ou haven't escaped the fact that moral judgements begin with feelings — Isaac

I am opposed to emotional judgments in law.

Each time the text delivers that you should do X, your mind will deliver either a sense of agreement or a sense of dispute. — Isaac

Religious people trust their scriptures. Therefore, this is not a problem.

Notwithsatnding the above, you still have to translate the words, sentences and paragraphs into some understanding in your mind as to what to do. — Isaac

The system verifies if a particular behaviour is permissible or impermissible. So, it has only one predicate function:

verify(%behaviour,%permissible, %justification) --> valid/invalid

• %behaviour: what you want to do
• %permissible: yes, if deemed permissible. No, if not.
• %justification: logical argument leading up to the assessment of permissibility

So, you supply behaviour, purported permissibility, and justification to the system, which will then verify if the ruling is provable from religious law. Note that the system cannot produce %permissible or %justification by itself. It is not possible to automate the discovery of knowledge. Coq is merely a proof assistant. It is not possible to create a complete theorem prover.

In other words, the system only verifies the answer provided by the rabbi or mufti. What you do with the answer, is completely up to you (as has always been, of course). A jurisprudential ruling is not and has never been binding.

You're assuming, without any justification offered, that the human mind is not itself a system. Simply because you don't fully know it's workings does not mean it is demonstrably not a fully complete system. — Isaac

Since the human mind is capable of rationality, it can certainly compute inference results in axiomatic systems. I have never said that it cannot be done, if only, because people do that every day. My take is rather that the human mind cannot be just an axiomatic system, since the human mind does things that mechanical systems cannot do.

I am opposed to emotional judgments in law. — alcontali

I didn't ask what you were opposed to. I pointed out that an emotional judgement is a necessary requirement to accept (and continue to accept) that law. The existence of a law does not itself provide any rational incentive to accept it. Doing so must be entirely emotional.

Religious people trust their scriptures. Therefore, this is not a problem. — alcontali

The very problem is that religious people trust their scriptures. Where does that trust come from (and continue to come from each day)? It's not itself part of the religion, there are alternative religions one could choose (at any given time) so when a religious edict say "do X" the first decision is "should I continue to trust this religious text?" that question must be answered before accepting the edict and cannot be answered from within the religious system. So where does the answer to that question come from?

The system verifies if a particular behaviour is permissible or impermissible. So, it has only one predicate function: — alcontali

What follows this quote has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. I'm asking how the words are translated. Words, sentences, paragraphs have more than one potential meaning, who decides which meaning goes into the machine and what machine could they use to make such a decision?

rather that the human mind cannot be just an axiomatic system, since the human mind does things that mechanical systems cannot do. — alcontali

This doesn't seem to make any sense to me I'm afraid.

"If it accomplishes that already, i.e. making the victim's family feel better, it would at least accomplish something."
Yes, it would at least accomplish something, howewer, that something is not really what we were trying to do.

"Diyya (victim compensation) (or forgiveness) is an optional alternative to qisas (equal retaliation), but it is not mandatory..."

The victim's family will not readily think of forgiveness (or victim compensation) as an act of atonement for themselves, if the perpetrator does not repent. Again, this system has thousands of years of mileage. It was already included in the Torah. I have never heard anybody with first-hand, practical experience with the system, heard complaining about it."

Well, probably because they either wanted revenge anyways or there wasn't first-hand experience in the first place. Or are you talking about the "pay fine or go to the prison" system?
Anyways, that still doesn't solve the problem since only ones who would've repented regardless would've repented honestly, while the others would just meet death -or what they caused to the victim, if you want to take the more literal reading of "an eye for an eye"-. I suspect that people will not repent honestly just because they will meet death.

Also, what about the family's general attitude? In your system, if someone wants to repent and is honest about it, he or she may still get physical punishment-merely because the family didn't believe in money and thought "Money won't bring our member back." And, if a family is forgiving, they can forgive an unhonest repenter and ask for little to no money-thus the problem would still persist. You can't expect, for example, a murder victim's family to always behave rational.

As for the other option, "qisas", that needs justfying in itself that doesn't contradict the option for the victim compensation. There doesn't seem to be one, i'm afraid.

It will be necessary to encode the text in formal language. — alcontali

To do that, you first need to interpret the text. And the interpretation itself will not be machine-verifiable.

"Additional value judgment" is exactly what we want to avoid.

I stick to the Church-Turing thesis in that regard. If there does not exist a purely mechanical procedure to verify a justification, then the statement being justified is not formal knowledge. — alcontali

It's impossible to avoid though. There is a reason the noun "judge" comes from the verb "to judge".

How should we carry out punishment?

I think Pilates machines can combine mild torture with making the criminals pay for sessions.

:up: