Legal Doesn't Always Mean Ethical

It goes without saying that what is legal is not always ethical. 

A proper legal system would be built upon valid ethical principles so that there was complete correspondence between the legal and the ethical. When people accept ethical subjectivism as valid, they have no means at their disposal to assess the validity of laws because they implicitly or explicitly rejected the notion of universal principles.

In a proper philosophical hierarchy, ethics comes before politics. Out of a scientific ethics derived from the facts of reality comes the concept of natural rights and natural law - namely the identification of legal principles to enforce social behaviour that are derived from ethical principles and the moral rights of individuals. From this perspective, the primary purpose of law is to protect individual rights.

Most people, however, when thinking about social issues, don't consider ethics at all. They begin with politics, i.e., the law, and then move backwards to make ethical judgments. This process reverses the proper method and makes ethics subordinate to politics. The inevitable result of this methodology is that it leaves no way to pass ethical judgment on political issues. It results in a political and social system that embraces the initiation of physical force as a legitimate technique to achieve desired social ends. This is the political system that the world is floundering in today - a system that is systemically unethical because it fully repudiates the validity of natural law and natural rights.

I recently came across an excellent article that touches on this subject by John Stossel, ABC News "20/20" co-anchor and author, that discusses the political from an ethical perspective, with the great title The Scandal Is What's Legal. 

There are a couple of memorable lines in the article. 

The first is from H.L. Menken: "Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." 

The second relates to the unethical means adopted by politicians and their bureaucratic support networks and the fundamental difference between them and the rest of us. For the rest of us, the initiation of the use of force is deemed to be unlawful and unethical. But the heart and soul of modern statist government depends on the negation of this principle because the use of force is at the heart of its mission to serve the people. Stossel writes: "Politicians, bureaucrats and the people they 'rescue' get money through force – taxation. Don't think taxation is force? Try not paying, and see what happens."

The initiation of force is the antithesis of freedom, and of ethical behaviour. 

With so much talk in the press about "business ethics" and the supposed lack thereof, one can only wonder why there is so little talk of "government ethics" and of holding politicians and government leaders to the same high standards of ethical accountability that they demand of others. Perhaps they think that ethical behaviour among those engaged in honest and voluntary trade is expected, while they expect others to recognize, as they themselves do, that there is no hypocrisy in the lack of ethical behaviour amongst today's breed of politician. Their plundering and destruction of the wealth of others is, after all, perfectly legal.