Law vs. Ethics

 


On facebook today, a person asked, "In any culture, isn't law exactly the same as ethics?"

Here's my reply:

Here's a take. I'm not saying this is absolutely true, or even that I'm sure I believe in it, myself... but I'm sort of working on this idea, so hear me out.
Ethics comes first. Early humans had ethics, and even other primates have ethics. Probably other animals have ethics as well. The vast majority of the time humans have been on Earth - hundreds of thousands of years - there has been ethics and no law. Law has only emerged in, say, the last 25,000 - 30,000 years, and very gradually, in a complex way.
In many ways, law emerged out of ethics, and even can be thought of as the development of ethics, the fulfillment of ethics, the completion of ethics, ethics becoming more ethical, ethics becoming more fully what it is. Thus, in a certain sense, law is ethics, and even, in a certain sense, ethics is law - or at least, what ethics always was, potentially, law is becoming, in actuality. (On this layer of meaning, it makes a kind of sense to say that law is "the march of God through the world," etc., etc.) You might say that this is true on an "ideal" level.
But this is a dialectical progression, full of negations, false starts, and reversals. Law could only become law by distinguishing itself from ethics, by establishing a firm separation between itself and ethics, by negating ethics. You might say that the history of history is the history of the separation of law from ethics. Thus, in a sense, law is the opposite of ethics - or more precisely, we could say that, from ethics, law and morality emerge as opposites - and not always the same way, in every culture. I have a lot more to say, but I'll stop there... except to note that this emergence of morality and law out of ethics, which should not be thought of as an event but rather as an ongoing historical process, can also be viewed as the emergence of the state and the development of the concept of freedom - and that this process, which is not at all linear, and often involves centuries of backtracking and reversion, is far from done, so there is much that has not yet fully separated - we can only dream of a future where law has fully separated itself from morality and ethics.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Capitalism is Ending

Image
THE PRODUCTIVITY BOMB Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hard
Read more

Liquefactionism

Image
“To Dissolve Man” An Investigation into the Liquefactionist Party In the 21st century, we will have to deal both with the odious Liquefactionists and with a confused and reactionary anti-Liquefactionism, which is far more apparent and obviously horrifying. I borrow the term “Liquefactionist Party” from William S. Burroughs, who writes about the Liquefactionists in the “Parties of Interzone” section of Naked Lunch - which, as a political policy guide, is unmatched in its insight and accuracy.  He writes that, “ The Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption. ”  He goes on: “It will be immediately clear that the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe.” Paradoxically, Burroughs goes on to tell us that “Liquefactionists in general know what the score is.”  If they know the score, how can they be dupes?  Perhaps thi
Read more

Why Ayn Rand was Wrong

  It is a pet theory of mine that the "greatness" or "importance" of a philosopher is mostly determined by that philosopher's subsequent degree of influence on a government leader.  Would we still talk about Socrates, if his student Critias had not taken over Athens as the leader of the Dictatorship of the Thirty?  Would we talk about Aristotle, had he not tutored Alexander, who later became Alexander the Great and took over a vast part of the ancient world?  Would we remember Rousseau, had not Robespierre declared him "divine"?  Or Locke and Montesquieu, had not the founders of the United States revered them?  The esteem given to the philosophy by professional professors within the academy matters less, and its internal coherence, or insight, or truth matters less still.  By this measure, Ayn Rand is, unfortunately, the most important philosopher of the 20th century.   Even though she is barely noticed by philosophy departments, Ayn Rand is massively
Read more