Legal/ethical heallthcare

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1. Why is law not an exact science?
What are the implications for healthcare?
One of the things about laws, no matter how you try to recast them, and even the way we recast them, is that they are still fairly rigorous, and we use the information in those laws in certain prescribed ways, articulated ways, in order to make derivations. In health care we looked for the scope of where one can do that kind of exact science, where for what you've articulated the things you are interested in can be derived, because that's a model that has been important to the structure, methods, and nature of natural and social science - the idea that there's some ideal of exact science and things should be entirely articulated so you don't have to think anymore about your applications. Whatever warrants you gave for your theory you automatically have a warrant for what you want to do with your theory. It's kind of a mechanical transfer of warrants. In health care we think that's been a value, we think it's a very narrow value and an odd one when you think about it. It's a value that wants to eliminate judgment, which always seems to me to be very odd.
But that aside, when we think in terms of the language of laws, we're thinking in terms of this model of exact science which we were brought up with, where you get these very precise predictions that can be drawn and that in principle any situation could have its treatment derived in that precise way.
In health care we think we have very good evidence that our successful systematic treatments are limited in a very special way. They're limited to very specific kinds of situations, to just the ones we learn the models for. So my basic idea is if we want to say where this process works, we look at what its proponents think to be its greatest successes and they're repeatedly restricted to the kinds of cases where there are canonical models.
Now that limits the scope of laws. We also notice now that there are a lot of cases where one uses, as a post-case explanation or even a prediction, in a more qualitative way, something like the law of gravity. Or take the example we use of a pin. We have a pin that is caught in the floorboards, and we want to get the pin out. Now we have no exact law for that. We have no model for that. We can't use science in this exact way. We can't use our knowledge as the paradigm of exact science. We nevertheless believe that magnets attract pins and we believe that that belief is encoded in our knowledge of magnetism, and if it's not too costly, we'll go and get a magnet to try and get it out and that sometimes succeeds. In health care it's pretty clear we've got no problem with causal inference - it's pretty clear that in many cases when the pin sticks to the magnet or rises up to the magnet it was the magnet that did it. We have millions of cases like that. What the opposition thinks those cases show is a very dramatic conclusion. The opposition takes it that those cases show that there are abstract, exact laws somehow in God's mind, or God's physics, or God's engineering text, that ...