Law, Morality, and Relgion

It is frequently asserted that laws are moral and that religion has a hand in that. Sometimes this gets mixed up in the concept that without religion there is no morality. This idea is understandable, no religion will last that creates social conditions that end in disorder and chaos, which means that any lasting religion will set out codes of behavior that result in some sort of social comity.

Governments that aren't a religion have a similar goal, social comity and lack of disorder and chaos. Having common goals often results in similar restrictions and requirements. A religion that teaches that murder is against the teachings and rules of the deity is certainly increasing social comity and decreasing disorder and chaos and it calls that stricture morality (god-given morality). A government concerned with social comity and lack of disorder and chaos will also place restrictions on murder, it requires no deity to do so, nor even morality - it is simple self-interest and survival for it to do so.

Governments have a couple tools at hand to achieve the ends of order and comity, punishment and reward, generally monetary or physical. Because a government deals with the temporal and worldly it really can't count on a deity to take immediate care of those rewards and punishments. It will deal with malefactors in a temporal manner, taking their money, their freedom, or their lives and do so with force. The tools the government has are abjectly amoral, it will force you rather than appeal to your "better nature." Once a law is established you are not asked about it, you are told and that telling is backed up by force. Compelling is not about morality, it is not an appeal to morality, it is not backed by morality, it is plainly unconcerned with the entire concept.

You can certainly build a government around damn near any document the populace will bear, holy books or other concepts of order and comity but once that is done the whole affair becomes at best amoral. It is popular to call Nazi Germany evil and immoral and the behavior of individuals involved does offend most of us at a moral level. That government wasn't destroyed because it was amoral or immoral, it was destroyed because it failed the basic goals of order and comity. It failed them internally and more importantly, internationally. The wholesale slaughter of a citizenry is not order, it is force at ferocious levels and it has nothing to do with comity.

There certainly is a moral component to the idea of slavery, it offends a basic empathy. As a feature of government it fails on another level, it certainly has nothing to do with comity for the subjected group and fails as order in the face of the resistance of that group to subjugation and the need for extreme force to maintain it. It is easy to forget that order requires very broad agreement or extreme force and extreme force is in itself disorder if applied at all broadly. It is certainly extreme force when a police officer shoots an armed robber, but that level of force is applied individually and rarely.

Drug laws are frequently put forward as a moral issue dealt with by law. It is pretty easy to track the success of those laws. Drugs certainly do have effects on comity and order, getting run over by a truck driven by an incapacitated driver is real in terms of order as are deaths from overdoses or psychological consequences. These outcomes are entirely separate from the morality of drug usage and because drugs are treated differently than the issue demands for comity and order the laws fail. Tremendous amounts of enforcement result in huge incarceration figures and huge profits for avoiding the laws leading to disorder and enmity afflicting entire communities.

It is entirely reasonable to have a moral code that aligns with laws and to wish to conduct a life in accordance with or in excess of law, it another thing to think that those laws are moral or religious. Through out history there have been governments that operated under cover of morality or religion, enforcing dogma as law. In the shorter term when their populations are homogenous they tend to be pretty efficient at keeping themselves in power. Over time they become increasingly forceful with their populations which fails the goals of comity and order and finally results in failure. The time scales of failure have accelerated through out history progressing through millenia to centuries to decades. Minus the intervention of outside interests, Iran should prove an interesting test case.

Hell, the US may prove interesting in that regard.

Self-interest And Morality

I've avoided this for a long time. This started as a discussion of whether laws were moral. I asserted that they were not and the rejoinder was that all laws flowed out of morality. I insisted that the use of force left that claim out and that what they are is a social contract to allow us to co-exist. To use an extreme example, murder isn't illegal because it is immoral, if that were the case the State wouldn't do it, soldiers wouldn't, there'd be no exceptions. It is illegal because it's dangerous and we can't live together if it isn't illegal. It is a matter of logic. I was challenged to show that a system of morality involved logic. If you're not interested this would be a good time to leave because this isn't simple, it isn't a matter of appealing to a book of regulations.

I am alive and I exist in an inter-dependent system and I want to do well.
The health of that system directly affects my well being.
I am the actor, I am the motivator, I am ultimately responsible.
It is in my self-interest to maintain that system.
My actions have outcomes that bear on my well being.

Now let's hold the train for a moment. Self-interest is not the same thing as selfishness and greed. Religions last because they hold within them the elements of a successful social contract. (it just doesn't matter if it is the word of god or not) If you take their tenets apart with that in mind you can find internal logic without appealing to a god as an authority. There are variants on the theme, but saving your soul is the object, this is the ultimate in self-interest and refers explicitly to long term thinking. Where I'm going isn't nearly as heretical as it might seem.

Self-interest is the basis of this moral construct.

So, can't you just do as you please? Well certainly, but there will be outcomes that will bear on you. Can't I just steal or whatever? Doing so will have bad effects on your interdependent system and victims will not like it or you and may most likely harm you. But what if I can get away with it? It isn't likely, and it sure isn't a certainty, not to mention that you have harmed the system you depend on. Why shouldn't I just take every bit I can get and screw you - greed? The system will break down if you do, people will be put into the position of taking it away to survive.

Do I want to be loved? It is a very valuable survival tool to have. If I want that then I'd best run my show in a manner that is lovable. If I give I improve my surroundings. The better everyone in the system does the better my long term business/economic interests are served. If you don't have you cannot trade with me, the more you have the more we can do of that. If you do not trust me you will not engage with me. Having sub-units of the system (friends/family) is important to mental health and social stability, if I want that then I'd best take care of it. If self-interest is the driver then why would I advocate for something like gay marriage as a hetero-sexual? The system doesn't work well with a second class citizenship, important details are thrown out of whack by it creating a dysfunctional system that I have to live in.

Does this create a situation of making myself god or a religion of the system? No. I cannot be a god if I am a piece of a system and because the system must work to the advantage of its inhabitants or screw me up it cannot be a religion with blind obedience. I do not use system to mean a collection of rules, I use it to describe the interacting collisions of humans in close proximity. We will lay out a system of rules regarding behavior because we will not all treat the collisions with respect that our self-interest requires. We will not all look at actions from regard to long term outcomes. These rules will work if they are laid out with the intent of producing outcomes based on the logic of remaining in close proximity and regularly colliding. If we approach these rules with logic we have some hope of achieving some consensus of what they should be.

If we appeal to the non-logic of things like religious faith we will not get past the varieties of faith to agreement. Without appealing to religion or "conventional" morality there would still be an argument to be solved regarding abortion. Without the rigor of religion/morality there is a measuring process that can be used to sort out the balance regarding reproduction. There are outcomes of varying social success on both sides. It does not require a god to recognize that child pornography uses someone who cannot understand or consent in a manner which damages that resource which the system depends on for its continuation. I am harmed when my neighbor is harmed because we must exist together, in some way I will have to account for his harm. It does me no good to cripple your ability to do business because I depend on your presence in the market in some fashion, but it also harms me to allow you to run rampant.

This is a simplistic approach to a very complex issue. It is intended for thought provocation, a serious treatment would take a book and no publisher has offered an advance. I cannot begin to more than lightly touch on the number of issues this affects; but the reader certainly can expand it - or dispute it. If you don't like it because it doesn't appeal to a higher moral authority, that is your business, I don't pretend to have god's mouth to my ear. I try to make sense of things and I won't absolve myself of that responsibility by using the word god to duck.

The eternal question regarding something like this is that without appeal to a higher moral authority it becomes optional. I'd say that even in that case it has proved optional and that you can, for example, drive a car into a crowd or you can drive on the road, there are outcomes. It is far simpler to teach behavior by saying something is bad without providing a basis for "bad" beyond appealing to a higher moral authority than it is to examine the reason for "badness." If you are four years old and reading this, go see your parents and ask them why you can't hit your sister. The rest of you help yourself to "comments" or not.

Sen Vitter and the DC Madam

Things got , um, uncomfortable for Sen David Vitter (R-LA) this spring when his phone number showed up in Deborah Jeane Palfrey's phone records of clients - or johns as the government alleges. On Tue, Nov 13, things got a bit more messy for him, he was served with a subpoena from Palfrey's attorney for testimony for the defense. The "conservative Christian" legislator has been keeping a very low profile.

I'm not sure if my views on prostitution are very liberal or libertarian, other than protection of the workers and customer I can't see why it is any government's business, but apparently Sen Vitter thinks all kinds of sex and marriage are the government's business. While I don't care if he or somebody other than myself and wife use prostitutes or other outside marriage "encounters", his wife seems to. This creates an issue, an issue of "private" behavior at odds with legislative behavior.

This is where I draw the line over jumping on some body's back, do not put yourself in a position of telling Americans what to do by legislating morality, first, and secondly don't even behave as if the positions you advocate are right for the common folks but inapplicable to you elite. While social order may be the government's business, morality is not. But that does not begin to address the hypocrisy of legislating "Protection of Marriage" while behaving outside the supposed ends. Either this sort of legislation is cynical vote pandering by people who don't believe it for a second or they are advocates of special consideration for "special" people - or, gee, both. This makes Vitter, at best, a hypocrite, take it from there.

The reasons government has no business legislating morality are not too complicated, the most obvious being the mix of morality and religion and law; the other and most damning is the morality of government itself. While politicians make personal statement regarding their morality or religion what government does is create laws and enforce them, enforce being the word that causes a real problem in this discussion. A law is not a suggestion, it is a rule backed with force, an armed force. Laws are forced upon the people with guns, batons, handcuffs, jails, and confiscation of property, whatever trappings of judicial justice are used, if you don't play by the rules and get caught you get crushed. A law is supposed to be an agreement between citizens about maintaining social order, a method of allowing us to live in close proximity without much bloodshed, but social order is something other than morality and morality maintained at point of a gun is scarcely moral. Most moral and religious systems have proscriptions of murder, as a wrong thing, government proscribes it because the social system breaks down if murder becomes common place and an ordinary tool for problem solving. The government's attitude is not one of morality but one of system management.

People tend to insist that our government is based on moral principles, Judeo/Christian principles; mostly because they like what it does and doesn't do; but several pieces of our founding law, the Constitution, provide specific mechanisms for behavior most Christianity considers immoral. The First Amendment not only protects religion and assembly, it also protects speech and press. It shouldn't be too difficult to find speech and media that offends Christians. The Second Amendment is even more troublesome, it protects the militia and an armed citizenry and arms are not decorations - even though they are nice for poking holes in paper and hunting - their primary purpose is killing humans and that is frowned upon by most religious and moral systems. Christians, in particular, need to be careful in this regard; while their book has been used to justify wars and self-defense, their religion's namesake's most violent act was knocking over some tables and his quoted statements involve pacifism not anything else.

Senator Vitter, you need to be sent home to retirement from public business, you are a hypocrite, a cheat (by you wife's own public statements), and a power monger. You suck even more than the usual Republican power thief. The only function you and Larry Craig serve is as a reminder to the American public just what you morality legislators really are.