Steve Watson

Use of Wikipedia

May 7, 2017 – 10:47 pm

The following is from an email I sent on 22/03/2007. I thought I might as well keep it here as anywhere.

Some people have pointed out that wikipedia articles often say true things. That may very well be so. In fact it might even be the case that, in general, it so happens that wikipedia articles are as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica articles; but that is really quite irrelevant to the question of whether wikipedia is a suitable reference for academic work. The real question is whether wikipedia can satisfy the accepted epistemological criteria which define the collective enterprise of modern Western scholarship.

If I decided to estimate the number of people in a room by rolling dice and adding the spots, it might happen that I got a true answer; and if I decided whether to take an umbrella to work by reading the entrails of a chicken, it might again happen that I got a true answer. But we do not accept that these are acceptable ways to arrive at the truth. What we prefer in these cases is to count the students or to look at the sky. Error is still possible, but experience has shown that the latter methods are vastly more reliable than the former and they are therefore to be preferred on epistemological grounds.

Through bitter experience and disciplined thinking modern Western scholarship has determined a set of standards and methods that are believed to maximize the reliability of the outcomes for this collective enterprise. These are the standards and methods with which we are familiar. One of these standards is that we prefer to trust someone who has been accepted as an expert in some area by others who are interested in that area. Another is that we test new scholarship by peer review by accepted experts. Another again is that when we refer to some supposed fact we support it by appealing to the agreement of some trusted expert. None of this is guaranteed to find Truth: experts will disagree, frauds and fads will occur, and accepted facts will change. It is only our best known method.

Wikipedia, by contrast, deliberately flouts these standards. Does that make it unacceptable? Well, that depends upon whether you think that the standards and methods embodied in wikipedia are as likely to yield reliable results as the standards and methods that they replace. Is that plausible? Is it plausible that the rejection of any preference for expertise in determining trustworthiness will lead to more reliability in scholarly results? Is it likely that the preferences of the most persistent editors will provide results as reliable as the preferences of the generally accepted experts? I would suggest that that is vanishingly unlikely. Wikipedia would replace the present accepted standards with worse, less productive standards.

The wikipedia model should therefore be rejected as a possible amendment to the epistemological criteria of modern Western scholarship; and consequently, we should insist that students avoid references to wikipedia, because we have a duty to train them in the best traditions of modern Western scholarship, and wikipedia is opposed to those traditions.

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T-Legality – A Modality for Legal Activists

May 7, 2017 – 10:25 pm

From Megan McArdle

A commenter claims:

Umm, you can make “corporations” (or engineers) give us more fuel-efficient cars simply by increasing fuel efficiency standards. If they passed a law tomorrow that said all cars sold by 2010 must get 45mpg, Detroit could do that pretty easily. They just don’t, because they don’t have to.

Apparently making a law that P means that P is the case. It’s an interesting point of view. Let’s see if we can establish a modal logic for that view of legislative power.

We define the modal operators L (the analogue to []) and P (like <>)

Lp =: It’s a law that p

Pp =: ~L~p =: it’s legal that p

Let’s take the semantic approach by defining the rules of the semantic tableaux for the appropriate logic.

LN                    ~PX              w/

                            …      

                          L~X              w                  

 

                        ~LX                w/

                          …

                         P~X               w

 

PR                     PX                w/v      

                            …                              

                          wAv

                            X                  v

                         where v is new to this path

The accessibility relation A is a legal accessibility relation, and the indexes on the right indicate legal worlds. PR tells us that if X is not forbidden by law in w then in some state v, accessible by lawyers from w X occurs.

LR                     LX                w\v      

                          wAv

                           …                              

                            X                  v

Which tells us that if X is mandated by law in w, then in any state v accessible by lawyers from w X occurs.

We know that LA -> A, which is a statement of Legal Reflexivity, won’t be a valid formula in this logic (try the tree and see,) but if we add the rule (following the Hintikka strategy:)

LT                    LX                  w      

                           …                              

                           X                   w

Or if we declare that the accessibility relation is reflexive (according to the Orthodox strategy:)

Refl                     …                              

                           wAw

                           for any w on this branch

We also know that there is an axiomatization that will give us just the same valid formulas in LTS:

We need a rule of inference of Legal Necessitation on the analogy of plain Necessitation:

LR1: |- A => |- LA

Which, curiously enough, indicates that anything that can be shown to be a thesis in the logic must be a Law.

The axioms required are

L1:  L(A -> B) -> (LA -> LB)             (Distribution of L over -> )

L2: LA -> A                                           (Reflexivity)

L1 itself would give us KL (Lawyers’ K,) and it has the at first sight odd result of saying that if it is a law that A -> B then if it’s a law that A, it is equally a law that B. But how odd is that? We could reasonably understand this as a statement of proper legal interpretation: if the law states that A and the law also states that whenever A then B, then it is at least implicitly according to law that B. (Roe vs. Wade seems to have been decided in this way.)

The axiom L2 gives us TL, Lawyers’ T. It’s an explicit statement of the claim that we started with.

This is a fairly weak logic, even amongst Normal logics. Do we want to add any other conditions? Do we want to give the legal accessibility relation symmetry or transitivity? What would these look like?

LT to L4? 

Add the property of transitivity to the accessibility relation in LT

Trans               wAv

                           vAu

                             …                              

                           wAu

 

Try                  Lp -> LLp

                        We find that it closes in L4 but not in LT.

Is this something we want? That if it’s a law that X then it’s a law that it’s a law that X? That actually seems quite reasonable, especially if we interpret ‘being a law’ in the way that we did for the distributivity axiom. Thus; if it’s a law that X then it’s at least implicitly according to law that it’s a law that X. Perhaps this is referring to some sort of constitutional understanding of the law.

LT to LB?

Add the property of symmetry to the accessibility relation in LT

Sym                 wAv

                            …                              

                           vAw

Try                  p -> LPp

                       We find that it closes in LB but not in LT.

Is this something we want? It’s a bit harder to understand. If something is occurring then by law there is no law against it. I have to say, that seems unlikely. So let’s not go so far as LB. (Nor, of course, can we accept L5, which we’d get by making the relation an equivalence relation.) So the accessibility relation can’t be symmetric: if v is accessible to lawyers from w it doesn’t follow that w is accessible to lawyers from v.

Even if we just stick to LT there are plenty of interesting results for the lawyers to get busy on. The following are all provable in LTS:

LTS1:    L(A <-> B) -> (LA <-> LB)

LTS2:    L(A & B) <-> (LA & LB)

LTS3:    LA <-> ~P~A

LTS4:    L~A <-> ~PA

LTS5:    ~P(A v B) <-> (~PA & ~PB)

LTS6:    P(A v B) <-> (PA & PB)

LTS7:    L(A -> B) -> (PA -> PB)

LTS8:    (LA v LB) -> L(A v B)

LTS9:    P(A & B) -> (PA & PB)

Actually, I started writing this as a bit of a joke, but I now wonder if there might not be a non-silly way to apply modality to laws. 

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The Intrinsic Value of Plants

May 7, 2017 – 10:20 pm

The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology has issued a report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” which declares that the ‘dignity’ of plants must be considered in our handling of them. Apparently “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive” and plants are living organisms. Since according to this argument their moral relevance doesn’t derive from their being able to think or even to feel pain or pleasure, it seems that we have to understand that what makes them relevant is that, as living things, they have per ipso facto solo intrinsic moral value.

But why should this be so? I can only assume that the Swiss Committee is under the influence of a very poor argument that the Deep Greens use to justify their claim that non-sentient, non-human, even inanimate things can have intrinsic value. The ‘argument’ they offer is just some variation on a simple thought experiment, which goes like this:

Imagine the universe without people: would it be better or worse if it had rocks, trees, butterflies in it?

Stated this way you might think, yes, it’d be nicer if there were rocks, or trees, or butterflies. And if you’re prepared to admit this then, since the world is better with those things, and there are no humans, then there can be higher and lower values in a world without humans. So those values can’t derive from the intrinsic value of humans. So the values must be intrinsic to the things in the world without humans. So there is an intrinsic value rocks, and trees, and butterflies, and to anything else you might name. But beware! In expressing your preference for a world in which there were those things, you are just expressing your preference between two possible worlds if you were there to make the judgement, whereas the experiment in its setup says you are not there. So, let’s rephrase the experiment.

Imagine you did not exist: in that case would you prefer to not exist in a world with rocks, trees, butterflies, or in one without?

Here the idea of a preference is obviously incoherent. Like many philosophical thought experiments the ‘Last Man Argument’ (the name comes from an earlier version) trades upon an impossibility or an illusion to convince you of its point (e.g. ‘imagine you are a bat,’ ‘suppose you know all there is to know about colour vision,’ ‘suppose you’ve memorized a program that is some human’s Turing Machine,’ etc.) Until a better argument is provided we should resist accepting a claim of universal intrinsic value that has the effect of giving the same moral status to humans and rocks – which is to say, no status at all.

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A Real Reason to Value Linguistic Diversity

May 7, 2017 – 10:17 pm

There’s been some discussion on other sites about whether we should regret the loss of small languages, and if so, why. Many of the usual points have been made about how change is not something that should be seen as bad just in itself, and we can’t expect to preserve language speakers in a cultural ghetto so that we can enjoy just knowing that their tiny language is being spoken while we engage the rest of the world in conversation in a more successful tongue. On the other hand people will claim that the lessening of diversity in the world is something to be regretted.

I tend to agree with all of the above, but I want to give a reason for preserving linguistic diversity that doesn’t get mentioned often enough. Languages are a very convenient way of looking at the way the mind works. And the larger the number of languages in the sample the less likely it is that characteristics of the mind will be extrapolated from merely contingent features of that sample. I am put in mind of an article I once read concerning the language of the Maricopa Indians of Arizona.

David Gil analysed the language [’Aristotle Goes to Arizona, and finds a language without “and”‘ in Zaefferer (ed.) (1991) Semantic Universals and Universal Semantics] and concluded that it lacks any coordinate construction even at its deepest level, and has, indeed, no syntactic category of coordinator. (I won’t bother describing this category here, it should be intuitively obvious what he’s talking about.) Approximate translation of English coordinated phrases is achieved in Maricopa by various means but these always involve a degree of subordination of one (English equivalent) phrase. In fact the basic difference is that Maricopa, like many other languages but to an extreme degree, tends to prefer subordination in its structures, whereas the Indo-European languages have a much flatter structure.

Some examples will show you what this means in practice. Here are just two ways the sentence ‘I saw John and Bill’ could be translated by a Maricopan.

[S: [NP: ][VP: [S: [NP: Johns][VP: [NP: Bill][V: udaavm (accompany)][V: ni’yuuk (see)]]]]

in which the closest thing to an ‘and’ is a verb ‘to accompany’, but the structure of the sentence is clearly not as we defined it to be for a coordinating construction because the elements are not directly dominated by the root node.

[S: [NP: ][VP: [S: [NP: Johns][NP: Bills][VP: mat teevm (be together)]][V: ni’yuuk (see)]]]

in which the closest thing to an ‘and’ is now a regular intransitive verb, but again the structure fails to be that of a coordinating construction because the conjunct elements are of category NP while the root node is of category S. In a coordinating construction recall that the category of the construction is the same as the category of its coordinated parts.

So what’s the importance of all this? Well if one has a theory – and it was popular at one stage – that LF is to be derived from S-Structure, then it strongly suggests that there is no coordinating structure in the LF of a Maricopa sentence; and similar considerations show that no analogue to LF with coordinators is derivable under the same constraints from any other accepted level of linguistic representation in the current model. Of course there are possible functions which could create coordinating structures from Maricopa S-structures, the fact that they would need to be used by any translator between Maricopa and English assures us of this, but that is not the same as claiming that those functions can be justified as transformations in the linguistic system itself. Moreover, if such transformations did apply the problem would then be to explain how monolingual Maricopa speakers came to acquire their rules of application, since there are no linguistic data available to that speaker which even hint at their existence.

And the importance of this is that if a language like Maricopa did not exist then it would have been unlikely that anyone would have proposed it as a possible language. In short, the store of languages is a set of experiments and data for our investigations into our language faculty, which is about the most essentially human of all our faculties. Fewer extant or recorded languages means less data about ourselves, means less access to the truth about ourselves.

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On Castro’s Resignation

May 7, 2017 – 10:11 pm

Well, no, not really. The title should really be something like ‘Thoughts on the Occasion of Castro’s Resignation;’ but then people might expect poetry. All I wish to do here is make some remarks with reference to a conversation that I had with a small group of graduate students a year or two ago in which Castro’s Cuba came up.

In that conversation I suffered through a series of fashionable leftist imbecilities while holding my tongue for the sake of good fellowship. (I had been warned previously about my ‘rudeness’ when I suggested to a graduate in ‘Peace Studies’ that her proposal to spend a year teaching ‘conflict resolution’ to children in Cambodia was a piece of ridiculous self-indulgence, misery tourism, patronising modern missionary work, of no earthy use to the Cambodians, and a transparent excuse for exotic adventures (Save Redfern first!)) Anyway, in the course of this conversation there was much said about the totalitarian horrors of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s period of rule in Queensland. There was outrage at the corruption, the failure to enact decent welfare legislation, the bulldozing of ancient (well, old, anyway) landmarks in the dead of night, the control of the press through fear, and so on. The Joh regime was apparently an appalling thing that no right-minded person could defend, and could even justify massive protest to the level of revolution. Maybe so. I can’t judge whether these complaints are well-founded or not, since I wasn’t here, and no one’s interested now anyway. But I was surprised to hear just a few minutes later that Cuba has a much better health system than Australia, so Castro has to be admired for that. And, of course, for doing this in the face of a bullying superpower’s unjustifiable embargo. The claim is ludicrous in many ways, but that isn’t the point of this memoir. When I wondered, quietly and politely, whether he should really be forgiven for running a tropical gulag, imprisoning, librarians, murdering opponents, hiring his army out to the Soviet Union, oppressing even the sainted homosexuals, etc. just because he had given Cubans a good health system, the response was that, well, people will put up with a good deal of government misbehaviour if they can just be assured of the necessaries of life.

This logical blindness was so staggering to me that I was unable to formulate a polite reply. I think my offhand comment was that they weren’t so forgiving to Joh. Not that I think that they should have been – but, really, compare the two cases. I was reminded of a comment by John Derbyshire that captures one impression I took from that conversation perfectly:

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy. Won’t they ever learn? No, their stupidity is impenetrable. They will never learn.

The other impression I took (hardly a novel one) was that ‘the left’ will put up with an amazing amount of oppression of other people as long as it can be painted as twisting the tail of the Great Satan. That wouldn’t be so objectionable or dangerous in itself – ‘the right,’ for example, would admit that the comment “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s ourson of a bitch” describes the motivation for much of the foreign policy that they approve. The problem with the left is that they just can’t be honest about this. Instead they have to twist their principles into a mess in order to justify their natural desire to support the enemy of their enemy. They must convince themselves that their partisanship is justified by something nobler and purer than that, because they are nobler and purer than that. It is almost inevitable that conceptual incoherence and practical incompetence will follow from such a practice; and this is what we see. Cuba isn’t even nearly the most egregious case. The very worst was the support of the Soviet Union or Maoist China; but the most pitiable is the current tendency of the left to associate itself with the resurgent Jihadist movements in Islam, treating them as if they were some sort of national liberation movement, or anti-imperialists, or anti-free traders, or what have you.

Further reading: Norm Geras ‘The Reductions of the Left’ Dissent, Winter, 2005.

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The Three State Solution

May 7, 2017 – 10:04 pm

When people say that they support an Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza that is ‘contiguous’ I wonder what they think that word means. How do they propose that the Gaza Strip is to become contiguous with the West Bank? Geography seems to be their enemy here, more than the Zionist Entity.

Anyway, it looks like the Gaza Strip has preemptively seceded from this intended state. This was entirely to be expected: the situation was always going to resemble Pakistan East and West more than Alaska and the lower 48. In fact, if the Israeli ‘Disengagement ‘ (should that project be taken up again) results in Israel retaining the Jordan valley and the borders of ‘Palestine’ following the proposed line of the separation barrier, that might create a situation in which the area about Hebron (south of J’lem) would seek to separate from the area north of Jerusalem.

During the period of German partition it was said by some that they so loved the idea of Germany that they would prefer to have two of them rather than just one. I wonder how much the people of the area love the idea of Palestine?

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Secret Lawyers’ Business

May 7, 2017 – 9:56 pm

On Wednesday (13/02/2008) Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his famous Apology to the Stolen Generations – that is, to those Australian aboriginal children who were removed from their parents because of their aboriginality. The theory behind the term ‘Stolen Generations’ is that in doing so government agents were implementing a policy of the Australian government to eliminate the aboriginal race. The victims of this policy and their descendants continue to suffer from this removal to this day.

One would think that, this being the case, and the Apology constituting an apparent admission by the government that it is the case, there would be a clear moral argument for offering compensation for this damage, and that if it is not freely offered then a legal case could be mounted to compel compensation. Yet we are assured that no such compensation will be offered, and that we need not expect legal claims for compensation to be successful.

This assurance comes in two forms. In the first place, we are told that the Prime Minister sought and received legal advice on this matter before he made the Apology; and the clear implication is that the lawyers’ advice was that there is no reason to fear that compensation must necessarily follow from the Apology. At the moment we have no ability to judge the worth of that legal advice because the government has refused to make it public. Second, the assurance is sometimes given as a lesson from history. On ‘Insiders’ (ABC, 9am, 17/02/2008) Julia Gillard, seeking to reassure viewers on this matter, argued that similar apologies by state governments had not been followed by legal obligations for compensation being imposed on those governments. She did not, however, expand on why that might have been so.

We might note in this context that compensation claims have in fact been tested in the courts, and the judgement has been that they are without merit, for the very good reason that the courts could find no evidence that there was any such policy of racial elimination as the theory of the Stolen Generations supposes.

My guess is that the legal advice to the Government made note of this, and also gave strong grounds to believe that there never was such a policy at the federal level (whatever may have occurred at the state level.) No eliminationist policy would mean no Stolen Generation, which would mean no compensation for claimants on the basis of membership in that group. Now, on the one hand, that is good news for the federal budget, and for the actual moral standing of past Australian goverments and their agents; but on the other hand, it would rather spoil the effect of the Apology if it came to be known that the current government believed it was Apologizing for something that had never happened. In fact, if it was known that the government had deliberately and knowingly accepted on behalf of Australians the guilt for an attempted genocide that had not happened, the resentment of Australians at this slander might very well undo (and then some) any benefits that the symbolic action might have achieved.

If my guess is correct, therefore, we should not expect this advice to be made public any time soon.

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Zoroastrisme: le saoshyant

March 2, 2017 – 11:29 pm

Zoroastre ne s’attendait pas à la fin du monde en sa vie: il ne serait pas celui qui mènerait les humains au paradis. Il n’était qu’un prophète, qui expliquait aux hommes tout ce qu’ils ont besoin de savoir – ou, plutôt, tout ce que le bon Dieu voulait qu’ils sachent. Il était le messager de Dieu, et ça c’était tout son ambition. 

Néanmoins, l’idée est apparue chez les zoroastriens d’un (homme extraordinaire) qui préparera le terrain pour le jugement dernier. Les zoroastriens ont nommé cette personne ‘Saoshyant,’ ou ‘qui amène les biens’ (donc ‘bienfaiteur’.) Alors, le terme lui-même était employé par Zoroastre pour des personnes de son propre temps qui étaient des bienfaiteurs de la lutte de l’homme contre le mal. Dans ce contexte le terme n’a aucune signification spéciale; mais, pour le Saoshyant qui va arriver après son temps, selon la nouvelle doctrine, nous le traduisons par le mot ‘sauveur’.

Le Sauveur sera un homme de la famille de Zoroastre. En fait, la semence du prophète est préservée au sein du lac (mythique) Kasaoya. Et il adviendra qu’une vierge se baignera dans l’eau; et elle attendra un enfant du prophète. Et ils appelleraient l’enfant ‘Astvat-ereta’ – celui qu’incarne la rectitude. Après qu’il sera sorti du lac, il rabattra le Drug (le Mensonge) du monde d’Asha (la Vérité.) Au moment où le Drug sera expulsé, le temps du Frašo Kereti sera arrivé.

Cette doctrine est devenue bien connue partout dans le monde ancien; c’est ainsi que nous arrivons à la doctrine juive ou bien chrétienne d’un Messie.

 

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Zoroastrisme le mythe de Thraetona

February 21, 2017 – 2:32 pm

…

On peut citer beaucoup des mythes en preuve; mais nous devons restreindre nos recherches à un domaine limité. Alors, considérons le mythe de Thraetona (surnommé ???iiani.) Ce héros iranien a vaincu le monstre, Aži Dah?ka, qui l’esprit malveillant avait créé, en forme de dragon (aži) de trois têtes, le plus puissant de tous ses agents de méchanceté. Selon le Grand Bundahišn, ce démon a tué le roi Yima après que ce roi là a perdu le droit de régner, et lui a coupé en deux. Après, il est devenu le roi du monde. Son règne était une période de grand danger pour toute l’humanité, qui n’était sauvé que par la victoire de Thraetona, qui a tué à son tour, et par la même action a libéré les vaches que le vaincu avait volé.

Chez les indiens le même combat avait eu lieu entre le héros Trita ?ptya et le monstre à trois têtes, Vi?var?pa (aussi nommé Trisiras,) le fils de Tvastra. Dans le Mahabharata, la grande épopée des indiens d’une date ultérieure, le rôle de Trita était joué par Indra. C’est possible que cette mythe était général chez les indo-européens. Par exemple, Herakles a tué un monstre à trois têtes nommé Geryone; et Hercule a tué Cacus, le fils de Vulcain – et Vulcain était le Tvastra de Rome. Il y a aussi plusieurs combats de héros avec des dragons. On pense, par exemple, du combat entre le dieu nordique, Thor (équivalent à l’Indra,) et le grand ‘Serpent de Midgard,’ Jörmungandr. On pense également, j’en suis sûr, des combats d’Indra avec de nombreux serpents  (Sanscrite: ‘Ahi’) et des vaches qu’il a ainsi gagnés.

Dans des sources ultérieures (dont le plus important est le ‘Shah Nameh’ de Firdousi, l’épopée nationale des iraniens,) Thraetona est devenu Feridun, et son ennemi est Zahhak – un homme avec deux têtes de serpent lui poussant sur les épaules. Le conte n’est guère changé, même si les détails sont différents. Par exemple, les vaches qui étaient libérées jadis sont maintenant les filles de Jamshid (c’est-à-dire, de Yima;) et le méchant n’était pas tué par le héros, mais était incarcéré à l’intérieur de mont Demavand jusqu’à la fin du monde. D’un autre côté, la portée de l’histoire est au fond différent. Selon le mythe modernisé, Zahhak habitait à Babylone, et ses têtes de serpents étaient liés au grand serpent pourpre Mušhuššu, symbole des rois assyriens, qui étaient à la fois les oppresseurs des iraniens. Donc, la légende originale qui avait eu son origine dans un souvenir des rafles banales des vaches au temps préhistorique, a fini en se faisant le mythe de libération du peuple iranien.

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Zoroastrisme: le jugement final

February 14, 2017 – 10:52 pm

Comme nous l’avons dit ci-dessus, le monde parfait et final n’arrivera pas avant l’arrivée du Frašo Kereti. À ce moment-là, la terre remettra les os des morts, et les âmes des morts seront réunies avec leurs corps ressuscités. Malheureusement, cette heureux événement sera suivie immédiatement par le jugement final dans un processus tout à fait horrible (mais, il faut le dire, absolument juste.) 

Les divinités Airyamen, le Yazate d’amitié et de guérison, et Atar, la personnification du feu, fondront tout le métal dans les montagnes. Puis, le métal fondu deviendra un grand fleuve qui coulera à travers la surface du monde. Tout le monde doit traverser ce fleuve pour gagner le paradis éternel. Un texte nous dit (GBd XXXIV 18-19) que “pour l’homme sans péché, c’est comme lait tiède; mais pour un méchant, c’est comme s’il marche en sa chair de métal fondu.” Ainsi, les bons pourront achever l’état final et permanent de bonheur, alors que les mauvaises seront incinérés. Enfin, le fleuve du métal se jettera dans le royaume d’Ahriman, tuant ce dieu. 

Cette destin nous semblerait vraiment bizarre, voire irrationnelle, si elle n’était pas si bien connue. Qu’est-ce que c’est la raison pour le second jugement? S’il doit être toujours le même que le première jugement, il est absolument inutile. Si les âmes sont éternelles, ou iront finalement les âmes des incinérés? Et si elles ne sont pas immortelles, pourquoi pas? Évidemment, comme nous l’avons déjà remarqué, les théologiens zoroastriens ne pourraient pas d’avoir été des philosophes.

Avec tous ces défauts, néanmoins, il faut reconnaitre que cette image d’un jugement final a fait une très grande impression sur l’imagination religieuse des peuples voisins des iraniens. Beaucoup d’entre eux ont adopté cette idée, et c’est ainsi que nous la trouvons chez les juifs, les chrétiens, et les musulmans. L’origine, pourtant, était chez les zoroastriens, et, par conséquent, c’est dans leur système que l’idée est le plus raisonnable. Par exemple, l’idée chrétienne d’un châtiment éternel pour des péchés forcements limités, est vraiment insupportable, parce qu’injuste. 

 

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