Losing The High Ground
“Once it’s no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free standing substitute for it. Beating up a 96-year-old isn’t wrong because its illegal; it’s illegal because its wrong.” — Mark Steyn
5 thoughts on “Losing The High Ground”
Given the illegal nature of a lot of Obama executive actions he’s set a precident of tossing the rule of law aside. How will the media that cheerleadered these illegal actions react when a future president writes an executive action making reporters be charged for misrepresenting the news? Or if liable laws are made very strict if someones wrong report or instant blame it on X group results in the reporter being imprissoned? Will they still cheer the loss of the constitution?
That’s the first time I’ve seen Steyn swing and miss in quite a while. Many things are morally wrong in some widely agreed-upon sense, but are quite legal and must remain that way. Beating up a 96-year-old is illegal because it inflicts harm upon someone else who’s done nothing to deserve it. If the law were to tolerate it, there would be more of it, as some would come to see violence as a source of profit, and of course bullying has its own pleasures which must be firmly discouraged for the sake of those who can’t defend themselves.
C. S. Lewis covers the essential thinking behind this sort of decision in The Abolition of Man. No, he doesn’t mention bullying specifically, but his treatment of the indispensability of the values he calls Practical Reason, which he also calls “the Tao,” is at the heart of this subject.
Francis – I read that differently than you did apparently. It seems to me he is saying that laws should be written with a sense of a moral code. Thus his analogy, but when there is an absence of morals, then what good are the laws? Think Baltimore riots where many saw looting as OK, when everyone should know stealing is morally wrong.
You have a point: Yes, a society needs a strong sense of morals. And yes, laws should be written such that what they criminalize is morally wrong. But there are moral wrongs — some of them things we do to one another, some things we do to ourselves — in which the law has no place, because no scheme of remediation would make sense.
An example: Smith seduces Jones under false pretenses: e.g., a promise of marriage. Now, there have been societies that tried to criminalize breach-of-promise-of-marriage — Gilbert and Sullivan wrote an operetta about it — but they got tangled up in the insoluble contradictions. What’s the proper remedy? Compel Smith to marry Jones? That never works out well. A monetary award? Based on what? A prison term? Unlikely to have a salutary effect.
So: yes, and no. We must criminalize some morally wrong deeds, and of course we must strive for a morally educated and aware society. But the argument for criminalizing something cannot stop with “It’s morally wrong.” As we mathematical types say, that’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
Have a bonus quote: “I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal.” — Herbert Spencer, “The Proper Sphere of Government”
Francis – Your making my head hurt. Paralysis by analysis.