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Comment by merinowool | Hacker News Reader

Not if the law is corrupt. Would you call people who "committed" same sex intercourse criminals if the place they did it had such laws that it was a "crime" to do so? What about people of which presence was declared unlawful because of their race and administered death penalty on the spot?

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I've been thinking about that too. In Virginia we had a long-time sheriff who was a homosexual and for most of his office, homosexual acts were serious felonies. He'd also been brought up on charges of kidnapping and some kind of attempted sodomy - while in office - but to deal with this they moved the trial to a rural town with an all white jury who would see the nonwhite victim in a predictable way. So much for equally applicable protection of and liability to the laws. Political patronage trumped the rule of law here.

This is sort of the basis for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

It's a tricky subject though. In the US, it's been used to bring judgements closer to what we consider legal today, like refusing to convict on the Fugitive Slave Act or alcohol control laws during prohibition. But there are also cases of all white juries refusing to convict for hate crimes despite obvious evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unit...

Should that maxim become universal standard, I don't know that we would be better. I think you could make a case that at some level, every single law is corrupt, especially if we allow for relativism (every law will be in someone's opinion, corrupt). The word loses all meaning at that point.

I think reasonable people can tell the difference between something they wouldn't personally do and something that should be illegal because it hurts other people. There's not really a slippery slope in GP's argument.

The point of the discussion, that we're keeping a bunch of people locked up for violating laws that we have recently decided were unjust, isn't relativistic at all. In a just society those people would be freed immediately.

I agree with you, but just because we believe that doesn't make it common sense or "just." To someone else, the idea that someone who broke the law would be released simply because the law changed is a violation of justice (the ex post facto argument). The fact that I personally think it's an unjust outcome to leave them in jail (or throwing them in jail in the first place), doesn't mean that my opinion is the only correct one (I'm not a strict moral relativist, but I concede they have some good points).

There are some values more fundamental than others. One might be that inconsistency or hypocrisy is bad.

One might stipulate that whether marijuana should be illegal isn't an absolute that can never change.

But if it is in accordance with our values that it should be legal now, and this is our best attempt at instituting just laws, then leaving people in jail for reasons we don't currently think are valid is relatively worse than any arbitrary rule about drugs.

Just because you don't know for sure what is truly and absolutely right doesn't mean you can't stop doing things you know are truly and absolutely wrong.

Agreed, I think this is where I generally fall as well. Pragmatism as a philosophical discipline is often criticized as lacking a purity, but at some point we have to stop philosophizing and actually make policy.

Side note: I love your username :-)

I think a lot of nasty laws we have are a consequence of voters not being able to distinguish between “I don’t like this” and “this should be illegal for everyone“

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