Thursday, October 22, 2009
Internal v. External Justification
According to Fuller's account of the internal procedural aspects of morality when pertaining to the law, I do not believe Fuller's claim that "when men are compelled to explain and justify thier decisions, the effect will generally be to pull those decisions towards goodness," can be proven completely. This can be substantiated when it comes to external justification to another person but I do not believe that all crimes can be justified by the perpetrator internally. Just because a criminal tries to justify the crime they committed to the outside world does not mean that they believe within themselves that they were doing the right thing and that their actions were legitimated with a "good" purpose. Fuller's claim makes me wonder if all people actually do have a conscious and know for what reason their crimes were actually committed. Obviously once one is caught and even convicted with a crime, they are going to try and reason towards a purpose that has moral and right backing. They are going to try and justify thier actions to the best of their ability and "towards goodness." But, I believe that everyone knows the selfish reasoning behind thier actions and that thier own internal justification can be pointed towards immoral reasoning. A criminal is by default someone who commits wrong so the likelihood of their admittance of criminal intention to be towards "goodness" is very high compared to doing the correct thing and admitting the wrong justifications for why their actions occured.
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I think that the minimal definition of a criminal is someone who has "broken" the law. I emphasize broken not because there is any question about whether a law has been violated, but because in some instances there can be a question of whether anyone ACTED to break the law. Retroactive and secret or unpublicized legislation provide good examples: If tomorrow, it becomes retroactively illegal to wear green shirts (P.S. this actually happened in Iran earlier this year), then in what sense did I "break" the law the day before? Similarly, if riot police declare it illegal to demonstrate on a certain street after a permit for demonstration has already been granted and this legislation is communicated among the police but not demonstrators, then in what sense have the demonstrators "acted" illegally? (This scenario, too, played out earlier this year in Pittsburgh.)
ReplyDeleteSince it's questionable in what sense these "criminals" acted and whether they could have acted in a legal fashion, it seems reasonable to think that if lawmakers or those charged with enforcing the law had had to give some justification for their legal decisions that this would have eliminated the outbreak of many "crimes."
In regard to the previous comment... I'm fairly certain that expost-fact or "retroactive" laws are unconstitutional. Therefore, one who has a broken a law not yet made really has not broken that law at all, even after the law is put into place. Fuller says that if "'we imagine a country in which all laws are retroactive' then 'the constant state of anarchy' in which such people live could hardly be considered lawful". As for your second example, where the law prohibiting the demostration has not been publicized, Fuller lists such a happening as one of the eight routes to failure for any legal system. Therefore blame for this should fall on the institution, and not on the public who wasnt made aware of the newly passed legislation. With this being said, I agree with the original post that all criminals feel they can externally justify their actions to the public, however on an internal scale, they know that they have done something wrong.
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