Recently I’ve noticed that a lot of people will not or cannot understand the difference between a legal system with its “laws” and a moral code. This makes me sad.

Definitions

Morals are a set of personal beliefs about what is right and wrong. Morals can and do vary from person to person. They historically tend to be somewhat consistent among a cultural group.

Laws in this context are rules made up and codified by some kind of government. Where I live, there is a city, a state, and a country that intends to impose it’s “laws” upon me, and expects me to follow them. I put the word “laws” in quotes here because they are really more of rules, and I personally would prefer to reserve the word laws to refer to physical laws of nature that cannot be broken rather than rules dreamed up by groups of humans. But for the remainder of this article, let it be understood that I’m discussing societal “laws” and not physical laws.

Moral Relativity

Personally, I am a moral relativist, which means I do not believe there is one particular set of morals that is universally “correct” but rather that each person must work to determine what is moral is each situation. This is in contrast moral objectivists who believe that there is one specific set of correct morals that everyone should follow. Many religious folks believe that God has dictated a moral code that applies to everyone and therefore they are moral objectivists. Interestingly, although I am a relativist, my morals are significantly influenced by the Christian traditions and the teachings of Jesus because I was raised in that church. However, they differ in many places. And, importantly, my morals have nearly nothing in common with the modern Evangelical douche bags who coopt the term “Christian”. Fuck those guys.

I’m not writing today to convince you to be a relativist, or to believe in nay particular set of morals. But I am hoping to convince you that you should care about morals and make an effort to determine what your morals are. Without a strong moral compass, you are susceptible to being led to participate in any manner of activity that may cause all kinds of harm.

Sunday School Anecdote

I remember being about nine years old in a Sunday school class at the local Methodist church. We were learning about the new commandment, where Jesus tells his followers that the most important thing is to love one another. And naturally we also discussed the original ten commandments. We discussed how Jesus had shown some radical love to people like prostitutes who were traditionally looked down upon by both the church and the roman empire. And the conversation developed into a general discussion of having a good conscience. Someone, possibly me, but I honestly don’t remember, asked what happens when there are contradictions, for example, the commandments say to honor your father and mother, but what if your parents tell you not to love someone? The teacher sidestepped that by saying she knew all of our parents and they would not tell us to do violate the commandments. The next question was what if the government tells us to violate the commandments. She dodged it again by saying that we don’t have guards and soldiers ordering us around like they did “back in those days” then she said “I guess we have the law, but the law doesn’t tell us to do bad things.”

I think this teacher was honestly doing her best to be a lay person teaching kids about the Church. I don’t think she had any bad intent. But OMG how badly did she miss the point. If I were teaching that class, I would have drilled home the point that it always your responsibility to ask yourself what is moral and act accordingly whether that means disappointing a friend or parent, or violating the law of the empire that claims to be your sovereign. Doing any less, or relying on the hope that the law is good in fundamentally immoral.

Why Don’t People Care?

So why do so many people fail to distinguish laws from moral and demonstrate a robust moral compass? Maybe because they are all hedonists whose morals truly allow them to advance their own interest at any expense. Maybe because they all had weak moral role models and genuinely don’t think about it. Maybe because they are afraid of the long arm of the law. I genuinely don’t know why, but I know that it makes me sad.

An Unfortunate Personal Example

So my wife is divorcing me. It sucks but it’s happening. She is someone who I thought I understood to be a moral person. I always knew that she had a tendency to be a rule follower, and felt anxious about breaking rules, but I ultimately thought she was moral at her core. I was entirely wrong.

In our horrible awful legal battle she has found out that courts typically consider any money earned during the marriage to be joint assets. And if that money is deposited into an account, then they assume the entirety of the account is joint assets. She never made any substantial income during our marriage. Rather she spent my income on lavish international vacations for herself. Nor was she contributing as a stay at home mom. The kids were in daycare, we had a cleaning service, we had a grocery subscription, I did all the home maintenance. But she is trying to take 50% of the money I earned, and 50% of the remaining account balance that was mine before we ever even got married, and 50% of the house that we bought entirely with funds that were either mine before the marriage or earned by me during the marriage. There may be legal arguments I can use against this, but that is not the point here.

The point here is that I expected her to act morally. To acknowledge that I had earned all of that, and supported her expensive lifestyle, asking very little in return. I expected that when she decided she wanted to leave that she would leave. Not that she would try to steal from me. But her understanding is that if the court says it is okay, then she has nothing to feel bad about. A pure confusion between laws and morals. Really really sad.