Comment by chefandy
1 year ago
Drinking and right turns are unethical if they’re negligent. They’re not unethical if they’re not negligent. The government is trying to reduce negligence by enacting preventative measures to stop ALL right turns and ALL drinking in certain contexts that are more likely to yield negligence, or where the negligence world be particularly harmful, but that doesn’t change whether or not the behavior itself is negligent.
You might consider disregarding the government’s preventative measures unethical, and doing those things might be the way someone disregards the governments protective guidelines, but that doesn’t make those actions unethical any more than governments explicitly legalizing something makes it ethical.
To use a clearer example, the ethicality of abortion— regardless of what you think of it— is not changed by its legal status. You might consider violating the law unethical, so breaking abortion laws would constitute the same ethical violation as underage drinking, but those laws don’t change the ethics of abortion itself. People who consider it unethical still consider it unethical where it’s legal, and those that consider it ethical still consider it ethical where it’s not legal.
It's not so simple. An analogy is the Rust formatter that has no options so everyone just uses the same style. It's minimally "unethical" to use idiosyncratic Rust style just because it goes against the convention so people will wonder why you're so special, etc.
If the rules themselves are bad and go against deeper morality, then it's a different situation; violating laws out of civil disobedience, emergent need, or with a principled stance is different from wanton, arbitrary, selfish cheating.
If a law is particularly unjust, violating the law might itself be virtuous. If the law is adequate and sensible, violating it is usually wrong even if the violating action could be legal in another sensible jurisdiction.
> but that doesn’t make those actions unethical any more than governments explicitly legalizing something makes it ethical
That is, sometimes, sufficient.
If government says ‘seller of a house must disclose issues’ then I rely rely on the law being followed, if you sell and leave the country, you have defrauded me.
However if I live in a ‘buyer beware’ jurisdiction, then I know I cannot trust the seller and I hire a surveyor and take insurance.
There is a degree of setting expectations- if there is a rule, even if it’s a terrible rule, I as individual can at least take some countermeasures.
You can’t take countermeasures against all forms of illegal behaviour, because there is infinite number of them. And a truly insane person is unpredictable at all.
I agree if they're negligent they're unethical. But I also think if they're illegal they're generally unethical. In situations where some other right is more important that the law, underage drinking or illegal right on red would be ethical, such as if alcohol is needed as an emergency pain reliever, or a small amount for religious worship, or if you need to drive to the hospital fast in an emergency.
Abortion opponents view it as killing an innocent person. So that's unethical regardless of whether it's legal. I'm not contesting in any way that legal things can be unethical. Abortion supporters view it as a human right, and that right is more important than the law.
Right on red, underage drinking, and increasing car emissions aren't human rights. So outside of extenuating circumstances, if they're illegal, I see them as unethical.
> Abortion opponents view it as killing an innocent person. So that's unethical regardless of whether it's legal.
So it doesn't matter that a very small percentage of the world's population believes life begins at conception, it's still unethical? Or is everything unethical that anyone thinks is unethical across the board, regardless of the other factors? Since some vegans believe eating honey is unethical, does that mean it's unethical for everybody, or would it only be unethical if it was illegal?
In autocracies where all newly married couples were legally compelled to allow the local lord to rape the bride before they consummated the marriage, avoiding that would be unethical?
Were the sit-in protest of the American civil rights era unethical? They were illegal.
Was it unethical to hide people from the Nazis when they were search for people to exterminate? It was against the law.
Was apartheid ethical? It was the law.
Was slavery ethical? It was the law.
Were the jim crow laws ethical?
I have to say, I just fundamentally don't understand your faith in the infallibility of humanity's leaders and governing structures. Do I think it's generally a good idea to follow the law? Of course. But there are so very many laws that are clearly unethical. I think your conflating legal correctness with mores with core foundational ethics is rather strange.
the right on red example is interesting because in that case, the law changes how other drivers and pedestrians will behave in ways that make it pretty much always unsafe
That just changes the parameters of negligence. On a country road in the middle of a bunch of farm land where you can see for miles, it doesn’t change a thing.