Codified morality

There would appear to be a school of thought that law is codified morality, a school of thought to which I do not subscribe. Having been writing on morality lately, this came up, and I realized an obvious link that had eluded me in the past.

One of the things that I do early on with novices is, not surprisingly, discuss morality. In debate, when the subject arises, we need a method of measuring right and wrong that is somehow objective, and although we may never light on the perfectly objective measurement, we can reasonably look at consequential and deontological approaches to right and wrong as decent enough working models. There are those who, because of the inherent imprecision of our models, disregard the possibility of any moral action, but this presumes that morality is an absolute, and that we can’t choose among different actions as more moral or less moral, a practical necessity in real life. This is the same as saying, since I can’t be good, there’s no point in getting any better: it is at the very least illogical, because the one does not follow from the other. And, well, maybe there is an ultimate, categorical good. As Fats Waller might put it, one never knows, do one?

In introducing those novices to this subject, the first thing I ask them is how to tell the difference between right and wrong. Since most of us act on moral models received from authority, first parents and then religion, one would expect an answer along these lines, but that is seldom forthcoming. No one ever tells me that the Bible (or the Koran or the Gita) is their source of right and wrong, or their spiritual adviser, and certainly not their parents. The almost inevitable answer is that, somehow or other, the majority of people determining that something is right or wrong is the way that we can tell the difference. That is, we somehow get to vote on it.

If you stare at them long enough with they point this out, they eventually come to realize the inadequacy of such a system. We go on from there to the more satisfying and traditional models.

Still, when you come to think about it, in a democracy law is the will of the people writ in statute. Law is the list of things we can’t do and the things that we must do, and one way or another laws exist because of the will of the majority (even if you follow the torturous path of representative democracy in the US). If you look at that and squint just the right way, it might be hard to differentiate that democratic legislative provenance from the idea of law as morality. My problem with this should be clear: I don’t think we get to vote on what’s right and what’s wrong, and that that is how we tell the difference between the two. That would presume that the majority must always be correct in distinguishing right from wrong, or that right and wrong actually are a numbers game, which seems to me the same as saying that since the Yankees have more fans than the Mets, the Yanks are therefore a better team. A better team might warrant more fans, but more fans don’t warrant a better team. Something being morally correct might warrant its codification into law, but codification of something into law does not warrant its moral correctness. I’m pretty sure that most of your conscientious objectors would agree with this line of thinking.

I only point this out because, hey, it’s summer, and what else is going on? After you scour the daily published lists of which schmegeggies at WTF are studying ill-conceived theory part three and who’s studying stultification in the aff, what else is left to fill the empty hours?