🚀 go-pugleaf

strnlght@netcom.com (David Sternlight) writes:
>Felix Gallo posts what I read as a sincere and partly moving
>message. Unfortunatly, I have difficulty with part of his central
>logic, which essentially argues that the law should be what he
>thinks it should be, rather than what the elected representatives
>of the people made it.

Adolf Hitler was put into power entirely by constitutional means under
an elected parliamentary government. Presumably, this means that you,
as a good Nazi, would have sent Jews off to the gas chamber, following
the "law", which, of course, was set by the duly and constitutionally
selected authorities.

It has long been understood by most, of course, that morality
transcends law. After all, you, David Sternlight, have hypocritically
stated on a number of occassions that you don't care if PGP is legal
in europe under their laws, because you consider its use "unethical".
That means that you yourself do not believe the arguments you are
making. Your statements tend to be inconsistant. For instance, you
make legalistic arguments and proceed to then claim not to be arguing
law but ethics. Then when people argue that ethics and law are indeed
seperate, you turn around and say that people are somehow ethically
obligated to follow the law no matter what it says, which, we presume,
contradicts your previous position on ethics as the laws of some
European country might, say, make PGP use manditory, thus placing you
in an odd ethical bind.

In any case, it does not appear that your arguments are coherent or
consistant enough to hold up terribly well.

--
Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
--
Laissez faire, laissez passer. Le monde va de lui meme.