The law is the product of many individuals each with different subjective axioms separately trying to maximize their particular utility functions during the legislation process. As a result the law as written and implemented has at best, an extremely tenuous link to any individuals morality, let alone society at large’s morality. Murder is illegal because for biological reasons the vast majority of people assign large negative value to murder so the result of legislators minimax procedure is that murder is illegal in most cases.
But if an individual did not assign negative value (for whatever reason) to murder how would you convince them they’re wrong to do such a thing? It should be easy if it is objective. If you can’t do the extreme cases then how can you hope to address real moral issues which are significantly more nuanced? This is the real question that you need to answer here since your original claim is that it is objective. I hope you’ll not quote snipe around it again.
I’m not arguing general rules from exceptional ones, I’m not proposing any rules at all. I am proposing an analytic system that is productive rather than arbitrarily exclusionary.
If morality is (are) seven billion utility functions, then a legal system will be a poor match for it (them).
But there are good reasons for thinking that can’t be the case. For one thing, people can have preferences that are intuitively immoral. If a psychopath wants to murder, that does not make murder moral.
For another, it is hard to see what purpose morality serves when there is no interaction between people. Someone who is alone on a desert island iskand has no need of rules and against murder because there is no one to murder, and no need of rules against theft because there is no one to steal, and from and so on.
If morality is a series of negotiations and trade offs about preferences, then the law can match it closely. We can answer the question “why is murder illegal” with “because murder is wrong”.
The law is the product of many individuals each with different subjective axioms separately trying to maximize their particular utility functions during the legislation process. As a result the law as written and implemented has at best, an extremely tenuous link to any individuals morality, let alone society at large’s morality. Murder is illegal because for biological reasons the vast majority of people assign large negative value to murder so the result of legislators minimax procedure is that murder is illegal in most cases.
But if an individual did not assign negative value (for whatever reason) to murder how would you convince them they’re wrong to do such a thing? It should be easy if it is objective. If you can’t do the extreme cases then how can you hope to address real moral issues which are significantly more nuanced? This is the real question that you need to answer here since your original claim is that it is objective. I hope you’ll not quote snipe around it again.
I’m not arguing general rules from exceptional ones, I’m not proposing any rules at all. I am proposing an analytic system that is productive rather than arbitrarily exclusionary.
If morality is (are) seven billion utility functions, then a legal system will be a poor match for it (them).
But there are good reasons for thinking that can’t be the case. For one thing, people can have preferences that are intuitively immoral. If a psychopath wants to murder, that does not make murder moral.
For another, it is hard to see what purpose morality serves when there is no interaction between people. Someone who is alone on a desert island iskand has no need of rules and against murder because there is no one to murder, and no need of rules against theft because there is no one to steal, and from and so on.
If morality is a series of negotiations and trade offs about preferences, then the law can match it closely. We can answer the question “why is murder illegal” with “because murder is wrong”.