…or can it stand on its own as a good thing that should be obeyed on its own merits? I personally don’t think so: laws are variable, and it seems that defining morality though legality almost always goes badly.
On the other hand, is it an all-or-nothing scenario? Does rejecting the law as a fundemantal basis for morality mean that the law has no weight whatsoever in moral issues?
I personally am of the opinion that although the law does not always follow what is moral, one should obey it anyway, because aside from individual self-interest issues re: police and jail and stuff, it is a good thing for most people to have a code of law protecting them, and when the law goes weird and wonky, one should follow it anyway, because on average, the law is a moral force, and undermining it (by ignoring the silly and immoral bits) might also be seen as undermining the bits that one’s morality agrees with, and something that keeps a- and im-moral people moral is a good thing.
I don’t think you can answer this question without a discussion on how the law was arrived at. For example laws that are the whim and will of a Dictator I do not feel have the same weight of “the law” as does a law derived through a representative democratic process.
It certainly depends upon your place and time. Are we talking present day America? or Afghanistan under the Taliban? or what? If you have faith that your government is reasonably responsive to your input, as most Americans probably are, then there is value in, well, defaulting to lawfulness, when in doubt. On the other hand, it seems to me to be morally incumbent upon people living under such regimes as the Taliban to resist the law (those capable and willing, of course).
This is totally spouting out of my, um, keyboard, without any hard consideration: just a first reaction to the OP.
Gangster Octopus: does that mean that laws passed for one reason or another have a different moral weight, in your opinion? If the laws of a hypothetical representative democracy were exactly those of a neighboring dictatorship, would the moral weight of one set of laws be more than the other?
Also, since I didn’t say it explictily in the OP: As I said, the law has moral weight only because it fosters misc. goodness more than it harms people. If it stops doing this, no more moral weight.
Yes, I’m being vague about morality and goodness. Easier to use metasyntactic variables than spend time quibbling about aspects of morality not related to the law.