RoR: Forum

Makes sense to me. Essentially the tyrants have made a perversion out of law. Just like a post-modernist does the same with art.

Post 61

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 5:37pm

Teresa,

I don't intend to emphasize legislative law - I was just objecting to that portion of Ted's post.
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I am of the opinion that very, very little (maybe none) of what comes from our current federal legislators should generate any respect. It should generate a tar and feather party.
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Question: What are the the people in the house and senate passing?
Answer: Bills.

Question: What happens to the bills?
Answer: The president signs most of them.

Question: Then what happens to the bills?
Answer: They become ___________________. [Fill in the blank with one of the following: "chopped liver," "blank out," or "law"]
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There are bad apples and good apples, good people and bad people, good laws and bad laws - simple.

What is complicated is to say that if it was passed and signed into ________ but it is not up to some standard, that is NOT a law. Then what is it?
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There is nothing in what I've said that claims or even implies that people should just endure whatever crappy laws are passed. I advocate removing bad politicians, challenging the constitutionality of bad laws, tea parties, political activism, speaking out for individual rights, free enterprise and minarchism, using states rights to restrict progressivism, etc. And if it gets too much worse than it is now, if we see censorship, for example, people should either Go Galt or take up arms.

Post 62

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 5:44pm

Jim,

I grasp that Ted is defining something other than, or in addition to, what is passed by a legislature. What is frustrating is that he refuses to see that a thing passed by a legislature is also a law. What else to you call it, "chopped liver"? "Yesterday I was driving too fast and I violated the local speeding 'chopped liver.' In my neighborhood it is a 'chopped liver offense' (can't use the word 'crime') to go faster than 35 mph."

And I have been clear about the existence of natural or moral crime, but he refuses to see that when a legislature passes a bill that defines a specific act as being criminal - than that act becomes a legal crime. If you want to distinguish between moral crimes and legal crimes, that's good. Because we all have individual rights, because we are all humans, that which is a moral crime is the same no matter where we live. But we shouldn't pretend that Cuba, for example, does not have different acts defined as legal crimes than we do... well, it just doesn't make sense.

The objective root is the moral crime (I get that!) and that the function of law is to define and codify the acts that constitute moral crimes (I get that too!) But what Ted refuses to acknowledge is that the code created by the legislature is law and the acts that it outLAWs become legal crimes.

Post 63

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 5:48pm

Hi Steve, did you mean to address me instead of Jim?

Post 64

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 6:22pm

Hi John,

No, that post of mine was a response to Jim in his post 49. (I'm running a little behind :-)

Post 65

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 6:27pm

Ted,

You said, "Laws, in the fundamental sense of the word, provide the rules by which governments identify and redress actual crimes."

I am in complete agreement with that.

What you are calling laws are the things that are created by governments. And they are created to redress actual crimes - what I've been calling moral crimes, what both of us would call violations of individual rights would also fall into that category.

You said, "If the concept of crime were not genetically prior to the concept of law, legislatures would never have come into existence."

Yes and No... Government came into being for a mixture of motives. Sometimes it was to facilitate theft with less risk. Some times it was to facilitate what was wrongly imagined to be a moral good. But, YES, it was also brought into existence to provide a cure for crime (moral crime, natural crime, an agreed upon harm that is seen as wrong).

You said, "The concept of crime in the fundamental sense is prior."

Yes, again.

But then you go totally off the tracks. We are now leaving the moral and political realm of identifying a moral crime and proposing that it is politically valid to create rules to address that moral (what you call "actual") crime.

We go into law, and we craft the language that best defines, in generic form, with adequate specificity, what acts will be grouped under our newly created legal crime. If it is done honestly and objectively it will be a description that suits the spirit of the moral crime while giving accurate definition of the act involved.

This is the process of translating or understanding of a moral wrong into definitions of a legal wrong. We have to engage in the process to be able to identify, determine jurisdiction, find fact, locate exceptions, describe principles, determine objective ranges of punishment, etc. Yes, there are legal crimes. If you have bad law, then you have acts defined as crimes that are not.

You say that I am defining by non-essentials. But I am not. You are failing to recognize that your definition excludes all bad law as if it didn't exist. That is a whim-based approach - "I don't like that law, so I'm going to say that it isn't law at all - is just farce by committee. So there- nyah, nyah - You don't have any laws!"

I agree with the spirit of what Rand said, where she said "the laws of a free society . . . which exist to protect individual rights [i.e., to redress real crimes] . . . are the only ones that can properly be called laws." But I don't agree with her word choice. She should have said, "... are the only ones [laws] that can be called just laws." You will notice her use of the word "ones" and you understand that it refers to "laws" which she then says aren't "properly laws" - which is close enough for me to substitute "bad" or "not just" or some other adjective to separate the laws that are good from those that are bad and all that are a mixture and need to be worked on.

Ted, I see our disagreement in this way. You are correctly identifying the fundamental movers in this area. But you are not recognizing that the products and concretes that arise from the interplay of those fundamentals. We can have bad moral codes, they lead to bad political structures, that lead to bad laws. Law itself has a proper purpose and there is a range of proper implementations of that purpose. But law is also the mechanism by which a corrupt state disarms the individual while robbing him. Bad law is law.

Post 66

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 6:46pm

What is complicated is to say that if it was passed and signed into ________ but it is not up to some standard, that is NOT a law. Then what is it?
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It's called a "dictate."

Post 67

Monday, January 4, 2010 - 7:38pm

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Monday, January 4, 2010 - 9:16pm

Ted,

You don't seem open to anything I've said so far. So, I really don't have anything more to say.

Post 69

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - 10:47am

Like Teresa has posted in post five. A simple example would be, say a stop sign. Upon first impulse. or subjectively this may seem "tryannical" . Upon thinking about it it is fair and just as it may save your life by heeding the sign. A cynical lesson.
It also reminds one to treat others as one would want to be treated. I guess I am learning what the Greeks meant by doxa.

Post 70

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - 4:43pm

My apologies for calling you a spambot, and my thanks for your reposting that. It was much more clear and helpful.

Post 71

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - 4:21pm

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Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - 6:29pm

Steve seems to be making pretty much the rebuttals to Ted that I would make if I had a bit more time -- in particular the notion that the laws that a legislature passes are indeed laws, however much we may object to the idiocy of most of them, and however much we agree with Ted that there are other types of laws such as natural laws -- so I'll call it a day and exit this discussion.

The reason I'm strapped for time is that I'm spending my days in the "sausage factory" watching LAWmakers gear up to pass LAWS.

Post 73

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - 7:00pm

Being culturally/educationally programmed to accept some ideas over others doesn't give those accepted ideas any more credibility than a fairy tale. They are dictates, not objective laws. The legislature is powerless against a people hell bent on overturning a fascist dictate through civil disobedience, or even through force. There is nothing in a dictate worthy of obedience by the People.

Free people are not subject to dictates from tyrannies masquerading as a legitimate legislature. There is nothing legitimate about fascism, socialism, communism, or any mixture of those. Rules from bodies representing these premises are dictates, not laws. To call these rules "law" is to offer them legitimacy, and to insult the very nature of our existence.

Post 74

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - 8:30pm

Jim, if you feel you can make objective arguments, please do so. Showing up to say that you are right but won't bother to argue the point is hardly polite.

I have argued that it is historically impossible to come up with the concept law as referring to legislative acts unless the concept law already first existed independently to mean the rules by which a government addresses crime. The concept lawmaker depends on the concept law. To deny this is to steal the concept. This is a characteristic historical-epistemological Objectivist argument.

I have not been talking about natural law, since that is an entirely different question from the laws of governments which is the topic of the poll. Natural laws are facts, not rules to deal with crimes, nor something passed by lawmakers.

As I have said repeatedly, linguistic evidence shows that the concepts of theft and murder as crimes have existed since well before the end of the last ice last ice age, 13,000 BP, certainly much longer. The notion of laws as rules by which governments deal with crimes has existed from the beginning of written history, (Sumer, other nations, and well before Moses) and the idea of "passing laws" only came about late, with the rise of assemblies, well on into Greek and Roman history, and especially the modern day. Hence, the concept "rule by which government redresses crime is hsitorically and epistemologically prior to "something passed by a legislature. That is what you have to argue against. I don't think there is any way that you can argue that the woman who said that "something made by an artist is not the definition of art" would accept "something passed by a lawmaker" is the definition of law.

Given that Rand must have meant rule for dealing with crime, tell us what could she possibly have meant by the following:

"Tyranny requires non-objective laws. No matter how severe a form of government you might have, if its laws and edicts are objective, it is not a tyranny."

Did she mean that "no matter how severe a form of government you might have, if its rules for dealing with crime are well defined and equally applied, it is not a tyranny"?

Or did she mean that "no matter how severe a form of government you might have, if whatever comes out of its legislature is written down, it is not a tyranny"?

One of those two questions uses her language and the other uses language she violently rejected. That what's at question here.

Post 75

Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 11:34am

Deleted

Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 5:11pm

Ted,

Could you please address this issue from Steve?:

But I have missed where you wrote down if "objective law" is, by its nature, consistent with individual rights. I don't think that it is - and I don't see the logical progression that would make it so.

Steve, in Post 21:

In that thread, Ted says, "Objective law is defined principled law uniformly applied." The word 'principled' covers more territory than just individual rights. Objective law could ignore or violate individual rights. It would, in that case, be bad law, but it could be 'objective' rather than 'subjective.'

In your view, how flexible are principles, Steve? How much contradictory territory can a principle hold? I think "none," but the situation seems hopeless to you unless the defined principle in objective law is individual rights. Where do individual rights come from? Are they self evident enough to be used as a principle? Or are they subsumed in a broader principle, like, say...identity? Objective law isn't based on individual rights so much as it is on the principles of objective identity. Individual rights derive their place on the principle hierarchy because of that wider, broader principle. Do you agree?

Post 77

Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 6:59pm

Teressa,

Are principles flexible, or are we talking about people being flexible in applying a principle? Principles can be fuzzy in their definition, or in their understanding, and there are contradictory principles (e.g. Marxist principles vs. Capitalist principles).

But they aren't at all flexible as I understand principles. If there is a principle it is as inflexible as the clarity of its understanding and the clarity of its definition allow.

The context will determine the application of a principle and that can change in ways that would make it appear that the principle has flexibility but really doesn't - just different contexts in which it is applied properly or not.

Individual rights arise from the conditions of existence that all humans require for existence proper to man. E.g., it is a condition of human existence to act on ones judgement, and if we have the right to live, then we have the right to act on our judgement. This is the way we translate an "is" into a "should."

You said, "Objective law isn't based on individual rights so much as it is on the principles of objective identity." I agree that an objective law isn't necessarily based upon individual rights and that the adjective "objective" refers to consistency with the principle of identity (and with being universal, and being described clearly - not ambiguously, etc.)

You said, "Individual rights derive their place on the principle hierarchy because of that wider, broader principle. Do you agree?"

If I understand you correctly, yes, I agree. That is, individual rights, being ethical, are based upon more elemental principles that are metaphysical and epistemological.

Those are my observations on your questions - if I understood you correctly. I have a book called Objectivity and the Rule of Law by Kramer. It isn't a work applying Rand's Objectivism, but it is dealing directly with what does "objective law" mean. (I don't agree with many of the author's view points, but he does a good job clarifying the many meanings that "objective" can carry in this context.)

Post 78

Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 7:44pm

Are principles flexible, or are we talking about people being flexible in applying a principle?

Without reading the rest of your post, (because I have another long day planned tomorrow) it should be obvious that principles are useless unless they're applied some how. If people are "flexible" when applying a principle, it's no longer a the same principle, and wouldn't be conducive to predicting the out come of an action or possible penalties involved. If adhering to life serving principles in a strict and severe manner is impossible because people will always attempt to make them flexible, this whole conversation is moot.

Post 79

Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 7:44pm