Comment by gampleman
2 days ago
Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.
Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.
Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.
Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.
The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.
Social mores are synonymous with morals and it is our social mores or our moral values that form the basis of our legal systems where we use those mores (moral values) to define the actions that fall into the categories of right versus wrong and help us define how we should treat each other and what an appropriate societal sanction should be when someone steps over the line and does something to violate our social mores or does something that we consider immoral.
By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.
To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.
Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.
In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .
”To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong.”
No one has suggested that. My comment about theocracies was referring to the way religious morals direct lawmaking in theocracies, leading to things like death penalties for homosexual acts and zero tolerance of religious critique (denial of freedom of expression and persecution of political opposition).
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What is the definition of right and wrong if NOT a moral one?
Indeed! However, law is not a definition of moral right and wrong; rather, it is a spatiotemporally varying definition of societal and judicial rights, permissions and restrictions of conduct which are usually grounded in the locally prevailing morals.
Law in a democratic society is a manifestation of so-called social contracts considered binding for members of that society.
However, law in a non-democratic society can be the complete opposite, to the point of enabling immoral conduct, including but not limited to legal crime, persecution of political opponents, ethnic cleansing and offensive warfare.
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It is a moral one, but laws have no morality.
The jury pronounces the sentence. What do you think sways the jurors - legalese complexity or straight up morality?
Jurors decide the verdict, the judge determines the sentence.
> maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent
Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.
Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.
Whether sentencing should reflect that is a hard question, but pretending all fraud is morally equivalent seems like willful blindness