Dear Friends,
It seems to me, morals are like dams and laws often breach those dams. Morals, based on the Golden Rule, say that killing human beings is wrong. Morality then puts a dam between us and killing others. Law, however, breaches that dam in a limited way. It says you can kill people if they did a bad thing, assist the suicide of an elderly person, or kill an enemy combatant in war. These breaches seem perfectly reasonable. The problem is that any breach of a dam results in the eventual collapse of that dam. To argue it has been breached for decades and hasn’t collapsed is spurious, since the speaker has no knowledge of the interior damage that breach has already caused. This explains why reasonable seeming laws grow to be unreasonable in time.
A breach in a dam widens over time. That’s the physics of dams. Dams created by morality are no different. Once they are breached, then a small increase in size to account for special cases is warranted. Then another increase, and another until the dam is hollowed out from the inside. Then the dam collapses. Everyone exclaims they couldn’t imagine it could have collapsed so fast… both earthen dam and moral dam. This is because a dam collapse is effectively a tipping point. It happens slowly at first. Often so slow it’s imperceptible. But once the damage has reached some threshold, there is a sudden tipping point. The dam collapses and sends a torrent of water to whoever is below. In the case of morality that torrent of water is retribution, feud, and every form of immorality there is.
If no one is allowed to kill anyone then murder charges are easy to prosecute. If there are exceptions then not so much. Even when the facts are indisputable… if killing is not a moral wrong but a legal one, the question then shifts to, was it justified? The scale of justification is a sliding one. In all cases of law the political favor of the litigants or defendants bears far more weight than the case itself. The Lindsay Clancy case for example. This means that sliding scale of justification depends on the person more than the law. Such a system cannot but create an aristocracy who are above the law. The collapse of dams always creates slippery mud covered slopes. An aristocracy is not the only nor the worst outcome possible. The slow erosion of morals by the legal breach opens us up to ever greater atrocities.
The breach of assisted suicide has already hollowed out the ethics of the Dutch, who are killing toddlers. While in some places assisted suicide laws appear to be in stasis, that’s because the damage is being done out of sight. Imagine a car in midair. The people inside complain. While in flight the driver can say, “I feel fine don’t you? Then what are you complaining about?” This is because it’s not the fall that gets you… it’s the landing. Or in the case of a breached dam, the collapse. In the US, killing is illegal unless it’s done for “national defense.” The justification of national defense, obviously, is a sliding scale. It allowed Obama to kill an American citizen in a foreign country by drone, and his teenage son a few weeks later… without trial. That is quite a breach in thou shalt not kill.
This is why we must guard against breaches of moral dams by law. These breaches seem sensible in the present. The long term damage to the dam itself doesn’t come up. People talk about the good that will come of breaching that moral dam. We will breach a moral dam to get retribution, make an example, or get an advantage. Self-defense isn’t a breach, because the person trying to kill us already breached it. Then there are regulations that give a politically favored group an advantage. That breach opens us up to favoritism breaching the dam of merit. Once the damage is sufficient, merit will be eschewed for political favor. These are just a few of the outcomes of breaching moral dams with law. Maybe it would be better to use law to shore up moral dams… instead of breaching them?
Sincerely,
John Pepin
