7 July

I posted about casuistry a while ago, to me one of the most important and forgotten human inventions. The idea of case-based reasoning. This outrageous injustice to Oscar Piastri is a great example of why it’s needed. Piastri had a penalty applied right at the end of the race that led to him losing a race he dominated. On the face of it, a ‘10 second penalty’, but the penalty really was ‘stripped of a race win’, in context. In this case, the officials and commentators universally are applying a sort of mandatory sentencing approach to the issue. (Not helped by the fact that most are British, and this outrageous injustice gifted a win at the British Grand Prix to one of their darling Brit drivers who didn’t deserve it.) The rules say ‘do X, penalty is Y’, they say. That’s horseshit legalistic reasoning, absent any context or overall assessment of justice. If you get a neg driving charge on the road, the penalty can vary hugely depending on the context. If you don’t harm anybody for example, you’ll get a fine and lose points off your licence. If you hurt somebody else, the penalty will be greater. Also the role of judges, to apply the context and assess justice. Why populists hate judges, they want black and white hard rules (unless they get in trouble with the law, then suddenly they want context and justice to apply). Each case has to be assessed on its merits, looking at context and the overall justice of the situation. Piastri should have had a penalty, but nothing even close to being the loss of the race, that he’d dominated.