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Whose morals do we govern on... yours or mine? Well, depending on the individual, the laws based on one person's morality can be extremely oppressive and violent to certain people under the law or most of the people under the law. And then when the law isn't based on your idea of morality, is it still based on morality at all?
Thomas Aquinas wrote a lot on natural law... He discussed laws and governments that are immoral and oppressive, and said that immoral or unjust laws are a violation of natural law and shouldn't be honored or obeyed. Breaking immoral laws, is an act of morality...
*since nobody has brought up the issue of immoral acting governments and regimes, I thought I would.
Of course. Virtually all law, all government, is force and coercion. The purpose of government is to make people do things they don't want to do, and stop doing things that they do want to do, when it is deemed to be in society's best intrests that this is so. (That is, if the government is GOOD government... BAD government does what is in the intrests of the ruling class, not what is in the intrests of "the people". )
Law is based on force, and the threat of force. Even traffic tickets. Accumulate enough traffic tickets and a couple of beefy Deputies will show up at your door with a warrant for your arrest. If you feel disinclined to accompany them, they will use force to make you come along. If you resist successfully enough, they will kill you.
All laws are oppressive to someone. Serial killers no doubt find laws against murder to be oppressive. Sometimes I find laws against murder oppressive myself, as they make it a lot harder to kill someone who needs killing. But, society defines when you can kill and when you cannot, and if you violate that and get caught you will suffer society's great displeasure. Such is life in a "nation of laws, not men."
And it is an improvement over the days when "law" was whatever whim-of-the-moment struck the ruler's fancy.
Most people don't believe in moral absolutes these days, apparently. I'm an oddball, I do, but I recognize that not everyone shares every aspect of my own moral code.
What we end up with, for the most part, is laws that criminalize things that the majority believe are morally reprehensible. We also get some laws that benefit some small group's special intrests, and while I have problems with that I suppose it is inevitable.
If you don't believe in absolutes, then I suppose you're left with "majority rules". If most people think it should be illegal, it probably will be. If you don't like it, you have to live with it anyway, or convince people to repeal that law, or immigrate to another country.
Well, there's the Constitution. Some people think the Constitution guarantees the right to an abortion, even though it doesn't mention abortion, but that the explicitly stated right to keep and bear arms should not be respected nowadays. :roll: Oh well, looks like we still have some problems there...
A popular theory these days is that the only things that should be illegal are those things that actually harm another person. Sounds good, right?
Well, the problem comes when we try to define "harm".
Take seatbelt laws. Certainly sounds like a case of government trying to make you "do what's good for you" like a nanny state, right? But I've heard people justify it by claiming "people who don't buckle up get hurt worse, and that costs all of us in insurance premiums and unpaid hospital bills".
Well, we could just mandate that if you don't buckle up, if you get hurt it is your own problem and nobody else has to pay for your injuries or treatments, but that would be too simple. Then the counties and states wouldn't get all that revenue from enforcing seatbelt laws, and they wouldn't have a simple excuse to pull people over and ask them intrusive questions because they weren't buckled up, or have "seatbelt checkpoints" where they're really fishing for any excuse to bust you.
This is where theory meets reality and the BS hits the asphalt.
Or NC, where you can be jailed for putting anything but aluminum cans in an aluminum can recycling bin. :roll: (Jail? Seriously? Because I thought it was just a trash can and threw a McDonald's bag in there?)
So anyway, I consider laws like that oppressive, but there they are. Not much I can do about it but write my Congresscritter.
Then we have moralities that are imposed by fiat, by a decision by a judge or court, and not by the will of the majority. Roe v Wade was one example of this; Massachusetts SSM laws are another. Laws imposed by one or two or three or five or nine judges, imposed on tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people whether they want it or not.
These are some of the details and complications I referred to in the earlier post, but didn't address there.
So if you feel oppressed by some law that originated with someone else's morality, don't feel alone: I guarantee you EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the country feels oppressed or unhappy about some laws, including the person(s) who imposed their morality (in the form of law) on you.
The only answer to this (other than anarchy) that would greatly lessen this sense of oppression would be local sovereignty: letting the states or maybe even the counties decide what moral code they will use to determine laws and regulations, then vote with your feet and pick the one that most closely fits your own beliefs. That, of course, is another subject with its own complications and details that I'm riding past at a gallop just now...
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