Walker wrote: ↑Wed Dec 12, 2018 8:41 am
Laws work because they can punish.
Punishment is not: doing right to a human.
Punishment is: doing wrong to a human.
(Life - execution. Liberty - prison. Happiness - bankrupt.)
Decency based on law, is based on the threat of punishment, which is based on doing wrong to humans.
Legislating human decency is actually legislating fear ... of punishment.
To do wrong to humans is not decent.
-1- wrote: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not cheat with your neighbour's wives, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not disobey your parents.
Commandments are laws with inherent punishments, namely, the offender's human nature punishes the human offender.
(How many wives does your neighbor have?)
1. Punishment can be avoided by behaving decently. There are many a persons who would behave indecently who don't, actually, because of fear of punishment. I would have murdered my own aunt and several of my bosses, but I did not, because of the fear of law.\
2.
Legislating human decency is actually legislating fear ... of punishment.
This is trickier. My fear of punishment was not an active fear... I was not fearing jail term. All I had to do to avoid going to jail is not murder my aunt and some of my bosses.
So my punishment was not fear... my punishment was the continuation of living with abuse by my aunt and by my several particular bosses.
In this case they were not decent. I was decent by the pedagogical effect of the law. I kept on suffering because the aunt and the bosses were not legislated to act decently.
There is a point beyond which law does not go. But it will. Right now we are experiencing the law going where it hadn't gone before: punishing men for casually sexually abusing women, by touching them here, by copping a feel there. This has never been a legal issue, and many women were bothered by this, and many men were indecent. Now this is being put to an end.
If a casual assault is punished now, then I can safely say that the law has a potential to encroach private interpersonal relationships where one person suffers due to another's unfair and uncalled-for actions.