Morality and Law

Legislative law is nothing unless it is based on true law.

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(EUGENE, Ore.) - In life and in business compliance with the law is an important part of one's decision making process. The relationship between law, morality, and individual action essentially defines how society functions. Law and morality are not the same.

If moral and legislative laws are two different things, then the possibility arises that they can be in conflict. If the moral and the legislative law come into conflict, then you are faced with a choice of which to follow.

Understanding the distinction between moral and legislative laws is crucial for making wise decisions when these two types of law come into conflict.

Morality

Morality, and moral law, supersede and predate legislative law. It can easily be deduced that there must have been some form of morality before there were governments and written laws. Legislative laws come and go on a regular basis. Morality has a much greater permanence. Aggression, theft, lying, and cheating are immoral. The fact that in some cases they may be illegal has no bearing on their morality.

Moral law is also different than mere social norms and taboos. It is conceivable to have societies where the norm is to lie, steal, and kill. If morality were nothing more than what is socially acceptable, then in such a society, lying, killing, and stealing would become moral.

Moral law is unique, because unlike either legislative law or social norms, it is self enforcing. Moral law does not require judges, juries, and executioners, and it does not depend on social acceptance or approbation.

Moral law is truly “law” in the sense that it cannot be broken. The existence and the meaning of the word law itself depends on the concept of something inviolable. Legislative law and social custom are lesser forms of something more profound. Whereas legislation can change, a true law never changes, and is never subject to debate or revocation.

The Moral Law

One formulation of moral law is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

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This moral maxim is espoused in many religions, and has been adopted by many modern philosophers. While it is expressed as a command, it is meant simply to be a statement of truth. This moral truth is based on a belief that, very literally, what you do to others you also do to yourself. The concept of “breaking” this law never arises, because there is no deviation from it.

According to this system of morality, right and wrong are not based on actions, but on understanding. Right and wrong only exist on an ideological basis, and the only “right” that exists is understanding the truth. The only wrong that exists is a lack of understanding. According to this belief system, truth is defined as understanding the nature of existence.

Even though morality is not attached to action, actions can be judged as right or wrong on the basis of whether or not they are taken in accordance with moral truth. The absence of altruism, empathy, and humility in one's actions is “wrong,” not because the actions are wrong, but because they demonstrate a failure to act in accordance with moral truth. Actions that are intended to cause pain, suffering, and death to others demonstrate a pronounced lack of understanding, taken to a self-destructive extreme.

This is but one example of a system of morality. It is not my intent to demonstrate its correctness, only to demonstrate its structure. This system of morality is based on a fundamental and inviolable law, which arises from a set of beliefs about the nature of existence. This is obviously something entirely different than people getting together and haggling out temporary agreements about how to conduct social business, which is what legislative law is.

The Flying People

There is a story that once upon a time there was a tribe of natives in the Southwest. In this tribe, a shaman arose who taught people that they could fly. He told the people that once they had reached adulthood they were too old and too set in their ways to learn to fly. Flying could only be taught to children.

On the advice of the shaman, and with the consent of the whole tribe, on every child's twelfth birthday there was a great festival held. Elaborate feasts were prepared, ritual dances were performed, and the spoken rights of the flying people were recited by their elders.

At the climax of each festival, the whole tribe would travel to a great canyon in their land. There they would join in a half-circle, and with beating of drums, and dancing, and singing, they would push the child of honor off the cliff. After this, they would return to their village. Their celebrations of having taught this new child to fly would continue for many days.

As the decades passed, the flying people grew old. They could no longer bear children and all their children had flown away. The flying people became bitter and resentful toward their children. “How could they fly away, and never return?” they asked. “Did we not give them this magical gift of flight? What kind of selfish children would repay such a gift with such ingratitude?”

The anger of the flying people eventually turned to the shaman, who had taught them how to teach their children to fly. They beat him to death and ate his body. The flying people were too old and weak to hunt now, and this was the first meat they had had in years.

Slowly, the weakest of the flying people died of hunger and thirst. They were left to moan in agony by the stronger among them who could still get water, and collect a bit of food. When they died, there bodies were eaten by the rest. This is how the flying people vanished from the face of the earth.

Natural Law

The story of the flying people is a story about natural law. People cannot fly, and throwing them off of cliffs will not teach them to fly. Natural law, like moral law, is inviolable. It does not depend on enforcement, and is not alterable by any social convention. If one takes a step back, it can be observed that if both natural law and moral law are inviolable, then they must be perfectly consistent with each other, which is another way of saying that they are two different words for the same thing.

Legislative Law

Moral law and natural law are the foundations for legislative law.

Legislative law cannot move beyond the boundaries of moral or natural law, because these are true laws. Legislative law is the work of humans who are bound by moral and natural law. No amount of legislation will ever allow humans to violate as a group the laws that bind them as individuals.

If you look to the Declaration of Independence, you will read that our system of legislative law is based on “the Laws of Nature and Nature's God.” The legislative law is further based on the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”

U.S. legislative law is explicitly founded on natural law, and explicitly founded on moral law. It is explicitly stated that natural and moral law are superior to legislative law. The signers of the Declaration are overturning existing legislative law based on the authority of moral and natural law. In this country, the legislative law itself explicitly acknowledges its inferiority to moral and natural law.

This is actually not a departure from European custom in any way, only a shift in the “chain of command” so to speak. In Europe the church claimed to be the ultimate arbiter of moral law, and gave sanction to monarchs on this basis. The founders of the United States essentially gave the church the finger, and said that they could interpret moral law for themselves, and claim their own authority on the basis of it. The consequences of that are manifold, but what is crucial is that there is a long and unbroken line of governments that consider themselves to be accountable to some authority greater than themselves.

Modern governments in the United States largely deny their accountability to any higher authority. In the place of moral or natural law, governments have turned to the cynical justification of “democracy” as the grant of their authority. As a result, the law has become self-verifying and totalitarian. This change in the basis of authority for legislative law has gone hand-in-hand with the widespread adoption of “utilitarian” morality as a basis for decision making.

Democracy as a basis for Law

Democracy is simply a mechanism for making social decisions. It is a form of social compact where people agree that they will take actions within certain predetermined bounds based upon the outcomes of group votes. Democracy, which is created by legislative law, cannot become the basis for asserting the validity of legislative law. This is a circular argument, whereby the law is made valid by its own existence.

On a more practical basis, it is obvious that legislated law cannot overcome natural law, regardless of whether or not it is enacted by democratic means. If enough people vote for it to rain, will it rain? If enough people vote that there should be no more hurricanes, will we never again see something like Katrina? Should we all begin to rally and petition for an end to earthquakes?

Belief in moral law is up to you. However, if you deny moral law, then you are abandoning the only basis on which government has ever been founded. The result is that you must fall back on arguing that the only basis for government is on force. If you make this argument, then you must accept the consequence that as soon as a more powerful force comes along you and your government will be destroyed or enslaved by it.

Democracy without morality is at best the force of the majority against the minority. Totalitarian systems of government, which deny all authority other than their own laws, can only result in government becoming an excuse for every kind of behavior that violates moral and natural laws. Totalitarian government founded on the pretext of democracy giving legitimacy to the law is no different than totalitarian government founded on any other pretext.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarian ethics is a system of morality that declares the only goal of life to be “happiness” or “pleasure” or some other poorly defined “good stuff.” Utilitarianism seeks to avoid the appearance selfish individualism, so it claims that the goal of life must be the achievement of this “good stuff” for the greatest number of people.

Two points:

1) Utilitarian thinking is dominant in government, economic, business, legal, and medical decision making.

2) Utilitarianism is a joke, or more specifically, a debating trick.

Utilitarianism is structurally a system where you can prove any action to be right or wrong in any circumstances, and you can prove the same action to be both right and wrong in all circumstances.

Because utilitarianism relies on making up hypothetical stories about assumed chains of cause and effect that result in hypothetical aggregate outcomes of unquantifiable and indefinable “good stuff,” the best utilitarian argument is nothing more than an eloquent fiction. Utilitarianism is a moral system designed by bullshit artists as a way to justify anything they want to.

Utilitarianism is, like democracy as a basis for law, a totalitarian system that denies all higher authority, and replaces it with self-verification. Utilitarianism is technically useful in administering a totalitarian government because it provides moral justifications for any and all government actions.

Utilitarianism and the Law

The influence of utilitarianism can seen very evidently in the history of the laws of this country. The law started out based on moral and natural law. The law has more recently shifted to using utilitarian justifications to provide a moral basis for legal decisions.

The focus of the shift from moral law to utilitarianism is law as it applies to corporations, and to a certain extent, criminal law.

Corporations of the size and type that are prevalent in this country could not profit if they were held to the same laws as individuals. Industrial corporations kill hundreds of thousands (conservatively) of people intentionally every year. Under the laws that apply to individuals, the Fortune 500 would be decimated by murder prosecutions.

What is crucial to point out is that corporations ARE their owners. When you talk about a corporation killing someone, you are talking about the person who owns that corporation killing someone. In addition, every person in the hierarchy from the owner on down who takes part in the decision making process that results in someone being killed is a conspirator and accessory to murder.

That is, if you judge individuals acting through corporations according to the criminal law as it applies to individuals. The criminal law is based on moral law. Legislation against murder on a moral basis goes back for thousands of years of recorded history. It is safe to say that it is well established.

The law has been rewritten, almost entirely in this century, to provide a very different basis for judging the actions of individuals who act through corporations. The “moral basis” of this legal innovation has been utilitarianism, which is basically a way of saying that it has no basis.

Under the law as it applies to corporations, intentional actions that result in the deaths of individuals are weighed against the hypothetical “greater good” to society of corporations engaging in those actions. This utilitarian calculus only comes into play if someone sues a corporation for wrongful death.

If a judge decides that the corporation was acting for the greater good, then the corporation does not even have to pay compensation to the family of the dead when they murder someone. The prospect of charging corporations, their owners, and executives under the criminal law, which most certainly does apply to them, is not even considered in the legal community.

Totalitarian Democracy

Democracy as a basis for law provides a theory that can be used to justify any law on the basis of its origins in the democratic system. Utilitarianism provides a rationale for how laws should be made in this totalitarian democratic system.

Totalitarian systems are problematic because they lack any basis for verification. They often result in insane conclusions. If society is governed according to totalitarian ideology you will have an insane government. You will have insane people, because in order for them to participate in society, they must accept its insane ideology.

The United States was not founded on democracy. It was founded on natural and moral law. Regardless of the legislative course that has been taken, natural and moral law are still supreme.

Laws that violate basic moral principals, and laws that are contrary to the natural order, are invalid. The only violation of the laws of nature is death. A law that commands something contrary to the natural order is null on issue, and anyone who follows it is only killing themselves.

If there is a moral law, and you violate it in order to satisfy a legislative law, then you are still responsible for the moral repercussions of that act. Legislation based on democracy, utilitarianism, or any other irrational ideology cannot provide immunity from an inviolable law.

Understanding natural and moral laws is consequently of utmost importance to living life. In collective action, whether in business, government, or anywhere else, building upon collective recognition of moral principals is essential. Understanding of the natural order, and harmony with the natural order, is essential to any productive endeavor.

Understanding these laws is essential because you will suffer the consequences of a lack of understanding yourself. It does not matter whether or not what you are doing is “legal” or that you believe it to be “right.”

True law is inviolable, and not subject to debate, or immunity. It needs no enforcement mechanism. The founders of this country recognized this to be true, and it is recognized by every major religion.

Truth is the only basis upon which a functioning society can place its government. Democracy was imagined as a way for imperfect people with an incomplete understanding of the truth to come to agreement. It was never imagined that people would deny the existence of truth, and declare that by means of democracy they would make true whatever they chose to believe.

This belief does not make the people who espouse it powerful. It makes them fools. Their foolishness depends on making greater fools of the rest of society. The legislative law is one tool by which the fools fool the more foolish. The legislative law is nothing unless it is based on true law. Recognizing this is the path to becoming a little less fooled.

Ersun describes his writing as being "in the language of the boardroom from the perspective of the shop floor." He adds that "he has no education in journalism other than reading Hunter S. Thompson." But along with life comes the real experience that indeed creates quality writers. Right now, every detail that can help the general public get ahead in life financially, is of paramount importance.

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