Do you Obey the Law?

Tony

Penultimate Amazing
Tony
Joined
Mar 5, 2003
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Does the legality of something have any bearing on whether or not you choose engage in whatever that something may be? For example, would the legality of marijuana keep you from smoking or selling it? I can honestly say that I've never thought, "hey this is illegal, I shouldn't be doing this". I think it's an interesting philosophical and political question. Should we expect people to obey the law simply because it is the law? Or should we expect the state to justify each law in relation to personal freedom, and individual, civil and human rights?
 
There's a third option: refraining from an illegal activity solely for fear of the consequences of getting caught. It's irrelevant whether an activity is morally acceptable to you if you fear being punished for doing it.
 
I go with the punishment thing. For example I speed alot. But only when I think there's no cops around (duh'). I smoke a joint maybe, once a year (annual canoeing trip) and dont feel any remorse. If it was legal Im sure Id smoke more.
 
TragicMonkey said:
There's a third option: refraining from an illegal activity solely for fear of the consequences of getting caught. It's irrelevant whether an activity is morally acceptable to you if you fear being punished for doing it.
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True, but I left that one out because it isn't the law, per se, that is keeping you from doing the illegal activity, but the so called "punishment" for breaking it.
 
Tony said:
True, but I left that one out because it isn't the law, per se, that is keeping you from doing the illegal activity, but the so called "punishment" for breaking it.
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In that case, if we take fear of getting caught out of the equation, then I can say that the law is utterly irrelevant to my activities. I would do whatever I felt like, the only restraint being my own personal ethics. Fortunately for everyone else, I am actually quite a respectable person. Now that most kinds of, uh, innovative lovemaking have either been decriminalized or the laws not enforced, there's nothing I can think of that's currently illegal that I really want to do.

Although I would love to assault certain real estate developers with a bucket full of monkey poop. The beach is not a good place for a light-blocking skyscraper, and nothing says "I disapprove" like pounds and pounds of monkey feces flung into the unsuspecting face.
 
Is this like questioning someones religious beliefs? Are you a good catholic because you want to be a good person, or is it cause you fear going to hell.
 
Tmy said:
Is this like questioning someones religious beliefs? Are you a good catholic because you want to be a good person, or is it cause you fear going to hell.
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False dilemma. You're a good Catholic if you contribute to the parish sex abuse legal defense fund.

Sorry, bad monkey. But my very religious grandmother was infuriated to discover that the church steeple fund she'd contributed to for forty years was used to defray defense counsel expenses in a pedophiliac rape trial. They still owe the lawyers, and that church is never going to get a steeple.
 
I have a personal policy against obeying stupid laws.

That doesn't mean I go out of my way to disobey them, but I'm not going to pay extraordinary attention to obeying laws that make no sense. For example, I don't smoke weed, but if I did, I certainly wouldn't stay awake at night worrying about it and I'm not going to worry about my friends who enjoy a good joint now and then.

Speed limits--how many people honestly follow them to the letter? We all push it--5 mph over, 10 mph over, sometimes more if a radar detector's handy.

The embargo of Cuba--this is a royally stupid law. Even if you assume its goals are noble (I certainly don't), it hasn't come remotely close to accomplishing what it's supposed to. If the opportunity arose for me to visit Cuba again (I was there, legally, for a period in 1995), I wouldn't think twice about it.

I think there's a conceptual difference between outright civil disobedience--a mass disobeying of a law to make a statement--and not bothering to obey a law because it's silly or irritating. If you take the two examples above, speed limits are mostly disobeyed because it's convenient. There isn't a massive "repeal the speed limit" movement. Every once in a while, people do publicly go to Cuba as a violation of the embargo in order to defy a stupid, oppressive US policy.
 
I don't know a single person who obeys 100% the law. In every country there are some laws so obviously stupid that nobody bothers to even change them (in Greece for example, someone discovered a few years ago that a kid has to have a "license" in order to ride a bicycle - a law from early 19th century). I also can't imagine a person who hasn't infringed copyright laws, one way or the other. Now, where exactly is the thin line between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" violations... this is another subject.
 
There are certainly cases where the morality of an act is affected by its legality. For instance, the government has decided that people should drive on the right side of the road. Driving on the left side of the road in the US is therefore dangerous and therefore immoral. But there's nothing inherently immoral about it; in the UK, it would immoral to drive on the right side of the road.

TragicMonkey said:
The beach is not a good place for a light-blocking skyscraper, and nothing says "I disapprove" like pounds and pounds of monkey feces flung into the unsuspecting face.
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If this were legal, how long would it remain unsuspected?
 
Art Vandelay said:
If this were legal, how long would it remain unsuspected?
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It's not a question of legality, or of being caught. It's a question of where can I get lots of monkey poop? There are rather a lot of developers around here, and even more skyscraper hotels on the beach.

I think it would catch on, and more residents would feel the urge to "say it with flowers", only they wouldn't be using flowers.
 
Aside from murdering people, I don't break laws because I'm afraid I will get caught.
 
I very, very rarely break the law - offhand I can't remember any time in my adult life I have broken it. Certainly I've never done any illegal drug, simply because they are illegal.
 
I smoked pot when I was younger, I speed when I'm on the highway, I don't ware a seatbelt all the time, I pay all my taxes NOBODY wants to screw with IRS!. I don't try to rationalize these activities. I do them because I want to. I will answer to the authorities if I get caught and will blame no one but myself.
 
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