On morality and the law
Posted by admin on June 7th, 2011 filed in General# ivan Jun 30th, 2006 at 4:28 am
KTM:
It’s interesting you draw the link between morality and the law.
Whilst i agree with everything you say about the ’spirit of the law’. Could i once again provide pts to ponder.
Hart in commenting on the issue “what is law”, observed and remarked that law and morality are separate, and when it coincided (ie. a lawful choice would be the moral choice), it was purely accidental. The reason he said so, was that by observing ‘rules’ and deciding which ‘rules’ were ‘laws’, it would be too stringent a test, and many laws we have today would not be ‘laws’ by that definition.
Also, another pt of discussion might be the issue of justice. If i posited that law and justice were separate - in the sense that justice could be determined by natural intuition (and hence perhaps by natural law). However many laws we have these days are not natural law derived, and thus laws do not necessarily mean justice is done. Furthermore, couldn’t justice be spilt into 2 stages, ie. formulation and arbitration. Just because a law is not just does not mean the application of the law is not just.
Sorry if i seem to be picking at fine hairs, ignoring the forest for the trees. But often when looking at the forest, we fail to see the difficulties of navigating the trees. It’s all in the interest of providing a balance evaluation.
# 17 Kway Teow Man Jun 30th, 2006 at 11:02 am
Dear Ivan,
I’m sorry if I was unclear in my post above. Law and morality are indeed separate entities. When I say that law and morality cannot be separated, what I mean to say is that morality will somehow impact the APPLICATION of the law.
Law much like economics is really a reasoning tool. It is naive to think that a person who knows his law well, ‘cos he gets lots of As in law school and ends up with 1st Class Honours, will necessarily be a good judge.
Of course, a person who doesn’t know his law is unlikely to be a good judge. Nevertheless, while good law is a pre-requisite, a good dose of common sense (commonly called wisdom) is also required.
An interesting example is the recent McCrea case. Since McCrea was charged with only culpable homicide (maximum sentence of 10 years), there was a possibility that the outcome of the case would have completely messed up the criminal justice system, since his accomplish got 12(!) years. The judge however applied his law and managed to resolve a somewhat messy situation (arising from Singapore’s undertaking NOT to hang the fella).
Basically, how do you ensure that justice is done when the fella has “committed murder” and yet you cannot charge him for murder ‘cos you cannot hang him? :-P The judgement is not out, but I’m personally happy with the verdict. This is my reasoning: for murder, you get death (only one death sentence ‘cos you cannot die twice). Life is twenty years. There’s no reason why we should commute McCrea’s death sentence to a life sentence for nothing, so we levy a 20% tax. 20 x 1.2 = 24 years. Seems like a reasonably “just” result given the constraints to me. After you figure out that 24 years is good, you then use your law to justify your answer. :-P