Basing one’s morality around legality is no way to live.

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One of the greatest evils that I see Christians constantly doing is  supporting any sort of evil that you can imagine “because it is the law”. Well I have news for you, writing words on paper can not turn evil into good.  The biggest offenders that I see are the thugs in blue. They like the guards at Auschwitz are “order followers”  that have not yet seen a “law” that they will not enforce.

~MFP

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One of my favorite sayings comes from the now defunct web-comic A Softer World. “It was a sweet day when I realized,” reads the comic, “legal and illegal had nothing to do with right and wrong.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I wish I could say it was because I had faced some grand moral dilemma that had brought me to a greater understanding of the crucial distinctions between when a thing is legal and when a thing is right, or when a thing is illegal and when it is wrong. There are certainly a lot of issues alive in our culture at the moment that seem to turn on those distinctions.

The Difference Between Legal and Right

But my recent thinking about right and wrong, legal and illegal, wasn’t inspired by any of that. Instead, it was inspired by a friend’s casual reference to the popular podcast, My Favorite Murder. I find true crime stuff intriguing, was about to get into the car for a three hour drive, and wanted something to listen to, so I downloaded a few episodes and listened to them in the car.

It’s a fine podcast and a funny one. I like it. The hosts–two comedians–discuss and theorize about a few different murders in every episode, covering everything from the details of the crime, to the investigation, to different theories about unsolved cases. The three-hour car trip flew.

But I felt increasingly uneasy.

For me, listening to this podcast in the way that I was doing it was wrong. So I stopped.

I wasn’t uneasy because I was suddenly worried about potential murderers lurking in every dark corner. I was uneasy because I wasn’t sure that listening to this podcast was right for me. I was driving along safely and happily listening to people talk about some of the worst things that humans have done to each other. I wasn’t doing it to learn anything, or in hopes of making the tragedies less. I wasn’t even doing it in order to practice my Smithian ability to sympathize with the sufferings of others.

I was being entertained. By murder. Real murder.

Somehow, the distinction between reality and the fictional murders in the Marvel Comics Universe that I enjoy so much, or in the mysteries I read so often, began to seem too much for me to treat the one as I treat the other. For me, listening to this podcast in the way that I was doing it was wrong. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who treats tragedy as entertainment.

So I stopped.

It is perfectly legal to listen to My Favorite Murder. It should be. And I can imagine all kinds of people with all kinds of good reasons for listening to it that would make me nod and agree that it’s the right thing for them to do. I’d object loudly if any Helen Lovejoys read this column as a reason to condemn the podcast and petition to have it taken off the air.

But unlike laws—which ought to be thin enough and general enough to apply to (as close as possible) all of us (as often as possible) all of the time–moral reasoning about what is right and wrong, should be thick and specific. It should be contextual—about the time and circumstance and the people involved—in a way that laws should not be.

Trolley Problem

That’s why, when I found myself in a real life enactment of the classic philosophical conundrum of the “trolley problem” recently, it was easy to decide what to do. I was headed pell mell down hill at top speed on my bike. A family—Mom, two elementary school kids, and Dad with a baby in a baby carrier—were headed down another hill, equally pell mell, right for me.

You can’t make a law for that kind of situation.

Of course I hit my brakes, ditched my bike, and crashed onto the asphalt. Because, for me, taking that damage myself was the right thing to do, rather than risk injuring the family headed towards me. It wasn’t a question of calculating the costs the family would experience if I hit them, and contrasting that with the benefit I would accumulate from avoiding a severe case of road rash and a spectacular set of bruises.

It wasn’t right to hit them. So I did my best not to.

You can’t make a law for that kind of situation. It’s too clunky. And it probably would have been legal for me to hit them, anyway. But it would not have been right.

Merely Legal

Right and wrong aren’t inflexible rules; they are responses to the world as we move through it.

Sometimes, maybe most times, all you can do is do the best that you can, in the given circumstances, to make the kind of decision that allows you to be the person you can live with being. That’s why I’m never impressed when a public figure—caught doing something shady—reminds us that he or she hasn’t done anything illegal. It may well be true, but mere legality is a lousy way to be a human being.

Much of human life, possibly most of human life, and almost certainly the most important parts of human life, are not usefully discussed in terms of what is legal and illegal. We know that. That’s why we write books like Les Miserables and make movies like Loving. Right and wrong have nothing to do with legal and illegal. They are complicated and personal. Right and wrong aren’t inflexible rules; they are responses to the world as we move through it and to people as we interact with them.

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Sarah Skwire

Sarah Skwire is the Literary Editor of FEE.org and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Email

Our lack of Constitutional knowledge means that believing in protecting the rights of minorities does not actually protect them when they are outvoted.

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This may be one of the most important ideas that you are presented with this year.  Knowledge is the answer to the dilemma that the country finds itself. Americans are currently one of the most dumbed down populations on the face of the earth. In that vein I ask you to take a look this 8 hour Constitution Class presented by Michael Badnarik:  Constitution Class taught by Michael Badnarik

The  United Nations “war on drugs” exemplifies the tyranny of the majority better than anything else that I can think of at this time.  We have also had a  devastating and continueing war on firearms that was made possible by the tyranny of the majority.  The criminals over at BATF  have played not a small part in this continueing trampling of our rights by the majority.

~MFP

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Constitution Day—September 17—marks the anniversary of its 1787 signing. Students will be taught about it…but not because of its importance. It is now a mandatory topic for every educational institution receiving federal aid. However, what won’t be taught is the irony of that requirement, which originated from the man then-described as the Senate’s leading Constitutional scholar, while clearly conflicting with the Constitution.

In 2004, Senator Robert Byrd (D.-WV) added this requirement to a pork-filled spending bill that was blatantly inconsistent with Americans’ general welfare. It also clearly overstepped the 10th Amendment’s restriction of the federal government to only its enumerated powers.

His “solution” aside, Byrd was correct about Americans’ inadequate Constitutional knowledge. As one National Constitution Center poll concluded, only one in six of us claimed detailed knowledge of the Constitution—despite the fact that two-thirds said it was “absolutely essential” to have.

Lack of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

In other words, Americans know too little about our Constitution to maintain the freedoms it was designed to protect. Instead, our ignorance leads us to sacrificing rights out of undue deference to majority rule.

Alexander Hamilton asserted that “Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy.”

America’s Constitution did not endorse majority rule. Our founders did believe in voting to select who should be entrusted with the power of government, but the more important and prior question they addressed was: “What powers do the people delegate to the federal government to exercise on their behalf?” That is why so much of the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, is devoted to what the government is not allowed to do, regardless of majority sentiment. As Jefferson said, our founders fought not for democracy, but for a government “tied down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

In fact, our founders had a great distrust of majority rule. Alexander Hamilton asserted that “Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy.” James Madison said “democracies…have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Thomas Jefferson warned that “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” and that “The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.”

That is why the Constitution contains multiple non-majority rules to protect Americans against federal abuses, such as presidential veto power and the super-majorities required to change the Constitution. Its defense is the rationale for the Supreme Court’s power to strike down unconstitutional laws, regardless of how many congressional votes they received.

“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote.”

Despite our founders’ antipathy toward pure majority rule, many today feel that our founders’ opposition to unlimited democracy can be squared with political determination of everything by adding the phrase, “also protecting the rights of the minority.” However, as Ayn Rand put it, “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” Consequently, our lack of Constitutional knowledge means that believing in protecting the rights of minorities does not actually protect them when they are outvoted.

The unwise habit of deference to political majorities results in those rights being steamrollered whenever more than 50% vote to do so.

Since Americans don’t clearly understand their Constitutional rights against government abuse, the unwise habit of deference to political majorities results in those rights being steamrollered whenever more than 50% vote to do so. Examples are plentiful because—despite the Constitution’s imposition of strictly limited, enumerated federal powers—there is no area it does not now reach, if not dominate. And with our protections eroding, majority voting controls more and more of what our founders thought they had made off-limits to political determination.

Sadly, as we can’t effectively defend what we are only vaguely aware of, American inattention to the highest law of the land puts our most essential rights and liberties at risk. We may think we have inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence asserts. But those rights are protected by the Constitution only if we know what they are and we remember that the federal government was not granted power to take them away based on any simple majority vote. Unless we once again take our rights as seriously as our founders and vigorously defend the Constitutional safeguards that maintain them—even against majority pressures—the system of self-government our founders left us will continue to erode. But when we don’t even recognize the irony of a federal mandate to promote understanding of the Constitution, especially when it is inconsistent with the Constitution, we are unprepared to do anything to effectively preserve its protections against government abuse.

Original article

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Gary M. Galles

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.