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In reply to the discussion: BREAKING: 3 killed at Maryland mall [View all]mindwalker_i
(4,407 posts)"that advocating ignoring the laws won't fix anything and is a horrible model to set for others."
This is at the heart of my argument. If laws are unjust, one should not follow them. It's at the heart of why we broke away from Brittian. The deeper point is that, if laws are applied selectively, the moral reason to follow laws disappears. From the original article, it is immoral for that person to kill three people, but the idea that not following laws is, by itself, immoral is no longer true. Laws are moral when they benefit people equally - when it's not ok for anyone, regardless of race, social status, etc. to kill another person, that is a moral law. However, when it's not ok for you to steal from a bank, but it IS ok for the bank to steal from you (and this is the situation we find ourselves in now), the law is not moral. Then, the law is like medieval laws where aristocrats got high justice but commoners got low justice.
When should someone not follow the law? Arguably people should rob banks. If the government refuses to fix the situation and makes more unfair laws, the moral thing to do is to overthrow the government.
"And advocating murder or theft or assault whatever"
I did not do that. This came from your ass, it came directly from your ass, it did not pass go, it did not collect $200 (adjusted for inflation).
What I would advocate is that, if the government does not fix the inequalities of how the laws are applied and instead, makes the laws more inequal (as with the TPP), we are morally obligated to overthrow the government. These things tend to be messy, have a lot of collateral damage (kind of like our recent wars, which further erodes the moral standing of our system of laws), but to continue to only take ineffective steps is immoral.
"By your own admission" and a)
True. I'm not doing anywhere near what I should be doing.
b)
I'll take you at your word that you are fighting to change things. Good for you, you're a better person than me. However, I'm not arguing your actions, I'm arguing the position you seem to be taking, which is that it is moral to only work inside the system and is immoral to break laws, regardless of the laws or their application. There is historical precedent for this argument: the aforementioned split from Britian, and more recently, fighting against slavery in this country - which was legal, but immoral.
"If you think I am immoral for trying to fight our system, you are actually advocating the status quo. Nice!"
Again, this came from your ass, it came directly from your ass, it did not pass go, it did not collect 200 (inflation adjusted) dollars.
If you would like to refute this point, please highlight anywhere that I said you were immoral for fighting the system. If anything, I argued that (in general, not even applied to anything you did) one should not limit themselves only to legal means in order to fight the system.