The second topic is Rule of Law (click to zoom)

Slavery was legal; apartheid was legal. Does legality establish morality? What should be the nature
of laws in a free society?
Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may
be the rst step toward changing it.
-Gloria Steinem
The quote does shake our faith in what we presumed to be a constant in our lives, a
pole star which guided our actions towards the nal destination of righteousness. If
legality does not ensure morality, what does? To answer this question, we must rst
understand the origins of both morality and legality.
Morality has given countless philosophers sleepless nights and probably will continue
doing so. The problem with dening morality is its subjectivity. Morality varies from
person to person and even within a person from time to time and situation to
situation. So expecting an objective denition of morality is a doomed enterprise
from its inception. However, we could, with some deliberation, arrive upon the
major sources of one's morality.
Now, an individual's personality is the sum of his life experiences. However, the
experiences in themselves do not mean anything unless they are interpreted within
the individual's psyche. So we can conclude that morality is birthed by the loins of
the outside world and the world within. The sperm is handed down to us, in the form
of the admonishings of our parents, in the form of bedtime stories and in the form
of what we see in the society among countless others. The egg, we create within our
own heads, by interpreting the world around us. Over the course of our lifetime, they
create our morality.
Laws on the other hand are created by the State to ensure its smooth running.
Understand that the people are in now way stake holders in this, citizens are. And
the State creates laws to ensure merely its own survival anyway. This is the primary
reason why States that implement laws that do not please the masses soon crumble
down one way or the other, be it a rebellion in Dictatorships or another government
in Democracies. One might argue that the citizens make the state and not the other
way around, but citizens themselves have no existence until under a State. Citizens
without a State are simply people.
The second topic is Rule of Law (click to zoom)
Slavery was legal; apartheid was legal. Does legality establish morality? What should be the nature
of laws in a free society?
To support this rather alarming assertion, I would like to point out the relationship
between the opressed and the State over the course of history. Be it Apartheid in
South Africa or Slavery in USA, the laws permitted these gross violations of human
rights simply because the opressed had no power against the State. The blacks could
not vote and so could not over-throw the democratic government, the opressors were
the people who had power to do that by their right to vote and their economic means
and so the State aimed at appeasing them at the cost of the pain and suering of the
powerless. Recognize that these laws were repealed only when the Internation
community protested against it and threatened the survival of the State, as in the
case of South Africa.
Now coming to the discussion on the nature of Laws in a free society, I would like to
point out how it is an oxymoron. In a truly free society, there would be no laws. Any
decently long period of anarchy will ensure that thr citizens follow Confucious by a
code of honour and live in harmony. The people rule themselves and there is no
State to dictate what is legal and what is immoral.
Inspite of how lucrative this idea might sound, we can not deny this is an idealistic,
Utopian idea that can never be realized in the real world. In the real world, absolute
equality can never be achieved and there will always be people who would want to
have more of one thing or the other and with no State to protect the weaker citizens,
we would go back to a form of State where the powerful rule over the weak.
The most practical solution to this problem would be the division of powers, as seen
in a Federal system, like the USA, where a small geographical region (state here) is
allowed to frame its own laws. As a result Texas can still use capital punishment and
New York can legalize marijuana, representing the sensibilities of the citizens of the
state. Granted, this would be messy and unorganized, not to mention riddled with
red tape but it will serve two purposes. It would satisfy a community's need to
uphold its own morality and secondly, encouarge other states to adopt more humane
sensibilities and denitions of morality by setting an example.
The second topic is Rule of Law (click to zoom)
Slavery was legal; apartheid was legal. Does legality establish morality? What should be the nature
of laws in a free society?
As we had established earlier the State always tries to implement laws that the
people want to follow, or would not mind following. In a democracy, laws are
formed by a small number of elected representatives as we usually agree without
much debate that the general population doesn't have all the necessary skill or
resources to make an informed decision. However, this is where the fault lies. By
making this assumption, we allow the State to form its own laws unchecked and get
away by saying that these were formed by the elected representatives and so they
represent the voice of the masses. We need to recognize that the State and
Government are distinct identities, not synonymous.
Most tend to agree that a Democracy is the closest thing to a free society. There is
freedom of expression and guaranteed basic human rights. Ancient Rome is
considered a prime example of democracy till date and the simple reason is that the
ratio of citizens to representative was low. Compare that to present day where, in
India, 545 people represent nearly 1.2 billion people! The ratio as you can see is
clearly ridiculously high. In such a case, the State can get away formulating laws that
may not be moral or even in the best interest of the citizens themselves by arguing
that the laws were formed by elected representatives. Morality is a collective
conscious and laws do not necessarily represent what society deems to be moral.
Abortion laws in Ireland are an important recent example. And so, in order to create
laws that truly resonate with the moral values of the people, the people need to have
a much louder say in the framing and implementation of laws themselves, as was
seen in the recent referendum in Scotland.
In conclusion, in a society where legality is often interferes with morality, the best
way to eradicate the confusion is to make the gap between the two increasingly
smaller for every community. Until the laws are shackles on people that oend their
identities instead of an incentive to lead a morally uprighteous life, we can not claim
to have lled the chasm between morality and legality.