My position can be summed up by what I posted in the other thread: I believe the law is just a codified expression of our moral consensus. I feel that people make decisions about what acts are moral and what acts are immoral and when the opinion is widespread in a society it becomes expressed as a law.
Other posters disagreed with this viewpoint but I won’t try to speak on their behalf and possibly misrepresent what their opinions were. (You can click on the link above to see what was posted.)
So do you feel laws are based on morality? Or do you feel that law and morality are two separate things? If you feel the law is separate from morality, what do you feel the basis of law is?
Some laws like murder and theft are based on morality. Other laws certainly are not. Many of the laws pushed and passed nowadays have even been written by lobbyists to benefit their clients. Some laws have been designed to limit or otherwise pervert out voting system to favor one party or the other.
In our society, I think law is meant as a balance between morality and freedom. Most folks think adultery is wrong, for example, along with a whole host of personal transgressions (betraying a friend, etc.), but those things are not illegal.
Some laws exist solely to create order. In the United States we have a law that says drivers drive on the right side of the highway; in Scotland and England, they have a law that says drivers drive on the left. This is not a disagreement about morality. People in both locales would generally agree that the important thing is to have an established rule, to make driving predictable.
With that as an introduction, there are a lot of laws that establish and maintain social order, and they have, among their supporters, a lot of people who do not so much think that the specific social order that is maintained is moral and all others immoral, as they think we need norms, so as to have social predictability. And they are willing to discard a significant amount of personal human freedom in order to have that social predictability.
If you could isolate the people who think that way and escort them out of the room temporarily, there would still be people who do indeed think that people bloody well ought to behave a certain way or else they are immoral, and this is in the absence of any demonstrated harm to anyone — just that some behaviors ain’t right and oughta be forbidden.
Escort them also out of the room and you have people who believe the only things that are immoral behaviors are behaviors that victimize people. They mostly pinpoint coercive behaviors, behaviors that affect other people without their consent, and especially those that appear to do permanent damage of some sort as attested to by people who have been on the receiving end of such behaviors.
But laws like this are being sold as moral issues. People don’t say “Congress should abolish environmental regulations because my client wants to cut his costs and make more profits.” They say “We need to promote the free market to improve the quality of life for ourselves and future generations.” And laws about voting restrictions are always promoted as attempts to fight voter fraud which it’s claimed is threatening democracy.
The fact that special interests feel the need to package their agenda as moral issues supports the belief, in my opinion, that laws are generally seen as moral issues.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo;21846075And laws about voting restrictions are always promoted as attempts to fight voter fraud which it’s claimed is threatening democracy.
The fact that special interests feel the need to package their agenda as moral issues supports the belief, in my opinion, that laws are generally seen as moral issues.[/QUOTE]
I don’t believe this is true. Gerrymandering is not promoted as an attempt to fight voter fraud. In fact it is being fought in court by saying the Federal government has no right to prevent legislatures from operating to benefit the part in power.
And even if those promoting the laws try to argue it is on a moral ground, I don’t believe it falls within your original idea that “law is just a codified expression of our moral consensus.” Apparently 90% favor background checks. That sounds like a consensus to me. 60% of Americans say that Health Care the government’s responsibility - consensus if not quite so big. Two-thirds of Americans support legal status for the “Dreamers”. Americans oppose Trump’s wall 56% to 38%. I would say each of those is a moral position that is not being enacted into law.
In general, morality considers what you should do. Laws speak to what to you should not do. There is always going to be an area of things that are immoral and also not illegal. Or all the roofers in America would be serving time in county jails. Or fat people. Or people who cheat on their wives. Or salesmen. Or lawyers, (ok, that’s probably not a valid example).
The point is you can’t have a law that says don’t do wrong things, you have to say what those things are, and I think “don’t be immoral” is just too general.
That depends among other things on which definition of “morality” you use.
If you define “morality” as we did in my philosophy class, that is, “what is considered acceptable and unacceptable by a specific culture” then the answer is “well, d’uh!”
If you’re thinking of morality in absolute and universal terms then no, because no culture has current values which are absolute and universal.
That’s pretty much the way I see it, which is why I was surprised when people disagreed.
My point is that I feel that almost all laws (I’ll grant AHunter3’s point that there are a few laws which just establish a neutral standard) can be traced back to a moral belief. Laws don’t originate from some objective rational proof that an action should be illegal; if they did, then every society would have the same set of laws just as every society shares the same mathematics or chemistry. Laws originate from a moral belief that doing something is wrong; laws differ from place to place or from past to present because moral beliefs change.
I believe laws derive from moral beliefs. Which means it takes time for a moral belief to grow and become widespread enough for it to be reflected in laws. This is especially true because moral beliefs can be vague and contradictory. It can take time for society to reach a consensus on how a general moral belief applies in a specific case or to work out a resolution between conflicting moral beliefs.
There are multiple competing factors in what the law says. At root the law says what the people who hold power over society want it to say.
There are various agendas of society depending on who holds power.
In the modern west, yeah you can make the argument that the law is mostly a reflection of morality.
But its also a reflection of the economic interests of the powerful (lots of form of competition in the marketplace are illegal).
It used to be illegal for slaves to run away, or to educate them. Again, it wasn’t in the economic interests of the powerful.
People may have social hierarchies that they want enforced via the law. So there is that.
Basically it depends on who runs society at any given time.
If I had to guess, I’d say shared morality, protecting the economic interests of the powerful and protecting the grip on political power of the current ruling class are the main factors in what is legal or illegal.
Laws’ main purposes are to ensure the functioning of a society. That society itself may be founded upon certain ideas and principles of what is considered moral but its not the laws themselves that are based in morality. Some laws are pragmatic solutions to the realization of those moral beliefs. But all laws are based on pragmatism and functionality. And many laws have nothing to do with morality, even indirectly. Murder is not illegal due to its immorality, its due to the fact that civilization as we know it would just collapse if people were allowed to kill each other with impunity.
Another Kropotkin put it this way: “The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.”
What are chances of being arrested and prosecuted for it? I found one case in 2001, but none more recent. I don’t think most people who commit adultery know or care that it’s illegal some places.
Around eighty million people were killed in World War II and civilization survived. So the act of killing people, by itself, does not cause civilization to collapse.
I think you’ve raised a good point. I tend to think of American laws or at least the laws of western countries where the general population has a say in the government.
But in a dictatorship, the people do not control the government. And the dictator and his regime might enact laws with more of an eye for what keeps them in power than what’s moral, even judging by their own moral standards.
A lot of people think that their mores (Latin “customs”) are absolute. Often, the same people who say that this or that thing should be banned because “it’s wrong!!!” are the ones who get miffed when they travel Elsewhere (which can be three villages over there) and not only are things not exactly like Back Home: the locals insist that their way works just fine!
In one of the first lessons of my Philosophy class we defined ethics as being that dreamed-of universal and morals as being the diverse localized versions of that ideal: this allowed us to have conversations talking about both concepts without confusion. When people use both terms interchangeably, confusion not only can ensue but will.