For example, some things are immoral but completely legal. You can probably find many of your own powerful examples, but we`ll only offer a few. First, if you don`t tip in a restaurant, it`s not illegal; But it seems like a crime, especially if the service is good. As another example, wealthy individuals and companies are often heavily criticized for using loopholes, offshore accounts and other systems to avoid taxes. However, businesses rely more than individuals on publicly funded resources to generate wealth, including routes for shipping goods and services, energy and communications infrastructure, law enforcement, national defense, and bureaucracies that support state, domestic, and international trade. Some examples depend on the cultural context. Think of Singapore, where it is illegal to sell chewing gum, not because it is immoral, but to promote public cleanliness. And until recently, it was illegal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia, in part because it was considered religiously immoral. This is in stark contrast to Western customs, where driving is commonplace, and in the United States, it is a rite of passage for all 16-year-olds, including women. Others fundamentally disagree.
You say that you have done nothing morally wrong by crossing the street, since you have no general moral obligation to obey the law – this law or any other law. Where should this moral obligation come from? Have you ever promised to follow all the laws? Do you owe the government obedience to the law? There are many things I agree with in these paragraphs. I fully agree that we cannot simply compare murder in war to murder in peacetime. I also invited, of course, Bens to focus on the legality of collateral executions in wartime, drawing on criminal law to point out that many national criminal justice systems would consider the deaths of innocent people in drone strikes to be intentional. Finally, Ben is absolutely right when he points out that how these collateral deaths are perceived is necessarily influenced by the evaluation of the legality of the drone program. An individual`s morality is based on their personal values, but is motivated by their culture. If you look again at the example of abortion, if you have the choice to abort, but it is against your religion, then you may think that the right, the moral choice, would be not to receive it. Kant says that people are subjective and base their values on their personal values and opinions. The SEP`s entry on Leslie Green`s „legal positivism” is useful here, as it highlights the extent to which the claim that „the very essence of positivism is the strict separation of law and morality” is not entirely accurate: „The separability thesis is generally interpreted as tolerating any contingent relationship between morality and law. only if it is conceivable that the connection is lost.
Therefore, the severability theory is consistent with all of the following: (i) moral principles are part of the law; (ii) the right generally or even always has real value; (iii) the best explanation of the content of the laws of a society involves reference to the moral ideals prevailing in that society; and (iv) a legal system cannot survive if it is not considered equitable and therefore to some extent real. The four claims are counted by the severability theory only as possible compounds; They don`t apply to every possible legal system – they probably don`t even apply to all historical legal systems. As mere contingent truths, it is assumed that they do not affect the legal concept itself. (This is a mistaken view of concept building, but we can ignore it for this one. In a sense, this is my take on the collateral deaths caused by drone strikes. While I don`t think all drone strikes are martial law, for the reasons I`ll discuss in my next article, I`m certainly more legally supportive of the drone program than most of my left/progressive counterparts. In particular, I am extremely sceptical about the oft-heard claim that drone strikes violate the principle of proportionality of IHL. As I have explained elsewhere, the principle of proportionality – not to mention the war crime that flows from it – is so amorphous and pro-commanders that it is essentially useless.
Yet I still believe that many, if not most, of the legally proportional collateral deaths caused by drone strikes are deeply immoral. I simply want to highlight here how opinions on this issue will influence opinions on the moral dimensions of the accidental murder of children. If, like me, one is inclined to view drone strikes as a legitimate instrument of war – a war authorized domestically by Congress and legal under international law – one will tend to view the deaths of children they sometimes cause as accidental deaths in the context of lawful and appropriate military action. Such deaths are always tragic. But we have centuries of moral vocabulary for such things. War is a terrible business, and one of the reasons is that civilians who have done nothing wrong are being killed; Indeed, war inherently transforms what would otherwise be murder into a legal and protected act. And while modern martial law requires every effort to protect civilians, they also accept that those efforts won`t always be successful. On the contrary, it calls into question the fine gradations of Kevin`s intentionality. The relevant question is whether adequate measures were taken to distinguish between civilians and minimize civilian casualties – not whether these measures ultimately worked. What is legal may or may not be moral, and vice versa.
„The most common response to my article on Newtown and the drone program was to point out that there is a difference between killing in peacetime and killing in war – that we are more willing to accept the loss of innocent lives in war, both legally and morally, even though the loss in both can be considered intentional. I`m not so sure. Who is this royal „we”? A relative of a soldier killed may not be „willing to accept the loss of the soldier`s life,” who considers that soldier innocent and, in that sense, his child innocent. In other words, the parents of the innocent child who was killed (in war or not) may not be „willing to accept the loss of their innocent child.” I use „must not be” instead of „is not” to see the variety of possible reactions a parent may have to the death of their child. Is the royal „we” the state? Or the servants of the state? I just don`t feel very comfortable with this royal „we” and what underlies it. I suspect that if you deconstruct this „we”, you will find.. However, my position would not change, although I would feel more comfortable with the legal definition of proportionality. Accepting the morality of a particular law does not require us to accept the morality of all actions that conform to that law. Someone who is pro-choice can still morally condemn the wealthy family that uses abortion as a form of birth control. Similarly, someone who supports euthanasia can always morally condemn a person who persuades a sick elderly relative to do so because they want their inheritance as soon as possible. The question of the legal versus the moral can be raised in America today in relation to cigarettes. We want to catch the bad guys and promote justice. But how can this happen if we don`t denounce immoral behavior, even if it`s legal? Perhaps our willingness to give people carte blanche when they do bad things, even if they are legal, undermines the likelihood that people will follow the rules, let alone the spirit of the rule.
Kant declared that „goodwill” is the only good without any restrictions. This means that a good attitude or feeling about something is moral for that particular individual. Kevin, although it is true that I try to read everything, of course, I miss this goal by far, and what is worse, you certainly cannot say that I understand everything, yes, the more I read, the more informed I am about the depth and extent of my ignorance. That said, and since I`m a bit thin at the moment, I have little to say, other than the fact that I largely agree with what you`ve written here (in particular, the claim that „the principle of proportionality – not to mention the war crime based on it – is so amorphous and sympathetic to the commander that it is essentially useless”) and that I hope some of these issues will soon appear in Ratio Juris in the context of „realist” political views and terrorism, which, as Ben Saul puts it, „draws disproportionate attention to the harm it causes,” a problem exacerbated by what he rightly calls „abominable moralization” (given the important distinction between striving to be „moral,” and the pejorative sense of moralization).
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