“Similarly Situated” Does Not Mean “Same”

Asking why similarly situated people are being treated disparately isn’t “whataboutism.” Such inquiries are the basis of the Western legal system and has a name - the Socratic method, which based on the Platonic dialogues. Only midwits use whataboutism unironically.

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 9, 2023

This is why lawyers spend three years in law school and then years in practice learning how to do it right. And why engineers spend years in school and still aren’t P.E.’s until they’ve had enough experience. And why M.D.’s spend years in internships learning that similarity situated symptoms must be distinguished as a matter of life or death. Or just common sense.

(Did I ever tell about the time my daughter had hives? She was 3 or 4 (this was a long time ago), and the new young doctor was sure I had savagely beaten the bottoms of my daughter’s swollen feet. The older doctor walked by and she asked him for a (supportive) opinion. He took one glance and said: “Sand fleas.” He looked at me and asked: “She been playing in a sand box?” I affirmed this and he repeated: “Sand fleas. Give her some Benadryl.” End of story.

I was not, needless to say, similarly situated to a child molester.)

Change the facts….

It’s a very hard lesson to learn, because it makes knowledge complicated (which is the nature of knowledge). Far easier to reduce it to empty cliches like “Socratic method” (as Kierkegaard pointed out in his Master’s thesis (for seminary), Socrates’ method was to ironically undermine understanding itself, thereby undermining knowledge itself, leaving you with…nothing. Don’t feel follow the “Socratic method too far; it ends in the old Greek notion of chaos (i.e., the opposite of reason). Or if you think law school employs the Socratic method: wrong again. Plato’s purpose in Socrates’ method was to recover knowledge we had but had, in modern parlance, lost access to. But nobody is born with knowledge of the law, or how changes in fact can change the law’s application.

And ironically, Kierkegaard’s critique of Socrates’ method is called The Concept of Irony. His thesis is that Socrates is being deliberately ironic, and has only chaos as his telos.

Which is a critique applicable to ignorance, too…