdict, it goes to compensate a person who was injured. Sometimes this person may be exaggerating their claim, but much more likely they are not. Any "reformed" system has to serve these people as well.
Are you sure you're not misunderstanding the problem? Commercial launches are possible today because the government has set up a risk pool. I this risk pool were to evaporate at the end of the year, the problem is that commercial spaceflight may be impossible because nobody could get insurance coverage.
I haven't looked into this particular service, but usually arbitration awards are directly enforceable in U.S. (and foreign) courts. So, instead of the expense of having the whole dispute heard over again, you would simply take your arbitration award to a court and ask nicely.
What you're running into is what philosophers of science call the underdetermination of theory by evidence (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/). The basic idea is this: no finite amount of empirical evidence can ever uniquely support a single theoretical hypothesis. But what I think you're missing (and, I think what others are trying to illustrate with examples involving elves) is that this is a problem with every theory, not just evolution.
The obvious question, then, is how to decide when you should believe a theory notwithstanding the impossibility of logical certainty. It's a debated subject, but the most promising approaches involve looking at other features of the theory itself (such as its simplicity and explanatory power). Different theories may also require rejection of different background beliefs despite being consistent with the same (finite) empirical evidence. Similar criteria can then be applied to figure out which background belief you're better off rejecting.
The point of all this philosophy is just this: you're asking too much of a scientific theory if you want the available empirical evidence to "prove" that it is correct. Empirical observation cannot work like that. And, of course, this also makes a certain skepticism valuable. I don't think any evolutionary biologist would disagree with you, for example, that it's POSSIBLE that the earth sprang into existence fully formed 6 thousand years ago. (Or, hell, 150 years ago. 5 minutes ago?) But this doesn't mean they have to profess disbelief int he correctness of the theory of evolution (or US history, or Wikipedia's Game of Thrones Season 1 episode list.)
Yeah. And here's another: the feds put someone in handcuffs and take them to jail, they call it an arrest, but if I do it they call it kidnapping! The hypocrisy! It's almost as though the government are allowed to do some things that members of the public aren't!
I've never understood people who suggest that assigning moral blame is simply the victors prerogative, as though nobody else would have an opinion. If this were the case, history would not contain episodes of "victor"-villainization. But they're actually really easy to find. In the U.S. alone, and just off the top of my head, we have slavery, genocide (or close to it) of the native americans, japanese internment, segregation, the Mai Lai massacre...the list goes on. No, I think it is cear that people can detect right from wrong (if only very imperfectly) no matter how the victor spins it. (Of course, suppressing information may be a problem; but it's a different one from the mater of moral relativism you're talking about.)
We prefer "search and destroy" you insensitive clod.
Not true. The issue of copyrightability hasn't been decided in the Oracle case; the jury has just been asked to assume it for the sake of their deliberations. That way if they conclude that the case is a loser regardless, the court doesn't have to tackle the copyrightability issue.
If the jury comes back with a finding of infringement, only then will the court attempt to decide the legal question of copyrightability.
Yep. First amendment lawyer here. I agree that the court seems actually to have held this (I was skeptical originally given tech sites' tendency to get this stuff wrong...but not this time and I also agree that this is wrongly decided. Fortunately, it is only a district court so it has no precedential value. I'm hoping the decision is appealed so the 4th Circuit can smack this down as I'm confident they would.
So, I hesitate to say "nothing to see here," since a Federal Judge was stupid enough to actually decide this. But some perspective is called for: this is very far from being the settled law in the United States, and I'm confident it never will be.
We should be clear about the problem. All this information actually is publicly available: the US Code is versioned by codification year (a new version is codified every six years with interim supplements), and you can find out who voted for or introduced what (including amendments) in the Congressional record. The Code of Federal regulations and the Federal Register serve an analogous function for agency regulations.
So the problem is not the availability of the information. It is all publicly available from multiple government sources on the internet such as the Library of Congress or GPOAccess.gov. The problem is one of formatting and presentation. This is a problem we can solve ourselves. Who's in?
True. Maybe Newt Gingrich would have been a better example. It seems pretty clear that he would have been done months ago were it not for Sheldon Adelson's cash.
Easy. Congress, in Article I, has the power to make regulations for the election of Senators and Representatives. So there's the source of Constitutional power. Next, of course, we ask whether McCain-Feingold violated the First Amendment. We had some precedent already on the books to the effect that corporations were First Amendment speakers and that spending was speech. Fair enough (although remember that it's not clear at all that the text of the constitution actually requires either of these results). Then the question is: is the regulation narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest? I think the answer is clearly yes, and we're seeing in the current election cycle why: in the absence of some sort of limit on election spending, fundraising capacity becomes functionally disconnected from popular support, allowing the candidate who has the richer supporters to more easily outlast and out advertise every other candidate until he eventually wins and everyone else is out of money. Today we call this man "Mitt Romney."
This would be a great idea if it were always easy to tell whether a law is constitutional or not. But it sure isn't for me, and I study constitutional law! So if your goal is literally zero legislation and zero legal innovation, this is a great idea. But no sane person should want either of those things. And here's a bonus: in the ensuing absence of legislation, we will have less and less guidance moving forward about what is actually constitutionally permissible, so the problem will only get worse over time. Yay? (The ACA, for example: I'm pretty convinced it's constitutional, but will the Supreme Court say it is? I have no idea!)
You're probably thinking "this is stupid: just read the constitution and it will tell you what's constitutional!" To which I reply: good luck. The Constitution is great, I make my livelihood studying it, but damn is it vague.
This does, though, reming me of something. Supposedly, when Rousseau was getting on in years he was asked for his views about how best to set up the polish government. Among his many other clever ideas, he proposed that the legislature rule by consensus. Anyone who blocked a measure would, in ten years, face trial to determine whether he should be celebrated as a national hero, or put immediately to death. I take it this would do the opposite of the effect you have in mind, but it's just as good an idea. You're in good company, at least! (http://www.constitution.org/jjr/poland.htm)
This is nonsense. Why not live one's life by tending to believe whatever is, to your knowledge, supported by the best evidence? If it was only "rational" for me to believe things that had been proven, I would believe very few things indeed. (Is that my car over there? Oh I don't know. It may be the right make, model, and color and be parked where I remember parking my car, but I haven't seen the license plate yet...) And, meanwhile, how do I choose which proposition to believe while I'm waiting for my proof?
Bravo to your friend so long as he doesn't shoot an out-of-place person in the chest.