Comment by ang_cire
18 days ago
I'm not interested in wading into the wider discussion, but I do want to bring up one particular point, which is where you said
> do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.
This is absolutely something we do: our purely technical, legal terms often feed back into our moral frameworks. Laws are even created to specifically be used to change peoples' perceptions of morality.
An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.
The word itself is even treated as a form of punishment; a label attached to someone permanently, that colors how (almost) every person who interacts with them (who's aware of it) will perceive them, morally.
Another example is rhetoric along the lines of "If they had complied, they wouldn't have been hurt", which is explicitly the use of a punishment (being hurt) to create an judgement/perception of immorality on the part of the person injured (i.e. that they must have been non-compliant (immoral), otherwise they would not have been being punished (hurt)). The fact they were being punished, means they were immoral.
Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.
Point being, our laws and punishments absolutely create feedback loops into our moral frameworks, precisely because we assume laws and punishments to be just.
> An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.
The US is an outlier here; the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours has been abolished in most other common law jurisdictions.
Often it is replaced by a similar distinction, such as indictable versus summary offences-but even if conceptually similar to the felony-misdemeanour distinction, it hasn’t entered the popular consciousness.
As to your point about law influencing culture-is that really an example of this, or actually the reverse? Why does the US largely retain this historical legal distinction when most comparable international jurisdictions have abolished it? Maybe, the US resists that reform because this distinction has acquired a cultural significance which it never had elsewhere, or at least never to the same degree.
> Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.
On the immigration issue: Many Americans seem to view immigration enforcement as somehow morally problematic in itself; an attitude much less common in many other Western countries (including many popularly conceived as less “right wing”). Again, I think your point looks less clear if you approach it from a more global perspective