Should we abide by unjust laws?

[Taraz]

One of my old roommates was a pretty hardcore Christian. I had always thought that he didn't drink because he thought drinking was bad. When he turned 21 a few years ago he started drinking all of a sudden and I was real confused. From our conversations it had seemed like he was appalled that everyone was drinking in school and that it was immoral, so I naturally assumed he thought intoxicants were just bad.

Apparently he just thought underage drinking was wrong and that it was terrible to break the law. I had also noticed that he never sped on the freeway, but I just assumed he was a bad driver. I asked him about what he would do in the case that he was forbidden by law to talk to females or something equally ridiculous. I assumed he would see that just because something is made law doesn't mean that it is righteous. To my surprise he said that he would stop talking to girls, but that he would do all he could to change the law by working within our system.

I thought this was absurd, but then he made a semi-compelling point. Who gets to decide what laws are unjust? If someone feels like a law is wrong, should they just have the right to break it? Why is my moral code so superior to our legal system? I didn't really have any good response to that other than I guess I would be willing to take the punishment if I got caught. But that's not entirely true because I would feel jobbed if I actually incurred some kind of penalty for breaking a BS law.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for with this post, but does anyone have any better answer to his questions? I've never really encountered his viewpoint, so I didn't know how to deal with it.

[gull]

Is the justness of the law even relevant to the cost-benefit analysis of breaking it?

[Taraz]

[ QUOTE ]
Is the justness of the law even relevant to the cost-benefit analysis of breaking it?

[/ QUOTE ]

Only if you don't want to go to hell [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
Who gets to decide what laws are unjust? If someone feels like a law is wrong, should they just have the right to break it? Why is my moral code so superior to our legal system?

[/ QUOTE ]
Superiority has little to do with it but I detest the idea of a society where everyone obeyed laws they disagree with and suspect that the only way to have a system with good laws is for people to break bad laws.

chez

[PairTheBoard]

I think there is more than one force at work here. Society generally benefits if there is a healthy respect for the law. I want to enjoy those benefits and my decision is to do my part by exercising a healthy respect for the law myself. This means obeying laws which are personally inconvenient for me. So this is one Force at work.

However, the Law is often too rigid to efficiently accomplish what it intends to. So society can sometimes be improved when its members obey the spirit of the law while adapting it to peculiarities of specific situations. Sometimes society benefits if we fudge on the law. Sometimes rigid adherence to the law is just downright counterproductive. So this is another Force at work.

Then there is the Boston Tea Party kind of situation. We sometimes have to recognize that the authority behind the law is simply corrupt and it is our duty to apply the principle of civil disobedience.

That's how I see it.

PairTheBoard

[Metric]

I don't claim that this is the "right answer" for everyone, but I personally have far more confidence in my own judgement of reasonable behavior than I have in the "rule makers." Most of the time I'm easily within the bounds of law, but when I'm not, my only concern is related to the consequences of being caught.

[tolbiny]

[ QUOTE ]
Why is my moral code so superior to our legal system?

[/ QUOTE ]

Why is a piece of paper with some ink on it superior to a human being?

[JuntMonkey]

"Trial and Death of Socrates" by Plato covers this (Socrates is wrong, but his point was far more legitimate in his time than it is in ours).

Anyway, government itself is unjust so do whatever the [censored] you want, cost-benefit in mind. "The system" is nonsense.

[ShakeZula06]

[ QUOTE ]
Why is my moral code so superior to our legal system?

[/ QUOTE ]
You can just as well ask yourself why is the legal system superior to your moral code?

In the case of victimless crimes you need to only worry about your own moral code. The legal system hasn't shown me to be a legitimate force in deciding when I can and can't drink alcohol on mine or a consenting person's property, so I see no need to care what it says (except as someone else mentioned, when considering the cost/benefit of breaking the law).

[ShakeZula06]

[ QUOTE ]
Society generally benefits if there is a healthy respect for the law.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'd admend your statement to say "society generally benefits from respect for others". Do you think that would be better? I don't think society benefitted from the results of the Dred Scott trial for instance.