Legislation Realizes Morality
In the "Oprah on Racism" discussion here under Culture, Lets Shrug made the easy statement that you cannot legislate morality. We accept that to mean that the law must ignore the spaces of subjective value and focus only on the basics of protecting individual rights.
That said, all legislation is based on morality. Laws can be pro-life or anti-life; objectively knowable or the empowerment of administrative whim. Regardless of the effective expression, the causative motive is the instantiation of ethical choice, and ultimately of a moral code.
Ethics is the foundation of politics. Every political system is the realization of a moral theory. The actual laws can be contradictory; and historically have been so, as philosophical consistency was lacking. In the medieval era, canon law, civil law, romanists, and jurists, offered solutions and justifications for them for the conflicts between people - and the conflicts between laws. (Even today, private international law is called "the conflict of laws." When parents come from two countries, live in a third, and want a divorce, how is that settled?) So, if you read about trade and commerce in the Middle Ages, you will find brilliant insights that allowed the transfer of huge sums of virtual money for large quantities of various physical goods across continents; meanwhile lending at interest was illegal. So, the legislation was contradictory because the philosophy supporting it was incomplete and incorrect.
We think of the USSR as an example of a police state. It was NOT a nice place to live, but even the police were constrained by law: they could arrest you for profiteering, but still needed a warrant to do so. Such a nicety does not stand up to the larger intention of the law to subjugate the individual.
We still have "blue laws" that limit the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Those laws also concretize a moral theory. The new proposed law on healthcare is the legislation of a that "blue law" morality.
American law generally (incompletely and inconsistently) is the realization of the ethics of egoism. Even when the government takes your property by force, they have to give you fair market value for it. The exception tests the rule.
To achieve justice in legislation, we must begin with the proper moral theory. No society can have objective laws without objective morality.
That said, all legislation is based on morality. Laws can be pro-life or anti-life; objectively knowable or the empowerment of administrative whim. Regardless of the effective expression, the causative motive is the instantiation of ethical choice, and ultimately of a moral code.
Ethics is the foundation of politics. Every political system is the realization of a moral theory. The actual laws can be contradictory; and historically have been so, as philosophical consistency was lacking. In the medieval era, canon law, civil law, romanists, and jurists, offered solutions and justifications for them for the conflicts between people - and the conflicts between laws. (Even today, private international law is called "the conflict of laws." When parents come from two countries, live in a third, and want a divorce, how is that settled?) So, if you read about trade and commerce in the Middle Ages, you will find brilliant insights that allowed the transfer of huge sums of virtual money for large quantities of various physical goods across continents; meanwhile lending at interest was illegal. So, the legislation was contradictory because the philosophy supporting it was incomplete and incorrect.
We think of the USSR as an example of a police state. It was NOT a nice place to live, but even the police were constrained by law: they could arrest you for profiteering, but still needed a warrant to do so. Such a nicety does not stand up to the larger intention of the law to subjugate the individual.
We still have "blue laws" that limit the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Those laws also concretize a moral theory. The new proposed law on healthcare is the legislation of a that "blue law" morality.
American law generally (incompletely and inconsistently) is the realization of the ethics of egoism. Even when the government takes your property by force, they have to give you fair market value for it. The exception tests the rule.
To achieve justice in legislation, we must begin with the proper moral theory. No society can have objective laws without objective morality.
I think if you're prone to using crack it being legal or not doesn't matter. And it being legal won't make people more inclined to use it either. (Prohibition didn't stop people who want to drink did it? It just made it harder to get.)
So legislating morality does not work. It only makes certain people in power feel like they know what's best for others and they pass laws in an attempt to force them to behave a certain way...for their own good of course.