I know this will shock you, Jonah, but Tyson does not appear to have given much thought to what a constitution is for. His proposed constitution consists of one sentence: “All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” It sounds like a line from Polonius. As critics have pointed out, this bromide does not get us very far given that our world features uncertainty and disagreement about how to interpret evidence, and disagreement about the goods policy should serve even when the evidence is clear to all. Even if these were not features of our world, a constitution would still need more than one line, since it would have to establish institutions and processes for making policy in the first place. (Who’s going to enforce that one-sentence constitution of Tyson’s?) But much of the point of a constitution is to establish institutions and processes that can make sound policy given those features of our (and any imaginable) world. A constitution can be brief, as ours is, but it must contain at least one useful thought.
Rationalia's Irrational Constitution↧