NationStates Jolt Archive

...what is the relevance of legality?

To keep order? Morality? Society? Civilization?

I was thinking more to the individual rather than society at large. I don't feel morality is always necessarily part of law.

Laws provide boundries for proper social behaviour. The consequence of disregarding them are criminal prosecution &/or civil litigation. That's pretty much it. If nobody enforced the laws, nobody would have any motive to obey them. Except for inner motives, such as the (questionable) ethics of doing what they are told to.

Well, I think morality is an important part of law. After all, what are morals?

Our American system of laws is based upon the Judeo-Christian view of morality. It is bad to kill people. Don't steal it is bad. Don't lie. We have laws that thusly define that such morality should be practiced. We don't have laws covering every area of morality, just the basic ones.

Omni, i would personally have said that American laws were based on Feudal concepts and Judeo-Christian morality was more used to try to enforce them.

Temme, i have to say i'd be a tad scared if you were taking your morals from the legal system

I was thinking more to the individual rather than society at large. I don't feel morality is always necessarily part of law.It's relevant because it's part of the structure society has built around itself to aid in its evolution.

Look at it this way--in order for people to be able to take time to create, they can't be constantly worried about self-protection, home protection, and food gathering. Society takes some of the worry out of that and allows us to concern ourselves with more esoteric matters. (That's a really simplified version, but it's a start.)

I can understand altruism as an element of social evolution but i would say law seems to be mostly about protection of property - aside from 'moral' laws that seem mostly to have been put in place to strengthen the church.

Our American system of laws is based upon the Judeo-Christian view of morality. It is bad to kill people. Don't steal it is bad. Don't lie. We have laws that thusly define that such morality should be practiced. We don't have laws covering every area of morality, just the basic ones.
I think refering these notions to Judeo-Christian values is pretty limiting and insulting to all the other cultures that have basicly the same laws.

More accurate to say they stem from when humans first gathered in large enough numbers that rules had to be laid out (Babylonian laws such as 'don't dig through your wall to get at your neighbors stuff')

I would characterize them as codifying the social contract, collect a set of standards and rules to allow us to co-exist as peacefully as possible. So when someone, say, digs through their wall to get at your stuff you can say, "Hey, that's not allowed," and everyone has agreed more or less on that standard.

Morals are something you do and have on your own.

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I think refering these notions to Judeo-Christian values is pretty limiting and insulting to all the other cultures that have basicly the same laws.[/quote]

I don't think he meant the laws were solely Judeo-Christian, only that they'd reached American law through Christianity, i would've thought.