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Bootstamp2's avatar

I'm having a hard time following the 'thus' in "Thus it makes sense..." in your reasoning in the last paragraph. Is this an accurate understanding:

For each contract C, you want laws to talk about it. Laws can't say something specific about each contract directly, so they say something about the type. Partition each contract into types, so Type(C) = T for some T. Each type T has a law corresponding to it, Law(T).

In business, there are many different types T1 T2 T3 ... T500 etc. If you change the law for one slyly, say T2, you only manage to effect Law(T2), which only effects the small number of contracts in T2, not all of them.

Now in personal matters, there are as many contracts, but way fewer types, say only T1 and T2, that's it. So if you change Law(T2), a lot more contracts get affected, some of which might have benefited you, in their original moral form! So don't contractify them, lest someone else explode your many contracts by slyly adjusting the entire type themselves.

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Trevor Adcock's avatar

The contract between the Jews and their god is based rather obviously on suzerainty treaties in the ancient Near East. With Yahweh standing in for a powerful empire like Egypt, the Hittites, or Assyria. This was long before the Jews were known as merchants or traders and they were in fact much less of those things than their neighbors, like the Phoenicians.

If marriage contracts support your theory that depends on if they existed during Second Temple Judaism, which once again was a religion practiced by a not so mercantile people, or if it is a later development of the Medieval era. Something I am ignorant of.

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