Is the Law like a Comic Book or D&D Game? Dworkin’s “Law as Integrity” | Philosophy Tube

1. 

   @Pobafett

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   I do enjoy Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.
   I think I only read it to be pretentious, but I found his musings on other philosophers amusing and insightful.
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

2. 

   @SSNewberry

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   The comic book style may be the case in Ronald Dworkin's mind but the SCOTUS has other very different ideas. The law is political first and needs to form a chain at the municipality, state, and federal levels, regardless of the actual meaning. Call it "post-Roe" judiciary. It does not need to make sense and only be chains.

3. 

   @natbarmore

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   Oh, oof—watching this from the future, and the 2021–present US SCOTUS decisions are really honoring Dworkin in the breach.

4. 

   @LittleBitVic

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   Damn, Abigail's been voice-acting ready since time immemorial. 😮

5. 

   @daniellanctot6548

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   1:42 – Too bad for Dworkin that the 2022 edition of the SCOTUS came along and defecated on his vision of what judges should do or be…!

6. 

   @carloscostacox

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   So, in the end, the law is idealistic fantasy just like economics

7. 

   @bassem500

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   What a sensible body of law, in my mind, is expected to produce and sustain, is peace within the realm in which the law is applied. It is therefore laws need to be perceived as just and equitable within the community it is applies to. Otherwise the community, or parts of it, rise up against authority.

8. 

   @asmrsleepbubble

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   Awesome lecture, but the background music is distracting

9. 

   @PlanckRelic

   January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

   I think lots of people would be on board with the hilarity of a d100 for 'exterminated by Daleks' rule

10. 

    @LOGICZOMBIE

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    the apophatic phaneron

11. 

    @phantomblot6072

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    The law should be adapted and adjusted way more often and faster than it is today. Many laws are unjust and only made to serve special interests. Look at copyright law, it's a complete bag of shit that rarely benefits creators, consumers or even distributors in any meaningful way.

12. 

    @Aellef

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    …. I secretly wanted this to be about Rules As Written (RAW) vs Rules As Intended (RAI) approaches in a legal setting…

    This was still cool, though

13. 

    @abielmiller6562

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Dworkin more like DORKin am i right ladies

14. 

    @zimbelpower123

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Dear Olly and Friends,

    these are some thoughts that came up while watching:

    The pressure that I feel as a GM behind every ruling of the laws in the game are pretty much on the basis of "setting a precedent" and "integrity", though I think there are some differences. For instance is GM´ing (and Comic Writing – through fan Mail, though to a lesser extent, i presume) not a Solo-effort, so Players might suggest a way of handeling the situation that the GM might not have thought of. And by extension also reflect with those same players, that witnessed the precedents, on how those earlier rulings affected gameplay and possibly revise them as the situation deems necessary. That seems to me like a mayor difference to the role of a judge, as the players and the GM are all on the same team, wanting to tell a good and fullfilling story together, while the judge and the accused/defendants/etc. may not perceive themselves in the same way and have a very different power dynamic.

    Excuse my english, as a german-native-speaker I try, but might fail 🙂

    Greetings, love and thanks for the content you put out, old and new,

    B.

15. 

    @archivechong823

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    as a political science major and a GM, this was my shit- this was a really interesting metaphor to explain precedent and judicial philosophies.

16. 

    @JJ.McCorley

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    In a game of D&D, you can feature a mountain in a flashback but then not have a mountain in present day

17. 

    @zacharygriffith8300

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Textualism marches on.

18. 

    @artemismeow

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Supreme court of the USA 2019:
    "Sooooo! were gonna start doing this event called crisis on infinite earths"

19. 

    @rougenaxela

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    So this is an old video by this point but I just really wanted to comment that Dworkin's 'One Right Answer' thesis seems like one of the most questionable things about all this to me, at least if one is speaking in terms of law as constructed by people. The law as it exists in practice is a construct created by humans, and it is a rather complicated construct at that. It might well be a desirable property for this construct to have "one right answer" in any given scenario, but that's just as much a fantasy as complex software with zero bugs. Even with a perfect ideal judge, human factors in the construction of the law means that contradictions and ambiguities are near certain to exist. Now… if you're talking about a particular idealized notion of law, not as constructed by people fair enough, but I think one could just as easily state that there is some some notion of a "Perfect Comic Book Author" for whom there is only one right path forward in writing a story from any given state.

20. 

    @Nameless_w9

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    6:27 ….I just realized… yikes.

21. 

    @Pfhorrest

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Ideally, the law should work like science works, in a Kuhnian sort of model: it should try as best as it can to give good results within the paradigm established by previous results, but when it cannot give a good result to a new case in a way consistent with that previous paradigm, it should carve out special exceptions (that will then be consistently applied to similar cases in the future), because it's more important to get the results correct than it is to be consistent with past results; and if too many exceptions keep piling up, then it may be time to scrap the whole paradigm that isn't working and switch to a different one. When you have to do that, you may have to revisit a lot of past results to see how well they really hold up under the new paradigm, which is a lot of work and might take a lot of time, but that's what need to be done if you actually care more about the law really being just, rather than (as Dworkin apparently does) presenting a possibly-false public image of the law being and always having been completely just.

22. 

    @sythersight

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Still not on board with the 'Killing a child early enough isn't morally equivalent to killing it later' position.

    I support abortion rights from a bodily autonomy perspective, so my practical position is the same, but that doesn't alleviate my concerns.

23. 

    @dacalasky

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    this is so dope. I GM a LOT, and I the idea of the arbitration and coercive power of the GM and the game rules is pretty well aligned to law. If a GM is a Judge, are the game designers the legislature?

24. 

    @Kram1032

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    The idea of one single correct answer is iffy to me. I don't think that's the case at all. The coercion of law doesn't come from it – even merely ideally – being the single best way to structure society. It's the legitimacy debate all over again. Ultimately, the power of law is something the people grant society. They may be well aware that parts of the law are far from ideal, either to them personally, or to some abstract concept they hold to be valuable. But most of the time they will comply with it anyway. In part because there might be repercussions otherwise, in part because it's, in a sense, "the easy thing to do" (at least most laws aren't gonna be particularly hard to follow), in part because much of it is gonna happen to align with their ideas of morality and/or common-sense, and in part because actually effectively revolting against any law perceived as unjust is going to take at least moderately large scale civil disobedience which only works if a sufficient number of people is sufficiently sure that a sufficient number of people thinks sufficiently similar to them to make this plausibly effective. It also takes a certain activist mind to kickstart a movement like that. Most people are gonna be fine with swimming with the flow, even if they see some injustice. People generally don't like standing out.
    But anyway, there can be several equally good solutions to problems, and some decisions are gonna depend on personal ideals and philosophies. And there are some problems that simply have no clearly correct answer. Even if you were to rely on perfect, complete information and infinite time and energy (neither of which could ever be counted on, obviously), the answer to some questions is gonna end up being "undecidable" rather than "true" or "false". What would a perfect judge do in a situation like that? Say, you have two candidate laws that The Ideal Judge has narrowed down the possibilities to. Say the laws are entirely incompatible. Nor is there a middle ground that somehow picks parts of one or the other. One of these two laws are IT. The ultimate winner.
    But what if this judge finds that the superiority of one over the other is undecidable? Which one should the judge pick?

25. 

    @hideshiseyes2804

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Some tabletop games (like Apocalypse World and its offspring) do actually require the GM to make certain “moves” at certain times. Practically it doesn’t make much difference and the moves work like guidelines, but technically they are hard rules, implying the game designers have some idea of a “perfect GM” in mind, if not a perfect call for every situation.

26. 

    @122Delta

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    dude your face is fucking red

27. 

    @Stingetan

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    On a lighter note: inseminator is a revolting word. I know it is used to be neutral but it turns my stomach.

28. 

    @natefialkoff8258

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    I find that giving precedent enough value to where it affects a judges decisions on the basis of continuity may be the most asinine assertion i've heard. What if the first interpretation of the law was both morally wrong and inconsistent? Would one then have to continue along the same path with this inconsistent law? Even if this is a marginal case, which I doubt, the fact that it exists means that the comic book / author analogy should never be applied to judges. If it were, then we'd be assuming that literally every judge was hercules. As this is obviously not the case (*cough* plessy v ferguson), we can't let past judges have that kind of power.

29. 

    @tastech

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    nice work

30. 

    @adamzandarski8546

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Why should the law apply equally to everyone? Of course I think it should, but this seems like an implicit assumption of the argument. And I think it fails there.

    Scientific naturalism and God.

31. 

    @antifasarkeesian1467

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    "HONEY YOU MEAN HUNCULES!"

32. 

    @terratorment2940

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    That's all well and good to imagine Judge Hercules but in practice every appellate Judge is a political actor. They don't like to think of themselves that way but they are quite beholden to political reality as anyone else. That is how we've got notorious bad calls like the Dred Scott decision, Buck v. Bell, Plessy v. Ferguson or the Bush v. Gore decision. All reflected the political pressures and realities of their times.

33. 

    @rudybeavis

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    This video was so useful- 3rd year LLB law student here trying to understand 'The Philosophy of Law' and the comic book analogy helped everything click in my head…

34. 

    @saeedbaig4249

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    The idea of the "ideal judge" reminds me of an interesting argument for moral realism called the Ideal Observer Theory.
    It basically asks you to imagine a similar being, with infinite time, patience and access to all necessary information (as opposed to just 'legal resources'). The argument goes that such a being would know what the best answer to any moral dilemma is, given their vast knowledge, and, thus, their ruling would represent the one "correct" answer.

35. 

    @maximegeerts6944

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Sorry but most boring intro ever

36. 

    @romaion4024

    January 16, 2026 at 12:20 am

    Thanks!

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