Rationality in law needed

Perhaps its the jurors, and perhaps its the jurists, but we need an uptick in rational evaluation in the legal arts. This has been a topic for many years/centuries. How can it be that we have made so little progress? Possibly for the same reason we have made so little progress in other areas--rationality is scorned by the general mass.

This article provoked this post.

A jury has awarded $15.6 million to a man whose image was used for years without his permission on Taster's Choice coffee labels.

You can say what you will, but the net appears to be that a man who did two hours of work, work that was not critical to science or general advancement, not pivotal or likely to produce more than its share of good for the community, was awarded a prize of $15 million for said work because the company that he did it for declined to pay him for it. If the company had been the local gas station, and the employee had been an attendant, and somehow it had got into court, the award would have been wages plus court costs, if any. Maybe. But since its a matter involving our two favorite things, a wealthy company with deep pockets and a person who puts his image out in public for a living, we settle it in grand style.

Deep pockets seems to mean to the average person that no one is going to get hurt. The absurdity of this position is demonstrated every day in this country in a thousand ways. Deep pockets in most cases means someone has already been hurt, and if you deprive the DP Co. of some of its spoils, it will do more hurting to replace them.

As for the worship of surfaces, graven images, shallow-badly-told stories, etc. this is a typical symptom. A society that interviews models on television and relegates Nobel Laureates to the back pages of obscure print media is a society that shows no rationality in the human sense, but only pragmatic selfishness in the animal sense.