Comment by notarobot123
2 days ago
Laws encode a kind of social reasoning (the balancing of risk, ethics, societal impacts, etc) and choosing to follow the law in most situations can be a moral stance (a matter of principle).
2 days ago
Laws encode a kind of social reasoning (the balancing of risk, ethics, societal impacts, etc) and choosing to follow the law in most situations can be a moral stance (a matter of principle).
It was legal to own humans. Don't conflate laws and morality, they're completely different.
Laws in theory encode the morality of the people. The people who believed it was moral to own humans encoded their morality into their legal system.
Indeed, in the most general sense (and probably more so in democracies) laws represent the codification of what society as a whole deems acceptable and what should happen when someone breaches that code.
To an extent, but you have to be careful with that. A common counter-argument is what happened when the Nazis allowed you to report your neighbours for treasonous talk. Lawful, but evil.
There's a whole section of moral philosophy dedicated to whether it's morally right to subsequently go after the people who reported their neighbours. They knew they were sentencing their victims to imprisonment or death, but did so 'lawfully'. Ex post facto laws are an interesting moral conundrum.
Also laws sometimes don't actually reflect society as the process gets hijacked by companies, the billionaires controlling the media or vocal minorities (usually religious vocal minorities).