Morality and the moral Compass
In a normal society, we accept that all citizens are expected to follow pre-determined laws-and-regulations and that it is imperative that these laws be comprehensible for the layman to understand. We accept that laws should be clear enough so that each member of society can anticipate what actions law enforcement would take against a member if they were to be in violation of those laws, the citizen must also be put in position where they can anticipate the sanction that will be imposed once one is found guilty of having violated a certain law. In cases of ambiguity, we affirm that the state’s elected judges are expected to follow a rational process of reason to reach a fair and just judgement before imposing a just and fair sanction. Ultimately, the government should be bound by the laws it passes.
Now these facts raise an interesting question, if government is to be bound by its law, then who makes the law..and, are the lawmakers bound by any law?. Well the answer to the first question is government, yes government makes laws however, the second question still remains unanswered.
In attempting to answer this second question, one immediately realizes that in order for law makers to be bound by any law, there has to be a law that operates outside the carapace of the lawmakers, we can call is an objective law. Historical philosophers might call it Natural law, this is a law that “exists” outside of man in the sense that it cannot be created nor destroyed by man, he or she is born subject to the law. In short, it is a law that makes you understand that gratuitous murder is wrong irrespective of the current public opinion or current state law regarding gratuitous murder.
We inherently know that this objective law exists even though we cannot always articulate it (apart from the religious believers who attribute this law to instructions given by a Deity). We call this morality. You will notice that this law applies to you against your will, you never subscribe to it willingly; this law applies to you and it has the ability to induce debilitating (and in extreme cases- delirious) levels of guilt whenever one is in violation of this objective law called morality.
Democratic governments can make amendments to their laws but will ensure that they can prove how their amendments actually brings them closer to this objective law called morality. It’s the only way they can convince their electorate into voting for this law. Remember, one can subscribe to manmade law, but is not given an option in subscribing to the objective law described above. Its either we abide to the objective law or we lose our sanity, we cannot keep both. The politician’s arguments may be valid or flawed, however, the one thing proponents from each end of the spectrum will have in common is a conviction that their ideals are more in line with morality than their opponents. In US politics, Democrats and Republicans both think they are good (moral). If one looks at the current debates concerning “Capitalism”, the issue of Inequality always comes to the forefront. The adversaries of Capitalism will argue that the inequality it creates violates moral law regardless of its ability to raise people from poverty, thus making the whole system immoral. On the other end, the apologists would argue that inequality does not violate objective law, to the contrary, they would assert that (as Don Watkins and Yaron Brook wrote) Inequality Is Unfair© as it takes away people’s justly gained earnings.
It’s our commitment to this objective law that prevents us from making arguments such as “I believe this amendment must be passed into law for this and that reason despite its immorality”, I think this would be a far stretch even for the most deranged of minds (Slavoj Žižek can take a good shot at it though, not to say he’s deranged).
So to answer the question “are the lawmakers bound by any law?”, the conclusive answer is, YES, lawmakers are bound by objective law (morality).
Sadly, the answer to my own question only raises another question, Who or What created this law, who or what is the moral giver?, it is the answer to THIS question, that further explains why collectivist states that govern in accordance with the will of the “people” have no guardrails prohibiting them from repression and totalitarianism. In my discussion regarding debates concerning Capitalism, my scenario showed how two people are able to hold firm believes on the existence of morality and yet have polarized moral opinions regarding the very same subject. It seems like these two individuals have an internalized way of seeing the world that helps them make sense of morality, and this internalized way of seeing the world may differ from one person to another. We may call this “internalized firmware” a compass, just like morality, two sailors may firmly believe in the existence of the North Pole, but navigating to the North Pole is highly dependent on the setup of their compass. A flawed compass will mislead the sailor in the same way a flawed moral compass misleads the human being.
It is for this reason that societies in the past emphasized the importance of religion because they understood that religion has the ability to affect one’s moral compass. A moral compass is the same reason why libertarians emphasize the importance of individual liberty; they understood that a belief in individual liberty has the ability to affect one’s moral compass too.
The collectivists’ commitment to ruling according to the collective will causes them to reject individual liberty, thus corrupting their moral compass. And a flawed moral compass can lead people into committing immoral acts without even realizing it
