Post by Steven Dale
For reasons too tedious to recount here, I recently came upon this wonderful satirical quote by the English scholar F.M. Cornford:
“The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”
Sounds not so very different from the No City Wants To Be First Problem, does it?
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