🚀 go-pugleaf

In gnu.misc.discuss, Chris Smith <htimsc@moc.rric.pcuu.orobenots> writes:

> There's a group of people around here who feel the car pool lane is for
> car pools plus anybody who's willing to pay the fine if caught.  Good?

No, I think that's wrong.  That's not what it's for.

> I say no.  It is immoral to accept other people's foregoing the
> opportunity to push their interest over yours, but fail to extend them
> the same forbearance.

I agree.

> To fail to honor the social contract.

Perhaps.  But only if the social contract is based on fairness in the
first place.  If it's legal for someone to steal from me but not for me to
steal from them, I have no moral obligation to honor that "social
contract."

Laws have *no* inherent moral force.  There are laws that enforce moral
principals, there are laws that enforce rules of behavior which are
neither moral nor immoral but are just an arbitrary set of rules picked
because we have to have *some* set of rules and they're as good as any
other, and there are laws which have nothing at all to do with morality
and everything to do with some political whim.  I have a moral obligation
to follow the principals underlying the first set, and if I intend to
participate in society I have a moral obligation to follow the second set,
but the line between the second set and the third set is very hazy and a
point about which reasonable people can disagree.  And I respect the civil
disobedience of people who consider some of these laws to be in the third
set rather than the second.

> But without some such overriding consideration, just being illegal
> *does* make it morally wrong.

Only if there is some gain in that area of life being regulated.  Only if
there's some underlying moral principal that the law is just an expression
of.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>