For the first time in my life, I realized I don’t have a clear understanding of why a law should exist. For specific laws, I’ll often come up with reasons, but I don’t have a general, guiding group of reasons for creating (or for that matter, keeping) a law.
I realized this when I was chatting with a friend on Twitter about polygamy. Many countries don’t have a law against it, but we do in the United States. Why?
Why is that law justified? More importantly, why is it justified from my perspective? Why would I support it? Or why not?
Like any good student, I asked Google, which shot back this article on the five basic reasons laws exist. According to that article, the five basic reasons are…
- To keep people from hurting one another.
- To keep people from hurting themselves.
- To help people do morally good stuff.
- To keep the government from unfairly helping certain people (usually at the expense of others).
- To keep people from unfairly hurting the government.
As soon as I read these, I remembered why I don’t have a clear understanding of why a law should exist. Just looking at those five reasons, you can see the slipperiness oozing all over the floor.
They’re slippery because all laws are based on someone’s morality, and most people don’t agree on who’s morality we’re choosing.
So yeah, I’ll have to think about this some more and ask more questions. Specifically, how much of my morality should I try to legislate unto others?
For now, why do YOU think a law should be created? What justifies it? How much should you legislate to force someone else to do what you think is right?
This is really interesting stuff, something I’ve been thinking about too. I believe in a very small state, with limited regulations, based on harm caused to others. So for example, religious freedom should not be legislated against except when it causes harm to others. We had an incident a while ago in the UK where a Christian couple who owned a Bed and Breakfast asked a gay couple who had booked to stay in separate rooms because they couldn’t condone them sleeping in the same bed. There was outcry that the gay couple’s liberties had been trampled on and then the Shadow Home Secretary (at the time) commented that the law ought to be different in regard to businesses run from the home. So, he was saying the Christians were right/not wrong anyway, to ask the couple to split rooms for the night. Again, this created more outcry, that a senior politician could even suggest that the gay couple were not to be defended above the Christian couple. But then a journalist made a very shrewd point (unusual, but true) that this was a clash of liberties, not an infringement.
Anyway, long and confusing story short, it made me wonder if it should even be a government issue. I mean, is private business and their custom of government concern? And yeah, society thinks homosexuality is fine, but the Bible doesn’t, and that’s where a lot of our basic law stems from. I have no right and no ability to judge someone by my standards or by the Bible’s if they don’t understand or take those morals for themselves. But society has to have some logic and law or we’d be an anarchic world where everyone fights for themselves.
It’s a tricky situation!
Right, good points. I’m planning to write a followup to this post, but here’s a teaser…
I grew up assuming that laws should follow the Bible.
Then a couple years ago, I began to consider it from a different perspective – I switched to a more libertarian mindset.
But now I think I’m going away from that again… perhaps. <<That's where I'm confused and need to re-assess what I actually believe.
See, as I said above, all laws are based on someone’s morality. So where I used to think Christians shouldn’t impose Christian laws on others, I might be going back on that. I think the standard should be the same for everyone.
The tension with imposing Christians laws on others is my belief that morality should always be attached to God, not given just as a set of rules. In other words, saying, “Don’t do this,” without explaining that it’s God’s law is often more harmful than beneficial.
So that’s my dilemma for now. I need to consider this some more. In a practical sense, I definitely think it’s an important issue.
-Marshall Jones Jr.
That’s the thing – without God, no laws make sense. If there’s no God, there’s no logical reason to do anything ‘nice’ or not do anything ‘wrong’ because there can be no absolute or logical truth.
If we decide there should be an ultimate standard, it is most likely going to come from the Biblical standard, whether people realise or not. The other option is so allow people to follow their own moral standards, and police them by that… Otherwise it’s a case of not being able to please all the people all the time!
– Becca
But then even when we agree that something’s good, when do we decide to legislate for it?
An extreme example: having people over for lunch is good, but do we legislate that?
No, probably not. So how do we know when to legislate and when to let God alone motivate people to do what’s right?
-Marshall Jones Jr.