4 ms·

It's morally dubious to pick and choose what laws you follow. It doesn't matter if you think they are monopolies, that's not your judgment to make

Melatonic 4y ago
or we need new laws that update what a "monopoly" is
Super_Jambo 4y ago
Outsourcing your moral decisions to the legal system seems a lot more dubious to me. I don't think you can claim a coherent moral philosophy when the morality of an action depends on the legal jurisdiction you happen to be standing in.
pigscantfly 4y ago
Practicing civil disobedience against laws you believe unethical is not morally dubious, it's legally dubious. If anything, I'd consider it a display of moral fortitude to prize one's ethics above the potential consequences.
- Blammar 4y ago
  Exactly. And now it's time for Godwin, more or less: would you have followed the laws in Nazi Germany that made Jews less than human?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I mean I think copyright laws are dumb but this seems a like a bit of an over-dramatic comparison.
    - nkjnlknlk 4y ago
      Not really when the initial comment was that it is immoral to disobey _any_ law.
    - alvarezbjm-hn 4y ago
      Here in HN it is frowned upon, but I do sometimes like to exagerate a point to show perspective, first. Now that we can agree that law can not be followed 100% of time let's kill the comparison with genocide.
- mhb 4y ago
  There's a difference between civil disobedience and just getting away with something because you can.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I actually think piracy is more like speeding than civil disobedience for most people. The intent of most people who pirate things isn't to get caught and change the laws. The intent is to just ignore a law that is inconvenient. And it is sort of similar in the sense that, copyright law is over aggressive, honestly, many speed limits are set too low, violation is pretty wide-spread, and within reason it seems basically fine. It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits.
  - nrb 4y ago
    > It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits. It’s not remotely the same amount of harm, but mass violations of copyright seem to be able to end series and potentially production companies. Netflix and Hulu appear to be making go/no-go decisions about a series after the first few days/weeks of viewership data.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Unless there are people who literally never broke any law (and there aren't), picking and choosing laws is exactly what every human does.
ryanwaggoner 4y ago
It's pretty morally dubious to think you can outsource your own sense of ethics to whatever government you happen to live under. Some laws are immoral to break, others are not. It's 100% up to you to decide what your own moral and ethical framework is, including whether to outsource those decisions to a government, religion, culture, etc. That doesn't mean you get to decide on the consequences for breaking the rules that society, religion, etc, has imposed, but that's orthogonal to whether they fit your personal ethics.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Is it morally dubious to change citizenship to another country? That's literally choosing what laws you follow. What about religions? Their texts used to be laws, and we seem to believe in freedom to choose our beliefs. I think every citizen has the responsibility to choose to not follow unjust laws.
LocalH 4y ago
It’s morally dubious to practice blind adherence to the law for the sake of it being the law
- prometheuspk 4y ago
  You can object to the law. Petition your lawmaker to change the law. Be vocal about hating the law. But until its not the law, you have to follow it.
  - vcxy 4y ago
    I understand that you believe that, but you didn't say why. Is this a foundational belief or is there a deeper reason?
    - prometheuspk 4y ago
      It's a foundational belief of the social contract we've signed by agreeing to democracy
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        Democracy exists at all because people did not follow a blind adherence to law. At any rate, "the law" is a body of rules so large and complex that likely almost no one actually manages to get through a month without breaking it a couple times.
      - LocalH 4y ago
        I agreed to no such thing. The social contract I've been forced into seems to have a lot to do with enriching power and moneyed interests, at the expense of the individual. I want no part of that.
        themitigating 4y ago
        In a democracy you don't always get what you want
pessimizer 4y ago
> that's not your judgment to make It certainly is.
jonathanlb 4y ago
You assume that laws are moral to begin with. Remember, slavery was legal in the United States, and the Nazis made laws to deprive Jewish people of their rights. Conversely, not all immoral acts are illegal, e.g. cheating on a spouse.
soulofmischief 4y ago
You need to fundamentally rethink your philosophy if you think law and morals are the same. Rosa Parks would like to have a word with you.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Immanuel Kant would like to have a word with you.
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Ha, well Kant's universal moral law is really what I'm getting at here. It transcends the current, highly immoral, Western legal system which is often confused with universal law.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Yeah, Kant wasn't a fan of 'law' in the legal sense, but natural and moral law does respect property rights. I'm not really aware of a deontological argument against IP.
      - soulofmischief 4y ago
        I don't think philosophy has caught up with the dizzing media landscape we exit in today. It's such a multifaceted problem. Like others have mentioned, media is heavily shaping culture today, and is responsible for a large amount of cultural dissemination and public discourse. And today, to be a patron of the arts, you are looking at an increasingly large library of works which you need affordable access to. Knowledge shouldn't be pay-to-play. With companies like Disney eating the lion's share, we should worry about what kind of legal landscape a continued, coordinated lobbying effort could lead to. Remember the shock around the DMCA? We still have massive and systematic abuse issues because of it. A chilling effect is well-established. With the way Microsoft, Apple and other vendors are moving, locked down computing platforms are becoming a silent reality. Thanks to corporate astroturfing efforts, cloud fingerprinting is being normalized as the moral choice. What's next, screen fingerprinting to ensure our greedy, multi-headed subscription serpent overlord always gets its piece of the pie? Eventually, unchecked corporate lobbying in areas like IP will lead to an inscrutable system of governance hiding behind the opt-in curtain, which completely sidesteps the ever-evolving system of rights envisioned by our past democratic visionaries.
lwhi 4y ago
How on earth is not our right to engage our own brains and decide if we agree with any aspect of the world that hold sway on us????!! I completely disagree. To think otherwise is to be entirely passive and compliant in a world that quite possibly could be (edit: is) corrupt on many levels.
bee_rider 4y ago
I think you could make a strong argument for the "sign" on the morality of pirating being negative. But the "magnitude" is so low, I can't imagine caring when other people do it.
fancyfish 4y ago
It's well-accepted in psychology/sociology that moral development extends beyond simply following the law, i.e. using the law as a stand-in for moral principles. E.g. in Kohlberg's stages of moral development[1], there is a post-conventional stage where an individual develops a moral code independent of laws, and views laws as a social contract that can be disobeyed if it violates his/her morals. Laws are a good guideline, but are not an absolute moral framework. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
chalst 4y ago
Do you know all the laws that apply to you? If you don't, that's some selectivity right there.
dexterdog 4y ago
It's not? I don't know where you're from, but if you're from one of the places that claims that its people are free then it is the people's judgement to make. If I download and watch a show from irc/usenet/torrent/etc I am harming nobody. It is no different than going to watch it at a friend's house. If the content providers want to secure their content they have to go back to showing it only in controlled locations, but that costs them too much and restricts their audience.

Melatonic 4y ago

or we need new laws that update what a "monopoly" is

Super_Jambo 4y ago

Outsourcing your moral decisions to the legal system seems a lot more dubious to me. I don't think you can claim a coherent moral philosophy when the morality of an action depends on the legal jurisdiction you happen to be standing in.

pigscantfly 4y ago

Practicing civil disobedience against laws you believe unethical is not morally dubious, it's legally dubious. If anything, I'd consider it a display of moral fortitude to prize one's ethics above the potential consequences.

Blammar 4y ago
Exactly. And now it's time for Godwin, more or less: would you have followed the laws in Nazi Germany that made Jews less than human?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I mean I think copyright laws are dumb but this seems a like a bit of an over-dramatic comparison.
  - nkjnlknlk 4y ago
    Not really when the initial comment was that it is immoral to disobey _any_ law.
  - alvarezbjm-hn 4y ago
    Here in HN it is frowned upon, but I do sometimes like to exagerate a point to show perspective, first. Now that we can agree that law can not be followed 100% of time let's kill the comparison with genocide.
mhb 4y ago
There's a difference between civil disobedience and just getting away with something because you can.
bee_rider 4y ago
I actually think piracy is more like speeding than civil disobedience for most people. The intent of most people who pirate things isn't to get caught and change the laws. The intent is to just ignore a law that is inconvenient. And it is sort of similar in the sense that, copyright law is over aggressive, honestly, many speed limits are set too low, violation is pretty wide-spread, and within reason it seems basically fine. It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits.
- nrb 4y ago
  > It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits. It’s not remotely the same amount of harm, but mass violations of copyright seem to be able to end series and potentially production companies. Netflix and Hulu appear to be making go/no-go decisions about a series after the first few days/weeks of viewership data.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

Unless there are people who literally never broke any law (and there aren't), picking and choosing laws is exactly what every human does.

ryanwaggoner 4y ago

It's pretty morally dubious to think you can outsource your own sense of ethics to whatever government you happen to live under. Some laws are immoral to break, others are not. It's 100% up to you to decide what your own moral and ethical framework is, including whether to outsource those decisions to a government, religion, culture, etc. That doesn't mean you get to decide on the consequences for breaking the rules that society, religion, etc, has imposed, but that's orthogonal to whether they fit your personal ethics.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago

Is it morally dubious to change citizenship to another country? That's literally choosing what laws you follow. What about religions? Their texts used to be laws, and we seem to believe in freedom to choose our beliefs. I think every citizen has the responsibility to choose to not follow unjust laws.

LocalH 4y ago

It’s morally dubious to practice blind adherence to the law for the sake of it being the law

prometheuspk 4y ago
You can object to the law. Petition your lawmaker to change the law. Be vocal about hating the law. But until its not the law, you have to follow it.
- vcxy 4y ago
  I understand that you believe that, but you didn't say why. Is this a foundational belief or is there a deeper reason?
  - prometheuspk 4y ago
    It's a foundational belief of the social contract we've signed by agreeing to democracy
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      Democracy exists at all because people did not follow a blind adherence to law. At any rate, "the law" is a body of rules so large and complex that likely almost no one actually manages to get through a month without breaking it a couple times.
    - LocalH 4y ago
      I agreed to no such thing. The social contract I've been forced into seems to have a lot to do with enriching power and moneyed interests, at the expense of the individual. I want no part of that.
      - themitigating 4y ago
        In a democracy you don't always get what you want

pessimizer 4y ago

> that's not your judgment to make It certainly is.

jonathanlb 4y ago

You assume that laws are moral to begin with. Remember, slavery was legal in the United States, and the Nazis made laws to deprive Jewish people of their rights. Conversely, not all immoral acts are illegal, e.g. cheating on a spouse.

soulofmischief 4y ago

You need to fundamentally rethink your philosophy if you think law and morals are the same. Rosa Parks would like to have a word with you.

kube-system 4y ago
Immanuel Kant would like to have a word with you.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  Ha, well Kant's universal moral law is really what I'm getting at here. It transcends the current, highly immoral, Western legal system which is often confused with universal law.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Yeah, Kant wasn't a fan of 'law' in the legal sense, but natural and moral law does respect property rights. I'm not really aware of a deontological argument against IP.
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      I don't think philosophy has caught up with the dizzing media landscape we exit in today. It's such a multifaceted problem. Like others have mentioned, media is heavily shaping culture today, and is responsible for a large amount of cultural dissemination and public discourse. And today, to be a patron of the arts, you are looking at an increasingly large library of works which you need affordable access to. Knowledge shouldn't be pay-to-play. With companies like Disney eating the lion's share, we should worry about what kind of legal landscape a continued, coordinated lobbying effort could lead to. Remember the shock around the DMCA? We still have massive and systematic abuse issues because of it. A chilling effect is well-established. With the way Microsoft, Apple and other vendors are moving, locked down computing platforms are becoming a silent reality. Thanks to corporate astroturfing efforts, cloud fingerprinting is being normalized as the moral choice. What's next, screen fingerprinting to ensure our greedy, multi-headed subscription serpent overlord always gets its piece of the pie? Eventually, unchecked corporate lobbying in areas like IP will lead to an inscrutable system of governance hiding behind the opt-in curtain, which completely sidesteps the ever-evolving system of rights envisioned by our past democratic visionaries.

lwhi 4y ago

How on earth is not our right to engage our own brains and decide if we agree with any aspect of the world that hold sway on us????!! I completely disagree. To think otherwise is to be entirely passive and compliant in a world that quite possibly could be (edit: is) corrupt on many levels.

bee_rider 4y ago

I think you could make a strong argument for the "sign" on the morality of pirating being negative. But the "magnitude" is so low, I can't imagine caring when other people do it.

fancyfish 4y ago

It's well-accepted in psychology/sociology that moral development extends beyond simply following the law, i.e. using the law as a stand-in for moral principles. E.g. in Kohlberg's stages of moral development[1], there is a post-conventional stage where an individual develops a moral code independent of laws, and views laws as a social contract that can be disobeyed if it violates his/her morals. Laws are a good guideline, but are not an absolute moral framework. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...

chalst 4y ago

Do you know all the laws that apply to you? If you don't, that's some selectivity right there.

dexterdog 4y ago

It's not? I don't know where you're from, but if you're from one of the places that claims that its people are free then it is the people's judgement to make. If I download and watch a show from irc/usenet/torrent/etc I am harming nobody. It is no different than going to watch it at a friend's house. If the content providers want to secure their content they have to go back to showing it only in controlled locations, but that costs them too much and restricts their audience.