where (I believe) the legal system was built for the purpose of assisting with right and wrong.
Sorry, still disagreeing. The justice system enforces a particular set of rules for a society. It's purpose is not to assist, but to enforce which seems obvious to me. The purpose of enforcement is to shape the behaviour by providing strong disincetives to certain activities declared criminal.
There is, of course, a correlation between what most of the population considers to be morally wrong and what is illegal. But it's only a correlation and not a perfect match. The justice system is also bent to serve the interests of the powerful at the expense of the powerless.
the subjective right and wrong at the time would have said that these actions are wrong
I don't know about that. If it's "subjective", doesn't it depend on the person? Are you willing to accept the moral opinion of the majority as "right"?
The legal system is not meant to be anything but in line with right and wrong
Surely it is. It is meant to provide a society with a set of rules to keep it running, keep certain social groups powerful and other powerless (aka keeping the proles under control), etc. etc.
Take, I don't know, say, licensing laws which regulate which professions must have a license to practice and which need not. Is there really a moral distiniction there?
The laws are many and their number is literally uncountable. I am not willing to believe that all these thousands of laws and regulations stem from an attempt to "assist with right and wrong".
Do the laws stem from an attempt to assist with right and wrong? this question should be easy to answer; it would only be a matter of finding one that does not (from the uncountable set). I will not actively look; but keep my eye out as I encounter legalese and continue to ask the question.
While the law can have other goals i.e. control of people by other people. I don't think this is a primary goal and might be a subversion of the purpose (just because someone could and did does not mean that is the way it should be.)
I sincerely hope I never find any active law that exists for purposes other than to assist with right and wrong. (otherwise I should be motivated to try to change it)
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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