2013-01-18, 23:24 | Link #41 | |
I'm not a tumor
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: In the dreams of beautiful women
Age: 31
|
Quote:
Last edited by solidguy; 2013-01-18 at 23:41. |
|
2013-01-18, 23:50 | Link #42 |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
|
People do not obey the law purely out of fear or selfishness. They obey the law because they feel it is morally righteous (which encompasses Justness and fairness). You don't choose not to murder simply because it's against the law, most people don't do it because they feel it is wrong. Likewise stealing, rape etc.
When a law ceases to align with people's sense of morality, it quickly becomes irrelevant. Consider Prohibition, sure alcohol was illegal, but everyone drunk it anyway (except the temperance campaigners who passed the laws in the first place, of course ). Just because Alcohol was suddenly illegal did little to alter people's behavior. Likewise today downloading music or movies is illegal, does that really stop anyone from doing it though? The state is not powerful enough to force people to obey the law, that's why it's important for the law to be inline with the citizenry's general attitudes, otherwise the law would be unenforceable. The law is constructed to be just and fair, when people no longer believe a particular law is just, they will try to find every method possible to evade it, if everyone is trying to evade that law, then it's impossible for the police to enforce it, and so the law ceases to be. |
2013-01-19, 23:06 | Link #43 |
I'm not a tumor
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: In the dreams of beautiful women
Age: 31
|
It's a symbiotic relationship between people and law. Is it against the law to rape/steal because it is morally wrong or is it morally wrong because it is against the law? I'm not sure if it is inherently in human nature to consider these things taboo, at least not as sure as you are that it is. I mean look at examples of societies where law has collapsed where rape and theft go hand in hand with daily life (or atleast thats the popular depiction of collapsed societies anyway). I'd say somebody living in this place would have at minimum an extremely diminished if not non-existent negative moral attitude to something that is considered normal.
What I believe is at the core of human nature is the desire to survive, not the desire to be morally correct. And this desire is fundamentally selfish. Basically what I'm trying to say is that the law is not created to be fair but created to keep order. Fairness and all that razzamidaz is a just a bonus. With that said do you think it is fair if the majority of people download movies and music at the expense of these companies? It reminds me of some quote I heard in some movie (which I admittedly watched online (oh the irony)) "If enough people call a chicken a cow does it become a cow?". Likewise just because a number of people say it is fair to illegally download does it make it so? |
2013-01-20, 00:05 | Link #44 | ||||
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
|
Quote:
Matricide was considered morally wrong first, and that moral wrongness was codified in the law. More obscure things, like copyright, do not necessarily have as strong a moral dimension to it. Quote:
In order to facilitate living together, it was imperative for us to evolve a "moral" sense. It is a very real part of our brains. Without our moral sense, human communities could never have formed and stayed together and we would have been doomed to die naked and alone. Quote:
Quote:
Let's remember, that until quite recently music was "free". People would sing to pass the time, and there were occasional particularly talented traveling musicians who would travel town to town and support themselves off the equivalent of tips, or by a particularly wealthy patron. When people bought music in the past, they didn't think of it as buying music, but rather buying the storage medium. The music inside the storage medium did not have a monetary "value". My prediction is that in the future media will switch to being supported by some kind of donation/patronage system, like in the past. |
||||
2013-01-20, 02:18 | Link #45 | |
I'm not a tumor
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: In the dreams of beautiful women
Age: 31
|
Quote:
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan talks about social contracts as being subordinated to the survival of humans. When a social contract no longer serves survival (theoretically) it is shunned (which I think an interesting theme explored in many dystopian stories). If law is derived from people wanting to resolve disputes this still is derived from peoples survival instincts. Now again this is my personal opinion but I think people submit certain liberties to government in exchange for protection against other people using those liberties in a harmful manner. I honestly believe that if there were zero negative consequences from killing someone in order to gain something people would do it. It is consequence that drives us obeying the law. And it is social order that drives the law. And it is survival that drives social order. I think what it may come down to is naturalist vs postivist approaches to law. Naturalist law states that law comes from some greater moral compass whereas postivist law is only concerned with the legitimacy of the systems of law in place or the order of the system. Basically one has moral law while the other is amoral law. If you like the positivist law then chances are you believe justice is amoral. but yeeee tbh I think I've drifted away from the subject and have found myself in the deep end of my knowledge in this topic I'd find it hard to continue without repeating most points or drifting away into a different area. But I did learn quite abit from this discussion cheerio Last edited by solidguy; 2013-01-20 at 02:33. |
|
2013-01-20, 02:55 | Link #46 | |||
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
|
Quote:
Quote:
In general, people find it painful to inflict pain on other people. Only a small number of people need the law to prevent them from killing other people. And they usually end out killing people anyway. Given a choice most people will try to work together. People will, of course, commit injustices against one another, but it is rarely direct, even in times past when the world was far more lawless. Quote:
|
|||
2013-01-20, 03:57 | Link #47 | ||
Romanticist
Join Date: Aug 2009
Age: 33
|
Quote:
I believe you are correct in that the social contract is founded fundamentally with the idea of survival in mind, but the important thing to note here is that a social contract is an absolute necessity for society to exist. Without a social contract, a society would cease to be. If you look from an egoist paradigm, no individual human being, with their survival instinct, would consent to sacrifice part of their own freedom unless there was something to be gained from it. It is that sacrifice of personal freedom and collective motive of survival that society is founded to begin with. Therefore, any law that does not answer to the values of the majority is dangerous to any society. Quote:
__________________
|
||
2013-01-20, 04:21 | Link #48 |
I'm not a tumor
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: In the dreams of beautiful women
Age: 31
|
I feel guilty when I eat a chocolate bar. It doesn't stop me from eating it. When you land a job do you think about all those people who missed out? Who could potentially lose their home for want of more income? If you did feel guilty would you, out of the righteousness of humanity give up your place for them because (for arguments sake) are more well off and can take this blow for the 'greater good of humanity'? I highly doubt it. That's just not how the world is. There are winners and losers. It takes selfishness to be compatible in this world, you wouldn't get anywhere without putting your own interests as your first priority. Maybe I went off topic abit with the killing talk (maybe that's just a reflection of myself coming out @.@) but the point remains people work together out of the interests of themselves. We are social animals but we are also individual animals. We harm each other all the time to benefit from it.
Take the black Friday death in the U.S where people tramped over one another for deals on flat screen TV's. Where was the righteousness and greater good in that? Unless you count that poor soul as a sacrifice to the greater good of consumerism there is none. Or CEO's making exponentially more than their workers, paying themselves bonuses out of the taxpayers money because they can. IDK about you but I see little fairness in that. What is stopping the workers from storming the office and loping off the CEOs head like they done in the good ole days when you didnt have to be a 'psychopath' to kill i.e the entire history of the human race prior to the modern age (or even today where people are killed all the time ie prisons, wars, SMOKING). Greed is what humans are good at. If we can do it, we will do it. Law is there as a means of stopping us. People are being lawfully 'killed' everyday with chemicals in your products, pollution in the air. Believe me when I say this...if we can get away with it, we will. |
2013-01-20, 04:26 | Link #49 | |
I'm not a tumor
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: In the dreams of beautiful women
Age: 31
|
Quote:
|
|
2013-01-20, 14:43 | Link #50 | ||||||
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
|
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
In terms of chemicals, pollution etc. however the people who do that do not think of themselves as killing anybody. They do not perceive the consequences of their actions. If you cannot percieve the consequences, how can you feel guilt? Instead you cut corners out of laziness thinking "nothing will happen", and continue on. |
||||||
Tags |
justice, philosophy |
|
|