Saturday, October 24, 2009

Average out Morality

What we do in the United States is average out the morality and assign an 'appropriate' punishment to the crime. It is easy to take murder, rape, and the alike and explain why there is a very large punishment. This is because the average amount of people think that this is an extremely horrible thing to do. And to take the other side, such as speeding, the majority amount of people believe that this is a regular crime that can be committed without serious punishments as long as you don't go over the speed limit too much. Now I believe, all the crimes in between the light and heavy ones, are all averaged out and have a direct correlation between the amount of punishment and the level of morality that the average people think. That is where judges come in play. They try to take the general public's point of view as well as precedents and the law today. When the general public's point of view changes, that is when you will see punishment levels change. That is why I believe people who say morality has nothing to do with law are full of crap. Sure People follow reasons other than morality, but the fact that there is a punishment correlated with morality allows morality to come in play. The reasons people follow the law will not always be consistent. Take the most arguably conservative group in the US and you will see that they break the law all the time, the Amish. They live a humble life and follow morals. Not often, but murder and other serious crimes happen within there communities between one another. Now they have morals of being clean, humble, and boring but things can happen. I think that morality is the basis for why people follow the law, but there are so many instances where even I break or follow the same law for different reasons. Like I said in my last blog, if I speed there are tons of reasons why I can or cannot justify my actions. If I am late, if I don't care at the time, because I don't want to get in an accident, because I don't want to get a ticket, because I think it's wrong at the time, and the list goes on and on. There are far too many things that can affect decisions and I think if someone tries to narrow it down to one thing, they are just wasting their time.

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