Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

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> Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law.

There are various ideas about morality. But I think even in the most common-sense interpretation of morality, most people agree that there are things that are legal, but immoral, things that are perfectly moral but illegal, and that respecting the law is a meta-rule that is important regardless of morality.

Simple example: Most people agree that cheating on a spouse is wrong and immoral. Not illegal though. Do you think it makes any sense to suggest that the only options are either we change the law to make adultery criminal, or we take vigilante justice on adulterers? Or is it just possible that some things might be immoral (to some people) but should be legal?

> A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines [...]

Yes, and I think the law was wrong in this case, like it's been wrong many times in history (slavery was once legal too). The correct thing to do was to try and change it, which is what eventually happened.

An incorrect option would've been to jailbreak prisoners because you disagree with the law, despite lots of people being imprisoned for longer than they should've been.

> You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.

I am engaging, because I disagree with this idea. The law and morality are connected, but distinct things, as I've shown above. We have to have legal systems in place to make broad decisions - we can't go based off of people's personal moral ideas. Explain to me how you would like things to work and still be compatible with that idea, given the above examples I've given.

And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.

The biggest question here is: what is the purpose of the law?

The standard answers are things like, the law exists to protect people, or enforce broadly agreed conduct, or to deter or punish criminals.

Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.

Civilization depends on people mostly not taking violent revenge when wronged. The law exists to replace revenge with “justice” in the minds of the aggrieved. Everything else is window dressing.

If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.

> If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.

I agree. I just don't think the system is as broken as you seem to think it is. Compared to almost any other place and time, the system is the best.

> Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.

Btw, while I do agree with this in a democracy, note that many, many people throughout history (and today!) live and have lived in places where some people really are above the law. That doesn't seem to preclude society functioning.

If the system is the best then it should work. If it worked then there wouldn’t be a bunch of people cheering on a cold-blooded murder.

Have you lost a loved one because health insurance refused or delayed payment for treatment? I can't take you seriously when you say the system isn't that broken when I see people sharing their experiences of how people died and suffered unnecessarily because some health insurance company fought them on it. How is that not insanely broken?

Here in Germany, I've never had to worry about whether my healthcare would pay my treatment when I've had to go to the hospital and had to be operated on. The idea that this is possible in other countries is unfathomable to me. I didn't choose to have whatever illness I might have. My doctor decided the best way to treat my illness. Why does some third party get to decide "but nah bro, it can't be that bad, let's just wait and see how the patient does in a week or two". Why can they override what a doctor thinks is best?

And why are there people like you who thinks "it's not that bad/broken".

Let me clarify. First, I'm not from the US. I completely agree with you that their healthcare system seems incredibly broken.

That, however, is not what I was referring to - I was talking about the system of laws, of democracy, etc. That was what the discussion was about - whether it's "ok" to kill someone in a vigilante way, and whether the legal system or general system of Western countries works well in terms of aligning the law to what people think it should be.

> And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.

I would say almost the entire body of social science and moral philosophy (setting aside the replication crisis for the moment) more or less proves the correctness of saying "nobody gives a shit what the law says". Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes. Without the law, we'd have more direct culture clashes around topics like immigration, because people try to bring their cultural values and social mores with them, the law encodes and enforces whatever social mores exist, as much as the people of a society can control its laws.

It's not the law people care about, it's the social mores. And the social mores extend from the collective consensus of morality. People don't generally kill other people, not because it's illegal, but because it's wrong. But sometimes, killing other people isn't wrong, such in the case of self-defense or protecting your family. Sometimes the law even convicts and punishes people for committing crimes, because the law has a narrower interpretation at the margins than wider social mores. This is exactly what you're observing here. There is a moral equivalence between murdering thousands of people via a bureaucratic decision and pulling the trigger on the gun, but the law treats them differently, society does not. /This/ is why so many people condone the shooter's actions.

You aren't getting it. The law does not matter. The law is a reflection of society, society is not a reflection of the law. The law is a tool of language to try to explain, communicate, and enforce something that exists outside of it, but the thing which gives law power is the thing which exists outside of it. Morals are way more important than laws.

For all situations that actually matter, nobody gives a shit what the law says, and they never will. They only care about what other people will think of them, what they will think of themselves, and how their moral compass and social mores guide their decision-making process. This is exactly why we generally think of people who murder as being sociopaths, lacking a moral compass, because it's the moral compass and not the law that prevents most people from being murderers.

You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.

> You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.

I think it's a bad approach to assume that you're making incredible points and I'm just not getting it, rather than assuming we're just disagreeing and that, potentially, you are wrong.

> Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes.

Maybe we're talking past one another by talking about whether the law "matters" or not.

Social mores are against adultery. Many people do in fact commit adultery, and continue to have totally fine lives, despite this.

On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.

I don't think the law is a reflection of social mores - almost everyone agrees that the law, while obviously based on many in society, shouldn't encompass all social mores, and has to include things that are not, prima facie, moral. You shouldn't, in general, put someone in jail for being too poor to afford food, and stealing some food. Very few people agree that that's moral in a specific instance. But if you don't jail people for stealing, very soon society breaks down.

I'm not sure which of the above, if any, you disagree with. Maybe none of it - in which case maybe we just agree with each other and are using different language to explain ourselves. If you disagree with something in specific, maybe we should drill down on that.

> On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.

You seem to be making the argument that the law has a life of its own, which isn't entirely untrue, but case in point: While most people don't enjoy paying taxes, they do so because they understand it's necessary to have a functioning society they want to be part of. There are many legal ways to get around paying most or all of your taxes, but they're generally so costly to setup that they're only available to the very rich and to corporations, and most people morally judge this as a negative thing even though it's legal, they don't generally morally judge paying their taxes as a negative thing, but the avoidance as negative.

We do disagree, and it's not a question of semantics, it's a question of causality. You are essentially saying that the law and social mores have no causality relationship, I am saying the law comes from social mores, and the law does not influence them. The law is /subordinate/, which is why nobody really cares about it. Obviously "nobody" is intentionally overbroad, policy-makers, lawyers, and judges care quite a lot about the law, but the vast majority of the population (99%+) does not, they do however care very very deeply about social mores and cultural norms.

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