No, thank you very much, heard that blame story long enough in my childhood (socialistic country).
If it's bad -- let's make it illegal. Law is a reflection of what people consider fair and just. If it's legal -- it's fair and just.
If it's bad -- let's make it illegal. Law is a reflection of what people consider fair and just. If it's legal -- it's fair and just.
Law is a reflection of what people with political power consider fair and just, and that set of people is only a subset of all people affected by it.
A quick look at history shows this to be false (Jim Crow laws, Nuremberg Laws, a million other examples). People should never derive their morality from bureaucrats.
Jim Crow laws were "fair and just" at the time, according to most people of the time; that's why the laws existed. The people wanted them (well, the majority who had political power anyway, obviously not the Black people). "Fair and just" is simply an opinion, and according to the people at that time, those shitty laws were fine. They weren't getting their morality from lawmakers; the people at the time simply had bad morals.
> well, the majority who had political power anyway
You're making a massive assumption that this somehow equates to voters/the people.
The idea that common white people 100+ years weren't massively racist is, honestly, ridiculous and downright insulting. Racist policies didn't come from a few leaders that somehow got themselves elected; regular people believed that way too. There's no shortage of historical evidence for this fact, and you trying to deny it really sounds a lot like flat-eartherism.
Go talk to your grandparents about how racist people were in those days.
Democracies are welcoming for people stepping down, not up.
People stating "nothing that is legal is immoral or unethical" is one parry in that "message social pressure", and those of us disagreeing is a counter-parry. And that's the way I think it should work! People who care what I think (my family, my friends, my kids, people at work and in my community who respect me for whatever reason) will feel pressure from me, pushing them toward what I think is right (and vice versa!), and people who don't know me, but who think what I'm saying rings true will also be affected, almost certainly to a lesser extent, by what I'm saying. And people (presumably like you) who don't find it compelling, will debate what I'm saying, and other people may find their perspective more compelling than mine, and that's fine too!
And in my view, this is just how society works, we messily influence one another toward a loose consensus on what is good and right, above and beyond what we've enshrined into legislation and legal precedent.