• The opposite of "splitter" is "lumper." (The origin of this distinction is obscure, but as dichotomous styles of social description the names were first employed by J.H. Hexter.) Alternatively, one could say "fox" and "hedgehog," as Isaiah Berlin famously did in his eponymous essay on Tolstoy's theory of history. The fox knows many things, says Berlin, and the hedgehog one big thing only. Splitters are empiricists, multidisciplinarity junkies, believers in the exceptional and the particular. Hedgehogs are organicists, holistic thinkers, unifactorial determinists, believers in the recurrent and the overarching. I don't think that distinction has any relevance in this debate, because the splitter's part here is being taken, rather inelegantly to be sure, by Mr. Gradman himself.

• So far as the main discussion is concerned, Mr. Gradman seems determined to offer Holmes a logical argument for not asking a question--which of course is the square root of nothing so far as Holmes is concerned--while ascribing Holmes' question to me, on no evidence whatever except that I assigned the essay Holmes wrote, and labored (apparently incompetently) to increase Mr. Gradman's understanding of it. I am therefore presumed to be accountable for its "rightness," a mistake that not even a lumper could love. I don't need to be Holmes to point out the problem in Mr. Gradman's argument: should it turn out that the effect of the criminal law is to increase crime and the harms resulting from crime, which anyone of sound and independent mind is at least likely to entertain as a possibility, then--regardless of the various other "systems" into which offenders might be distributed--the purposeful justification of this system in Holmesian terms would be insuperably difficult. What good is a last-ditch solution to a problem whose primary effect is to make the problem worse? When you are trapped in a hole, one might say about matters general and particular, the best first step is to stop digging.

-- EbenMoglen - 25 Jan 2008