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Try having "morals put into law" and what you end up with is Sharia law. In democracy you should avoid doing that, because people typically do not agree on what
by mamon 6y ago
Try having "morals put into law" and what you end up with is Sharia law. In democracy you should avoid doing that, because people typically do not agree on what's moral.
Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.
- skissane 6y ago> Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims. > but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.u...