My daughter got married last week and one of the possessions her new husband has brought into her life is a radar detector. My daughter now has this detector installed in her new Ford Focus. (Her husband is a soldier about to be deployed overseas, so he’s not using the radar detector himself.)
So, my question for debate is, is the use of a radar detector morally justifiable? My daughter is an adult and can do what she wishes, but I have several problems with this radar detector.
For one, the device’s sole purpose is to evade the law. Speed limits serve a legitimate public purpose in that they help make the public roadways safer. Therefore, speed limits must be enforced and police radars are an effective way to do this. A radar detector is designed to alert the speeding motorist that a radar is in use nearby so that she may slow down before the officer detects her speeding.
I also question the wisdom of having my daughter exceeding the speed limit in a small, compact car (for which I am a cosigner on the loan). The car is a competent, but is not a speedster. It would be easy for her to exceed the capabilities of the vehicle, especially if she thinks she can do so with impunity. The radar detector may help her evade man-made laws, but it will not help her evade the Laws of Motion.
I don’t think speeding should be classified as “immoral”. It is malum prohibitum and not malum in se.
In my opinion, the fact that speed limits are woefully mismatched with the speed that a normal, careful motorist would travel on a given roadway is good enough for me to get any edge to defeat the enforcement.
There is a difference between radar detectors and radar jammers. The latter are immoral, in my opinion, because they deceive the authorities. Radar detectors are really no different than slowing down when you see a police car on the highway; they just give you an earlier warning to slow down.
I guess the question is, would you rather have your daughter slow down in the presence of an officer, thereby forcing her to drive safer and avoid expensive tickets, or would you rather her drive fast all the time, consequences be damned? If she’s anything like the rest of the driving public, there is very little chance that the radar detector actually makes her drive faster. It just allows her to slow down when necessary.
Furthermore, what makes the speed limit “moral”? I agree that driving too fast can be dangerous, but I’m highly skeptical that the city council or state legislature has managed to set the optimal maximum safe speed in all conditions for every road in their jurisdiction. Frankly, I think they attempt to maximize revenue when setting speed limits, not safety.
A new Focus may be compact, but exceed its capabilities? Not unless she’s going over 100 mph! That car should be capable of relatively safe transportation at 80-85.
If it makes you feel better - if your area is using laser speed guns, the detector will do little or nothing to keep her from getting tickets.
Well in some traffic situations not speeding means one doesn’t keep with the flow of traffic. This can increase the risk of an accident.
Is it moral to put people’s lives and limbs at increased risk just to follow the law?
How about weed? Some people feel they have inherent natural rights to weed on the level of free speech, and rights to privacy. They feel that antiweed laws are unjust, and immoral. Are they immoral if they partake of weed in violation of what they feel is an immoral and unjust law?
There was a time when when Black people had to sit at the back of the bus and give up their seat to white people. Was Rosa Parks immoral for breaking this law? She’s stated before she didn’t do for it some big civil rights demonstration. She did it because she was tired from working hard that day and didn’t want to get up. She broke the law because she disagreed with it. Was she immoral?
Finally the DMCA is used by the scientology cult to harass it’s critics. Are it’s critics immoral?
The DMCA also makes discussing breaking encryption a crime. Where the people who wrote unauthorized DVD players for Linux immoral?
I say this because some web sights disable right clicking through javascript to try to stop you from copying pics or text or something. However this also disables right clicking for other functions such opening in new tabs, view info, view source, etc. To restore the right click menu in firefox go to tools->options->content-> then click the advanced button by “enable javascript” and uncheck disable or replace context menus.
By telling you how to keep your right click functional I have just told you how to circumvent a copyright protection scheme and broken the law under the DMCA.
Make the point to her that the detector doesn’t guarantee that she’s not going to get ticketed where there isn’t a radar gun. She may get paced by a police officer, or she may set off a camera. And really excessive speed may cause her to lose control of the car.
Thus, while the detector may emphasize the need to slow down when it goes off, she shouldn’t regard it as facilitating speeding at times when it’s not.
Are they even legal where she is? In Virginia they’re not.
There is the philosophy that no information is inherently immoral - how you choose to act on information may be, but that’s a personal problem and has (philosophically speaking) nothing to do with the radar detector.
Also, all the radar detector does is encourage you to obey the law at certain times. If there’s any moral issue here, it’s your decision to speed in the first place, which is not something the radar detector makes you do. While there is a correlation between speeding and use of radar detectors, it seems to me that that’s most likely caused by the fact that people who don’t tend to speed don’t buy the things. I don’t personally believe that a radar detector increases a person’s likelihood of speeding. It just helps those that do avoid getting pegged for it, a little, by speeding a little less at opportune times.
Radar detectors are illegal in private vehicles in Virginia and Washington DC (they’re illegal in a couple of other states in commercial vehicles).
Radar jammers are illegal in all states because you’re actively broadcasting a signal. Detectors are just picking up the signal broadcast from the police’s radar gun.
I don’t believe you can definitively state that the sole purpose of a radar detector is to evade the law. It detects when radar is in use, but presuming that anyone uses it to evade prosecution isn’t a logical - probably likely, but not strict - next step. Regardless of your views on speed limits, having the ability to be aware of the presence of law enforcement monitoring my behavior anywhere isn’t immoral at all.
So, if a person offered you $100 to stand on a street corner, and send him a message on a cell phone or on a two-way radio if you saw a police officer approaching, you would not see any moral issues in such a proposition? He hasn’t told you of any illegal activity that he is about to engage in, but he just wants to know about the presence of law enforcement.
I think this hilights the fact that the issue is the crime, not the knowledge itself - it’s a crime and immoral to be an accomplice (lookout) to a crime, but it’s not a crime or immoral to do a study on the distribution of police in the city. What you’re actually doing with the information matters!
Which is to say, it’s not a crime or immoral to have a radar detector in your car; it’s a crime (and debatably immoral) to speed - whether or not you use a radar detector to try and avoid getting caught.
Yeah. Bull Effin’ Honkey. I use one, even though at worst I only speed moderately, because I never know if I will run into Patrolman Bumfutz who (A) is desperate to reach his quota (and don’t go telling me about the myth that there ain’t no quotas, especially if you get all semantic-al on me about it-call them whatever you want, they still exist), and/or (B) doesn’t know how to use his radar/laser gun, such that he gets a speed reading off the SUV behind me, thinks I was the one speeding (because he didn’t pay attention when they trained him, or they never trained him properly in the first place, or notices that I am out of state, and the SUV is not), and pulls me over instead.
Yes, most police are honest, fair, & competent, but all it takes is one (or a department) who isn’t, and I’m looking at several hundred if not thousand in raised insurance fees. No frickin’ thanks.
Thanks for the conversation. This has caused me to think about this issue differently. I personally have never purchased a radar detector because I felt that its only purpose was to evade detection during the commission of a crime. It’s not that I’m a saint – I have exceeded the speed limit a time or two and I have received a few traffic tickets over my twenty four years of being a licensed driver. As I have grown older, I have also gotten to driving much closer to the speed limit (although the maximum speed limit has increased from 55mph in my youth to 70mph and even 80mph today.) It is possible that the speed limit has simply caught up to where I was already driving.
I like the notion that possession or collection of information cannot itself be immoral. It is the action after the receipt of the information that can be suspect. In the case of a radar detector, obeying the speed limit is the desired behavior and the knowledge that a radar is active in the area encourages the desired behavior.
What about Giles analogy, though? Does the guy standing watch on the corner have a moral obligation to learn what the information he collects will be used for? If he is asked to observe police activity because a legitimate authority is studying police patterns, then this could be a correct thing to do. The use of police could be a viable area of study by the local university, news media, public watchdog group, etc. If a shady-looking guy asked me to watch for the cops, it seems to me that I have a moral obligation to refuse since I suspect he will use this information to assist in committing a crime. In fact, I may be morally obligated to act by summoning the police or otherwise intervening.
So, are the manufacturers and dealers of radar detectors obligated to learn what their customer’s intentions are? I don’t see a way to realistically do that, but isn’t there some sort of liability here? Maybe I need a radar detector because I want to terrorize the community with my blazing speed. Maybe I want a radar detector as I speed out of town with my ill-gotten booty and I want to avoid any police entanglements. What if the Oklahoma City bomber had had a radar detector? (Wasn’t he apprehended in an ordinary traffic stop?)
