4 ms·

Your conclusion does not hold: making something retroactively legal is vastly different than making something retroactively illegal. The first happens all the

Your conclusion does not hold: making something retroactively legal is vastly different than making something retroactively illegal. The first happens all the time and is the entire point of a full pardon. In the US the latter is unconstitutional and the former explicitly constitutional. Besides which, your approach assumes the law that allows for chemical castration because he was gay was a legitimate application of state power. I maintain that it was not.

burgerbrain 15y ago
Exactly. The law in any sufficiently just system is always asymmetric with respect to guilt and innocence, in innocence's favour. Retroactive action should be no difference.
arctangent 15y ago
> ... making something retroactively legal is vastly different than making something retroactively illegal. I can see the difference. But the similarity is (as I pointed out) that accepting either of them makes the case for the other stronger by removing a barrier - that barrier being the presumption that the law is fixed at a particular point in time. > The first happens all the time and is the entire point of a full pardon. I can't think of any examples of illegal acts being made retroactively legal (and certainly not "all the time"). Could you cite some examples for my benefit? I think you're wrong about what a pardon is. A pardon is a way of publicly acknowledging that a (guilty) individual has fully repaid their debt to society. It's used explicitly to release people who have undoubtedly broken the law from the consequent obligations (i.e. prison/gallows) and is done at the behest of monarchs or their governments. Pardons are a very thorny issue in general because they do not respect the notion that all individuals should be equal under the law. It would be unfair for a convicted murderer to escape the noose on the whim of a King (for example) while another murderer is left to hang. Similarly, pardoning Turing would not be fair on all the others who suffered under the same laws. > your approach assumes the law that allows for chemical castration because he was gay was a legitimate application of state power. I don't understand where you get that from.

burgerbrain 15y ago

Exactly. The law in any sufficiently just system is always asymmetric with respect to guilt and innocence, in innocence's favour. Retroactive action should be no difference.

arctangent 15y ago

> ... making something retroactively legal is vastly different than making something retroactively illegal. I can see the difference. But the similarity is (as I pointed out) that accepting either of them makes the case for the other stronger by removing a barrier - that barrier being the presumption that the law is fixed at a particular point in time. > The first happens all the time and is the entire point of a full pardon. I can't think of any examples of illegal acts being made retroactively legal (and certainly not "all the time"). Could you cite some examples for my benefit? I think you're wrong about what a pardon is. A pardon is a way of publicly acknowledging that a (guilty) individual has fully repaid their debt to society. It's used explicitly to release people who have undoubtedly broken the law from the consequent obligations (i.e. prison/gallows) and is done at the behest of monarchs or their governments. Pardons are a very thorny issue in general because they do not respect the notion that all individuals should be equal under the law. It would be unfair for a convicted murderer to escape the noose on the whim of a King (for example) while another murderer is left to hang. Similarly, pardoning Turing would not be fair on all the others who suffered under the same laws. > your approach assumes the law that allows for chemical castration because he was gay was a legitimate application of state power. I don't understand where you get that from.