Thoughtful Innuendos

[jackofallgeeks]

I was doing some thinking the other day, spurred by a comment made by my uncle over dinner the other night. We were discussing the Libertarian Right vs. the Religious Right, and why he doesn't like the trend that the Religious Right would have us take -- legislating morality and dictating behavior.

I've been sitting on the fense of this one for a while, sort of. On the one hand, I've been aware that you can't legislate morality, though I can't articulate it any better than "it won't work." But at the same time, older theories on Politics argued for a Government that takes stock of it's people's spiritual health as well -- I cite Plato and Aristotle, lest anyone fear I refer to the Middle Ages' Catholic Church. And so I've been stuck, in a way; why not set laws to dissuade people from doing what's wrong, anyways?

The key point my uncle made was a line he pulled from a book, What's So Great About America? if I recall, and it went to the tune of "true virtue must be freely chosen. To force it on someone robs it of all it's value." It would actually be a disservice, I think, and something of an insult to human nature, to legislate morality (aside from the other point that was made, that is that morality is not easily codifiable enough that we might build a suitable code of laws from it).

This post, from mephron makes a point of how legislating morality could go wrong. We would all have people Be Good and Do Right, surely, but seeing that this is so isn't necessarily the job of Government, I think.

(Not that I expect to hop the fence and turn Pro-Choice, fight for legalized drugs, or have laws against murder repealed. My uncle also made a point that most good laws were those which were set to either protect individual rights or to preserve the interests of society. I am not an anarchist, I would just have morality dictated by something other than the government.)

Comments

On Justice

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Philosophers since before Plato have argued on what the nature of Justice is. Plato himself wrote a whole book, The Republic, on that question and it's implications. I don't have the time, space, or expertise to attack the question here. If the issue hasn't been settled in several thousand years by several thousand minds (if not more!), I'm not going to settle it here in fifteen minutes.

As I noted before, to be virtuous, one must choose. That is why a fascist Government, even based wholly in Objectively Right Morals, would be a detriment to Man and an affront to his Nature. You can not force virtue, simply because of how it is.

However, while I will grant you that there must be choice before there is justice, I don't believe choice is in anyway inherent to justice. There must be sunlight before there is corn, but sunlight is not itself inherent in corn. One may choose justly or unjustly, and so choice is not itself justice; you can't have an unjust justice.

Justice, I believe, has more to do with the consequences of an action that the origin of the action -- choice.

I intend to read Plato's Republic again soon, and think more on the issue, but as a mostly-uneducated first step, I think I would hold now that Justice is something akin to correctly rendering consequences to good and bad choices. I do think there's more to it than that, but I can't really say what.