Don't Confuse What Is Legal With What Is Morally Right

Most people think of themselves as being “law abiding” citizens.  People admonish those that break the law and feel that it is reasonable that transgressors should pay the consequences of crime.  Broadly speaking, this makes sense.  In most Western countries there is a strong correlation between what is legal and what is morally right. But make no mistake.  What is legal or illegal is not necessarily the same as what is morally right or wrong.  Here are three good examples of laws that we now find morally wrong:

Slavery. It was legal to have slaves in parts of the United States all the way up until 1865.  Today there is no doubt that banning this practice was the right moral thing to do.  At the time, however, the southern Confederate states chose to secede from the Union rather than abolish slavery.  The northern States then went to war in order to keep the Union intact – which was an illegal aggressive act which breached the sovereignty of the southern States. The North had no interest in making slavery illegal in the South, they just did not want the practice to spread beyond the South.  It was only later in the Civil War that Lincoln explicitly tied the war effort to slave emancipation in the South. So the South seceded to maintain a morally repugnant system and the North went to war in violation of the legal right of the South.  Breaking the law was the right moral thing to do.

Women’s right to vote.  Women were deliberately excluded from voting in 1832 and did not get the right to vote in the United Kingdom until 1928, 96 years later.  Today there is no doubt that women should be treated as equals to men and that allowing women equal rights to vote was the right moral thing to do.  At the time, however, women had to break the law many times in order for their voices to be heard and to achieve their goal.  Breaking the law was the right moral thing to do.

Interracial marriage.  Blacks were not allowed to marry whites in most part of the United States until 1967.  Today, racial purity is becoming increasingly blurred in much of the United States where combinations of black-white-asian-hispanic peoples are becoming relatively common.  Yet this change in legislation was extremely controversial and white Americans believed that allowing blacks to intermarry with whites would challenge white racial supremacy.  Today the thought of banning two consenting adults from marrying each other on the basis of their race seems absurd.  Fighting to change the law was the right moral thing to do.

So herein lies a big question. Who, or what, should be the arbiter of what is legal or morally right?

Laws are written by legislators.  Legislators are elected by the general public.  Thus the general public has a clear, albeit indirect, impact on what is legal and illegal.  The problem is that the elected representative receives a mandate to act on behalf of his/her constituents but does not necessarily vote for what the electorate actually wants.

But what is morally right? In the West it  used to be that Christian beliefs and The Ten Commandments provided the foundation of what was morally right.  Yet Christian doctrine is full of “laws” that are quite questionable in the modern world.  It provided a lot of the moral justification needed to validate slavery, for example.

The reality is that moral convictions change over time.  This evolution in beliefs explains the change in attitudes towards homosexual marriage for example.  In 1983 only 21% of Britons believed that homosexuality was 'rarely wrong or not wrong at all'.  By 2012 57% of Britains felt the same way.

The law is often out of sync with moral convictions.  There is a lag between what is deemed morally acceptable and what is enshrined in law.  If enough people think that something is morally acceptable, over time you can expect legislators to catch up and pass or repeal laws to allow that behaviour.

In the meantime, early adopters to morally right viewpoints appear to be on the fringes of society.  Their views will not be deemed acceptable and behaviours that they propose will frequently be illegal.

As a free society it is important that those people are protected from unnecessary persecution and that their illegal behaviour is not excessively repressed.

While we may not agree with them today, they might be providing the moral guidance that we need to change the laws of tomorrow.