All of our laws should be founded in morality. The catch is this: law should be founded in moral consensus- no smarmy minorities trying to sneak in laws that are against other people's beliefs.
Yet moral values are, by their very nature, subjective, and therefore unlikely to be subject to universal consensus. And if you simply accept a moral value because more tan half the population accepts it, you run the risk of what Thomas Jefferson called "the tyrrany of the many over the few."Just because 51% of the people in a given place agree that X is immoral does not necessarily mean that X is, in fact, immoral.
You also will quickly encounter a difficulty when you try to reach morality by consensus: whose consensus do you use? A community's? An entire nation's? It's quite common for one region in a nation to subscribe to different moral values from another region. Even in a single town, you can have a problem, because any town of any decent size is not really a community--it's a collection of hundreds or perhaps thousands of communities, some of which overlap and some of which don't. In Atlanta, for example, the moral values of the BDSM community are significantly at odds with the moral values of the evangelical community; if you accept the notion of morality by consensus, then whichever community happens to be largest wins.
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Date: 2007-02-12 10:54 pm (UTC)Yet moral values are, by their very nature, subjective, and therefore unlikely to be subject to universal consensus. And if you simply accept a moral value because more tan half the population accepts it, you run the risk of what Thomas Jefferson called "the tyrrany of the many over the few."Just because 51% of the people in a given place agree that X is immoral does not necessarily mean that X is, in fact, immoral.
You also will quickly encounter a difficulty when you try to reach morality by consensus: whose consensus do you use? A community's? An entire nation's? It's quite common for one region in a nation to subscribe to different moral values from another region. Even in a single town, you can have a problem, because any town of any decent size is not really a community--it's a collection of hundreds or perhaps thousands of communities, some of which overlap and some of which don't. In Atlanta, for example, the moral values of the BDSM community are significantly at odds with the moral values of the evangelical community; if you accept the notion of morality by consensus, then whichever community happens to be largest wins.