ID: white text on a black background around a faded photo of a person with a black face scarf on and a hat that says “illegal” on it:
“But it’s illegal”
"Saying that something is illegal is not an argument, it is an appeal to authority. Laws are arbitrary dictates to control a population, not universal standards of morality.
Credit: freethouchtproject.com
It was illegal to hide Jewish people in nazi Germany…
🙄
These mtfkers be saying “Anne Frank is in the attic” when the gestapo didn’t even ask them.
Nazi got laws in applications. For them, all of their doings was legitimate and “legal”.
Yup, the holocaust was legal, as was slavery, as was the genocide of Indigenous peoples the world over, as were so so many other atrocities.
Back when Christianity was a protest movement they understood this too:
Galatians 2:21
" I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
The problem is these people are just full of shit about everything all the time. The law is a very poor excuse for doing something, and if The law makes someone choose a different action then what they think is right, That’s literally just moral cowardice.
on the other hand, saying “trumpler can’t do that! it’s illegal!!” has even less meaning now than ever before, and it never had much meaning to begin with
“The police can’t lie to you, its in the constitution!”
-said the cop who’s legally lying
This reminds me of that scene in Breaking Bad where
spoiler
Badger gets arrested by an undercover cop who told Badger that “cops can’t lie” 🤣
Poot Badger…
Might want to check the dictionary for ‘arbitrary’ and ‘dictate’. I see the deeper point but this is poorly worded and doesn’t constitute an argument either. Weak demonstration of an appealing idea.
ETA:
Scarfolk Council has the best public information campaigns of any civic body.
Lol, making you uncomfortable doesn’t make it wrong.
Very comfortable with Kantian ethics, thanks; they’re like old slippers for the soul.
The laws can be wrong, bad, immoral, certainly. That doesn’t make them arbitrary.
I’m not even an unfrozen caveman lawyer, and I didn’t even click through, I just took what DDG provided, but I think both the second and third definitions certainly apply. To whatever degree it might be a loose fit, it doesn’t seem to merit this level of pedantry.
it doesn’t seem to merit this level of pedantry.
But it’s just so much easier for them than confronting the reality!
Kants whole system of ethics is built around the categorical imperative, which is so rigid it can’t honestly be used in the real world. The dude was a miserly shut in that glazed authority for authority’s sake and tried to frame it as “autonomy”. His writings are only good for paralyzing someone into a perpetual state of anxiety and indecision.
No wonder you take issue with the words used in this post. Kant had to use hyper-specific and specialized definitions for every other word in his writing to make the absolute drivel he was pushing out sound profound. To the point that when you peel back all of the layers of abstraction and attempt to arrive at something resembling advice on how to live you’re left with a giant contradictory mess that is best summarized as “Be good cause it’s good. Please love me king Frederick”
You’re applying Kant, someone who is almost entirely concerned with metaphysics, to a situation that is only tacitly related to his whole schtick, while using his super-special and not at all externally applicable definitions for common words, and expecting other people to: 1. Know you’re approaching this from Kant without previously saying it and 2. Being a real chode about it.
To actually address the post: in the real world, law doesn’t determine morality. Sometimes the law imperfectly reflects aspects of morality (murder for example) and other times it’s its own thing (jay walking). Basing your moral framework off of the laws of a state is reductive, harmful, and obviously ill-informed
Kant very clearly states that personal ethics should be above other considerations (‘the moral law within me’ and like 300 pages on the topic) and gives an intellectual framework to justify the submission of unethical laws to moral criticism.
Drivel, yeah, sure. I mean, you can disagree, but drivel? It’s not the very hungry caterpillar, I’ll give you that, but it’s usually fairly respected.
Sure thing, you keep telling yourself whatever you need to to preserve that cognitive dissonance of yours lmfao
Not sure where my point of view on the question has been expressed, but okay 🙁
I don’t really listen to Egor Letov, a russian punk-alike singer-songwriter, but I find the phrase ‘Kill the government in you’ that I’ve first heard from him kinda fitting. Delegating integral parts of you to the big daddy government\corporation is irresponsible and leaves you at it’s will, it grows into you like cancer. And there are too many people not feeling like they make a choice by following the line.
It’s not an anarchist perspective, but I do love quoting David Henry Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience at the kinds of people who think that the law determines what is right. It’s very useful for justifying a lot of the less radical activism to the moderates, helps with recruitment and all that too
Did you typo
“freethoughtproject.com”?Edit: never mind, that wasn’t the right site either. Apparently the correct one is thefreethoughtproject.com?
That’s the question I was thinking.
