Legality and Ethics

There's a lot more ground to cover on the issues of will, intention and desire. But tonight I do want to complete and make explicit a thread of thought I began a few posts back.

Legality and ethics are in opposition. In the example of Abraham, our inability to gauge intent may (I say *may*) render us unable to render an ethical judgment. But where ethics fail, legality steps in and prosecutes. Were Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, a court of law would and should prosecute the act.

Attempts to divine intent would impact the severity of charges faced and the type and length of sentence. Our fictional Abraham (fictional because in this alternative universe, we posit that he actually completes the act of sacrificing his son), acts under a divine imperative, and so might well be performing an ethical act, but acceptance of the legal consequences would be part and parcel of his ethical conviction. In this, he woul be no different from Socrates accepting the legal punishment assigned him.

From parking tickets to charges of murder, the legal system is there as a prosthetic to substitute for ethics when our ethics fail. Over time, I believe, the tendency is for legality to assert larger and larger domains for itself -- moving into contract law, when a handshake once served; arbitration law, when debate once served; and so forth. The scope of ethics shrinks until our culture behaves as if "good/bad" were irrelevant, and "legal/illegal" is the only meaningful distinction.

In this time of legal dominance, this entry appears to be an unmediated criticism of Law because I overlook the obvious advantages that accrue to law. Law at least attempts to apply objective standards towards adjudication of societal rules and values. As such it carries with it a strong democratizing tendency. It asserts that legality should and (because objective) can apply equally to all people.

The world of ethics, on the other hand, carries strong potential for elitism and abuse -- precisely because to some extent in must eschew objectivity. Intent is not tacked onto ethics, it is integral to ethics. And as we've already begun to establish, intent is precisely where the difficulty arises in living the good life or being a good person.

I confess, though, on the whole, I would prefer to live in an era with an excess of ethics, as opposed to the hyper-legalistic era of today.