Should Everything Wrong Be Illegal?

[_subgenius]

"should we make laws criminalizing and punishing anything that society deems to be wrong?"
- yes, we already do that. When society deems it wrong, it's unlawful. Most times is done via a proxy system.

(maybe the bigger question is "who is society?")

[_EAllusion]

There are lots of things widely considered to be immoral that are not made illegal in any way. Lying to your parents about what you ate for breakfast is immoral, but almost no one thinks that deserves legal sanction.

[_EAllusion]

I guess I just can't see how the law has any root in morality. The law is made by the sovereign. The sovereign does not have to be moral in any way and that includes democratic majorities. The only thing the sovereign needs is the loyalty of the military. That's what determines what is legal and illegal, not whether something is moral or immoral.

It's a wonderful thing that an all powerful God is perfectly moral as well. We're very lucky that it is this way in eternity. It certainly doesn't have to be as this world allows us to see every day.

No one *has* to be moral, but the law concerns proper codes of conduct which are, at their root, moral assertions. Saying "you ought to be forced to give up your property or worse if you speed" or, worded slightly differently, "we are justified in taking your property or worse if you speed" is a moral assertion.

P.S. The God you believe in is a evil tyrant worse than any human has ever been or ever will be. Fortunately, that God does not exist. If you appeal to God simply being good by definition or for reasons that exist beyond your ken, then the assertion that God is perfectly good is empty of content. Literally anything is compatible with being "perfectly good" then, which is not, if you think about it for a second, a wonderful thing.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

https://www.foxnews.com/us/dozens-arres ... -york-city

Who’s in the wrong here, and what should be illegal?

“The city reported last year that turnstile jumpers and bus-fare cheaters cost the MTA $215 million, according to Bloomberg.”

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

"should we make laws criminalizing and punishing anything that society deems to be wrong?"
- yes, we already do that. When society deems it wrong, it's unlawful. Most times is done via a proxy system.

(maybe the bigger question is "who is society?")

In your opinion is it wrong to say, "God damn it!" ?

Supposing as a Mormon you think it is, is the fact it isn't criminally punishable only due to society not sharing your view? But in a perfect society it would be punished by the state?

[_honorentheos]

Honorentheos,

According to Milton Friedman, the CEO is morally responsible to make his shareholders money, and therefore is morally bound to flood rivers with pollutants, pay off politicians, and whatever else makes the investors money. Therefore, it's up to government to solve for market failure scenarios. He hoped something in the spirit of the market could work like vouchers for polluting, but nonetheless it's the government's roll at the end of the day.

So then, the moral dilemma could be, suppose the CEO does a risk analysis and concludes that it's well within the company's spirit of risk to get around the laws for bribery and make 2% more for his shareholders, is he morally obligated to do so?

Well, there are lots of moral dilemmas I can't answer, but you get the idea. Perhaps there is some room for saying that some things are wrong but not illegal, or can't legislate morality, but just want to make sure people aren't taking the easy way out and they are really just saying it's other people's ideas of morality that shouldn't be legislated, not theirs.

Friedman makes interesting arguments regarding the above in his essay on social responsibility from 1970. A few excerpts:

In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose--for example, a hospital or a school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objectives but the rendering of certain services.

...

Many a reader who has followed the argument this far may be tempted to remonstrate that it is all well and good to speak of Government's having the responsibility to impose taxes and determine expenditures for such "social" purposes as controlling pollution or training the hard-core unemployed, but that the problems are too urgent to wait on the slow course of political processes, that the exercise of social responsibility by businessmen is a quicker and surer way to solve pressing current problems.

Aside from the question of fact--I share Adam Smith's skepticism about the benefits that can be expected from "those who affected to trade for the public good"--this argument must be rejected on the grounds of principle. What it amounts to is an assertion that those who favor the taxes and expenditures in question have failed to persuade a majority of their fellow citizens to be of like mind and that they are seeking to attain by undemocratic procedures what they cannot attain by democratic procedures. In a free society, it is hard for "evil" people to do "evil," especially since one man's good is another's evil.

While he is using the language of incentives and taxation above it isn't difficult to see the same applied to criminality embodied in the rules of society. It's interesting he divides those into law and custom. Or, what is criminal and what is just wrong as defined by society.

[_honorentheos]

No. It’s an impossible task since few of share fundamentally compatible ethos's. I guess illegality, for me, is determined when someone breaks a contract with another, whether it’s social or conventional. Perhaps it’s more along the lines when someone can seek redress for a measurable or demonstrable wrong either for themselves or for the vulnerable.

But that’s the thing, and why our legal system is vast, because nuance and circumstance will dictate every scenario in which a wrong is assessed as such.

- Doc

In many ways our system is reactive. We write laws to address break downs in the social order, not necessarily to define it down to the nth degree as a means of anticipating wrongdoing. I think EA has presented good points and examples highlighting we have both a legal system as well as some form of shared morality that either incentivizes positive or disincentives negative behaviors we see as wrong but not criminal. When something moves from the side of custom to the side of criminal it is to strengthen the enforcement of that value or norm where the customary incentives are failing it seems.

So there is inherently tension as your example with the turnstile jumpers helps illustrate.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I think a good example of this would be Rep. Nunes’ unitemized campaign donations (received) totaling over $3.4M for 2018. Weird, huh? In 2016 he received a bit over $25k. I can’t possibly imagine what tech savvy country who’s known for meddling in our elections would find a way to do that. Do you?

- Doc

[_moksha]

Would that be an argument lobbying should be illegal?

I suppose the type of lobbying would define the legality. If this lobbying involved telling a Congressmen that blind people would greatly appreciate support for the reauthorization of Americans with Disabilities Act, I would say bless them. If the lobbying involved an international scheme to lift sanctions on an aggressive enemy via multiple initiatives, I would say it should be illegal.

[_ajax18]

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?