Sex Offenders Get Life in Prison, Even after their sentence ends.

[MMMark]

Wed. 10/05/19 10:10 EDT
.post #94

[url=Sex Offenders Get Life in Prison, Even after their sentence ends. - #65 by bloomj31]

@bloomj31

[/url] Again, I will say this for what seems like the thousandth time. The law has nothing to do with right and wrong, it has to do with what is and is not allowed. Until you understand this, you will not understand how morality and law are totally separate. All that is required for a law to be a law is power. It doesn’t have to be morally justified or logically justified, it simply has to be enforced. If the government has the power to enforce this law, it can do it.

Whether or not you think punishing jaywalking is moral or logically justifiable is totally irrelevant. Whether you think this law is morally or logically justifiable is irrelevant. The only relevant question is: does the government have the power to enforce this law? I think they do.

[url=Sex Offenders Get Life in Prison, Even after their sentence ends. - #67 by bloomj31]

@bloomj31

[/url]This is not might makes right. This is might makes possible. This is might precedes questions of right or wrong.

Without might, law is not possible. Might is a precondition for law. Without might, there can be no law.

Just because people think that the law has something to with right and wrong doesn’t mean it does. People can think any law is either morally just or morally unjust, but without the power to enforce the law, it doesn’t matter what they think it is, it’s not a law. And lawmen can think their acts are morally justified, but that’s irrelevant. If they didn’t have the might to enforce the law, it wouldn’t matter what their values were.

For instance, you could pass a law yourself right now but if you lack the might to uphold it, it won’t be a law. Conversely, if our government passes a law and can enforce it, it’s a law whether you think it’s right or wrong.

People can certainly pass laws that are consistent with their values, but the law itself has nothing to do with right and wrong. It has to do with might. Might cannot make things right or wrong, it can simply make them so. People can inject their own set of moral values into any set of laws and declare them either just or unjust but the actual mechanism of law has nothing to do with right and wrong.

We must separate the values inserted into laws by people from the actual functional mechanism behind law, which is the use of force to uphold rules. We must also separate ourselves from the idea that laws require moral and/or logical justification. They do not. Laws simply require that someone has the power to enforce them.

It seems to me that morality, or at least, the popular perception of moral justification, must come first; this is why the state supplements its gun power with propaganda, including the delusion that “democracy=freedom.” When the propaganda fails, so does the state’s ability to enforce the law. As easy examples, drug and alcohol prohibition laws have failed, as have copyright and prostitution laws. The state certainly has the guns and the prisons, but there has been and is mass disobedience (or at least, non-compliance), because the laws are popularly perceived to be immoral.