Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
What about the possibility that there is an ethical aspect to supporting your country's laws, independent of whether the law is good, or enforced? I'm really on the fence there, but leaning towards no.
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I look at it this way: morality involves your duty to God, ethics involve your duty to your fellow man, and legality involves your duty to society.
These things overlap, but they are not coterminous. There can, indeed, be a moral or ethical duty to disobey the law.
You are not required by morality to tell the Nazis that you are hiding Jews in the basement. You have a duty to God not to help murderers. You are not required by ethics to help a slaveholder capture his escaped slave. You have a duty to your fellow man not to help someone enslave him. Yet the laws in force in each instance would have required otherwise.
Basically, your ethical duty to obey the law revolves around the simple fact that unless the law is generally obeyed, it cannot perform its necessary function in creating and sustaining justice in society. And creating and sustaining justice strikes me as a moral duty to God, or, if you are an atheist, an ethical duty to other people. So as a practical matter, the wisest course is to obey all laws that don't clearly violate your ethical or moral duties.
Note that I use the word "duty," not "principle." Some law might violate your moral or ethical
principles, but unless in obeying it you find yourself violating an ethical or moral
duty, I don't think you have the right to disobey it. Someone might think that the income tax, even in a democratic country, is unethical, because it deprives people of the fruits of their labor against their will. But I don't think that means that you should not obey the income tax law, because as far as I can tell, there is no moral or ethical
duty not to pay income taxes. It does mean, however, that you don't have to help the state enforce the income tax laws, because given your principles, you have a duty not to make your fellow man pay income taxes. So if you are on the jury, don't vote to convict!
My personal belief is that copyright law should always be obeyed, not because I think that it is ethical in its current state, but because I can't see that I have any duty to disobey it. I do not, however, share what seems to be the general belief that
any copying of copyrighted material is forbidden by the law. That's what the publishers would like you to believe, but the law is not quite so all-encompassing.
For example, I am confident that if you lend me a book that you have bought, and I sneak off with it & photocopy it to read later, while giving the book back to you, I personally have not violated the copyright law. It is possible (but not in my view, likely) that if you gave it to me knowing I was going to copy it,
you might have violated the law- but I still haven't.
This thread, of course, is about whether I have an ethical duty that extends beyond the requirements of copyright law, to the point where it should be considered unethical to copy that book you lent me, even though it is not, in my view, illegal.
Or maybe the thread is about whether there is an ethical duty to actually violate the copyright law, which in my view would require you to copy and sell some copyrighted work without permission of the copyright owner. Somehow, I don't see that such an ethical duty exists.
But I'm pretty clear on the proposition that I have no ethical duty to obey a law that doesn't exist.