Comment by danaris
4 years ago
> spirit of the law
> as written.
I'm not sure you understand what the "spirit of a law" means. It has very little to do with the written wording.
In tabletop RPG circles, there's a very clear distinction between "rules as written" and "rules as intended" (because basically zero tabletop RPGs of nontrivial size can avoid having some rules that fail to properly convey their intent in their plain wording).
It's clear that, by this law "as intended"—ie, the spirit of the law—foods that didn't already contain sesame would be carefully separated from chances of sesame contamination.
You are, however, absolutely correct that "as written", it strongly encourages the behavior being seen.
I’m not sure that follows. “This law makes ‘no sesame’ products a lot more expensive. We are <shocked pikachu.png> that producers stopped making as many ‘no sesame’ products in response to reduced consumer demand for those now more expensive products.”
The spirit of the law could be deduced as “if your product claims to contain no sesame, this law ensures that is true, even in trace amounts”. That spirit is being upheld.
No, the intent of the law was to make it easier for people (and parents of people) with sesame allergies to find and select foods to eat. By incentivizing manufacturers to add sesame to everything, the unintended consequence is to make their lives much harder.
That's your belief. An equally valid alternate belief is that it was a food safety law, intended to ensure that no products were sold which contained trace amounts of sesame without being disclosed on the label. This is why we rely on the contents of laws rather than our beliefs/feelings about what the contents should have been.
No one can be compelled against their will to manufacture a product containing no sesame, even if they were probably doing so before this law was passed.
2 replies →
Do you believe that advocates of the law would have ceased to advocate for it in the counterfactual case that there was no effect on expense? If you don't believe that, then you cannot believe that the spirit of the law was to make "no sesame" products more expensive.
I made no claims as to "[making] 'no sesame' products more expensive" being the spirit of the law. I claimed that the spirit could be the most straightforward reading of the law: “if your product claims to contain no sesame, this law ensures that is true, even in trace amounts”.