Should Everything Wrong Be Illegal?

[_ajax18]

No one *has* to be moral, but the law concerns proper codes of conduct which are, at their root, moral assertions.

So hunting on the king's land is a moral assertion?

What if go over to Res Ipsa's office, bypass the security system and start doing eye exams in her legal consultation room. If the noise bothers her clients she's welcome to work out of my pos ghetto building when I'm not using it. Some may call it criminal trespassing. Some may call it an act of love because I'm using the money I earn to provide for my family. It's also a way of providing my low income Medicaid patients with better facilities. After all, what's wrong with changing my address? The land belongs to everyone right?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ajax - The law was this way in 1692.

Not an Idiot - The law evolves as society evolves.

Ajax - Why can’t I kill people when I want to take crap? The Romans did it.

Not an Idiot - It’s 2019. We don’t do that any more because social convention has changed.

Ajax - That’s BS, and that’s why the LIBTARDS want to TAX YOU TO DEATH AND MAKE YOU DEFENSELESS BY TAKING OUR GUNS AWAY.

Not an Idiot - K. I’m done here.

Ajax - Heh. Another LIBTARD owned.

[_ajax18]

The law evolves as society evolves.

No it doesn't. You might see groups of people trade places but sovereign still makes the law. All things evolve but not in the direction you think. Natural selection does not favor morality. It only favors military might.

[_EAllusion]

So hunting on the king's land is a moral assertion?

Yes.

What if go over to Res Ipsa's office, bypass the security system and start doing eye exams in her legal consultation room. If the noise bothers her clients she's welcome to work out of my pos ghetto building when I'm not using it. Some may call it criminal trespassing. Some may call it an act of love because I'm using the money I earn to provide for my family. It's also a way of providing my low income Medicaid patients with better facilities. After all, what's wrong with changing my address? The land belongs to everyone right?

It sounds like you are saying that some moral questions are nuanced? If so, yes, that's true.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

The law evolves as society evolves.

No it doesn't. You might see groups of people trade places but sovereign still makes the law. All things evolve but not in the direction you think. Natural selection does not favor morality. It only favors military might.

Heh. Might makes right, soyboy. Another LIBTARD owned.

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

Natural selection does not favor morality. It only favors military might.

E.O. Wilson would argue you are wrong. His research shows he would be right, too.

Humans are social animals. The moral instincts we have are evolutionary advantages that were passed on through natural selection. There is also a fair amount of evidence that moral behaviors are subject to their own natural selection-like forces. The original meaning of a meme was for social behaviors that have gene-like functions in societies.

[_honorentheos]

One quick thing, Honor. I think you need to distinguish between “when should a person who has been harmed by another be entitled to seek compensation” and “when should the state be entitled to punish conduct through forced deprivation of life, Liberty, or property. Defamation is an example of the former, but not the latter.

Hey Res,

I wanted to come back to this after some thought. I am assuming you are referring to our having both criminal and civil courts where the consequences and role of government in imposing punishments differ if one of found to be guilty or liable in one vs the other.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided I don't know enough about the differences to discuss this meaningfully. Intuitively to me there seem like more similarities than differences in that they have judges and lawyers involved who have to meet similar criteria, there are rules that must be followed and failure to follow those rules can result in similar punishments, etc. Other than criminal violations can result in incarceration my limited knowledge leads me to see them serving the same function with the government and law still central to the process and providing the needed authority. But I really don't know much if anything beyond the superficial about this.

I was hoping you could explain a bit more?

[_honorentheos]

Ajax, you’re answering the question exactly backwards. What’s immoral about people changing the location of their residence? If it’s not immoral? Why should it be illegal?

Let's ask it this way. Were the pilgrims acting immorally by entering Indian lands and turning their sacred hunting grounds into farms? Did the Indians have a right to kill them or drive them off their land?

I think you'd find Malcom Gladwells latest book, Talking to Strangers, valuable. Everything about your question would probably change if you were able to internalize the central themes of the book.

[_Res Ipsa]

One quick thing, Honor. I think you need to distinguish between “when should a person who has been harmed by another be entitled to seek compensation” and “when should the state be entitled to punish conduct through forced deprivation of life, Liberty, or property. Defamation is an example of the former, but not the latter.

Hey Res,

I wanted to come back to this after some thought. I am assuming you are referring to our having both criminal and civil courts where the consequences and role of government in imposing punishments differ if one of found to be guilty or liable in one vs the other.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided I don't know enough about the differences to discuss this meaningfully. Intuitively to me there seem like more similarities than differences in that they have judges and lawyers involved who have to meet similar criteria, there are rules that must be followed and failure to follow those rules can result in similar punishments, etc. Other than criminal violations can result in incarceration my limited knowledge leads me to see them serving the same function with the government and law still central to the process and providing the needed authority. But I really don't know much if anything beyond the superficial about this.

I was hoping you could explain a bit more?

Hi honor,

What I’m referring to is, roughly, the distinction between civil and criminal law. If you think about it, we all do things that affect the well-being of others in all sorts of ways. Civil law decides the subset of these ways that require me to compensate you for ways in which I negatively affect your well being. I think, in general, civil law has at most a very loose connection with morality. For example, we are all careless at times, and I don’t think we would describe ordinary carelessness as immoral. But if I injure you through carelessness, civil law will often require me to compensate you for the harm. Because the purpose of civil law is compensation for harm, it is driven much more by fairness than morality.

On the other hand, criminal law is focused on punishment for bad acts, which gives it a closer tie to morality. It’s more focused on whether the act is bad, which naturally brings morality into consideration.

For example, I can lie about you here at MD a dozen times a day every day, and the law will do nothing to me. Nothing, that is, unless you can show that I’ve damaged your reputation. Only then will the state order me to compensate you for the damage I’ve caused. On the other hand, If I attempt to murder you, the state can punish me even if you didn’t even know of the attempt. It has nothing to do with compensation, because I haven’t injured you. It has to do with punishing and deterring bad acts. And morality is one of the ways we determine which acts are bad.

[_honorentheos]

Thanks, Res. I had to go back and contextualize the original comment with my reply to Lemmie which I think helps frame this part of the discussion.

I say only make illegal the wrongs that hurt other people. Of course that opens several more doors regarding the definition of hurting others, both in the short and long term, as well as passive vs. active hurting, which would include externalities, and who gets to decide when feeling hurt is actually being hurt, etc.

I think this is a good starting point as it intuitively seems right. I think it gets cloudy quickly though even without having to define a common ethical baseline.

For example, is there a threshold negative gossip crosses between making a person feel like they are being harmed and their experiencing negative impacts independent of their emotions? In my mind, the two are detached in that a person's life could be quite damaged by gossip and they be none the wiser. The promotion they don't get, the relationship they miss having, the opportunities diverted they would have gained from...those aren't just feelings.

But should it be illegal to gossip? We have laws against libel and slander, but they don't necessarily cover all harmful cases and most people wouldn't pursue charges anyway. Yet most people have probably been harmed by gossip in some way. Is the answer to make more types of gossip illegal and lower the disincentives to pursue charges against a person?

In so doing, it seems we have the two categories of "wrongs" and "harm" that may or may not overlap morality. It's an interesting distinction. It seems there are harms that aren't necessarily tied to intentional wrong-doing that fall within civil and criminal law. Manslaughter, or acts of negligence resulting in lose of life, being a criminal example to add to the civil examples. The crime not coming out of intention to do wrong so much as failure to take reasonable and expected measures that would have prevented harm.

I guess I should step back to the ideas that got this rolling around for me. Those being:

Example 1: Ajax asking why we don't make it illegal for a president to purge the state department if it's valuable to have career diplomats on staff that overlap administrations and party-in-power changes? It wasn't a major theme of that discussion and only received a couple of responses essentially noting it shouldn't have to be illegal, plus the president ought to be able to remove people. The premise there being making it illegal does harm to the president's ability to govern, while not making it illegal reflects there isn't a need to do so given there are underlying and usually understood reasons for recognizing doing so is a bad idea. It took someone like Trump and his base to suddenly make that understood value seem in jeopardy.

Example 2: At the dinner discussion a number of issues came up where a casual claim would be made that certain behaviors ought to be illegal (with sincerity and not just hyperbole) where I personally think it shows a similar issue as in Example 1 but from the other side of the spectrum. Those included issues related to free speech, gender balance in the work place, and in one case, food. My own position has been that each of the above differed substantially in terms of how "wrong" the underlying issue was. Hate speech, while wrong, is less wrong than damaging our Constitutional protections of free speech, for example. Wanting to make it illegal to say certain things on social media shouldn't be a matter of law, in my opinion. While the law has to weigh in where there are serious harm done, I sit somewhere close to what Lemmie said above in her reply on that one.

What surprised me was the most libertarian person there made the appeal to social norms (i.e. - a shared sense of right and wrong) being the better vehicle for most of the things being discussed in a way that sounded very Norman Rockwell in it's appeal to needing better analogs for church, family, and belief in the good ol' American Way to strengthen those norms. It seemed his issue with progressive-minded arguments was that they put the government in as the analog for all of the above. And in doing so, people didn't actually internalize those norms but outsourced them.