Should the government legislate morality?

Does a society have a responsibilty provide some level of care for it's populous?

I think it does.

We may disagree on the level of care. Is is only law and order? Personal safety? Is it only military? Does it extend to medical care? Basic housing? Education? Colour TV? Starting threads on the BBS?

I don't follow your connection to legislating morality. There's a morality component in everything. Should we have no laws?

How much govenment do you want?

How do you keep it accountable?

That's where the debate comes in.

 

Criminal law is all about the disadvantaged. If everyone was able to defend themselves against theft and assault and other crimes then there would be no need for a criminal justice system. It’s very existence is to protect the disadvantaged, but what I hear you referring to now is universality, so lets look at school taxes for example. Every property owner pays them but not everybody has children that go to school. Is this fair? Our society says it is because we feel that educating children is good for society as a whole. (I’ve got some good Thomas Jefferson quotes on this if you like). And I guess the bottom line, whether there is a moral component or not, is that this is what the people want, so the government has agreed to do it. It is likewise with assistance to the disadvantaged, most people feel it’s good for society as a whole, but the bottom line is that we want it and that’s why the government provides it.

How about agreeing to hire more police officers or to build a new school or firehouse? This is not just pork spending. That’s a pretty cynical view you have. And note that this wasn’t your point in the first place. It was a point I raised because it explains, apart from morality, why the government does things. It does things because it makes an agreement with the electorate to do certain things that the electorate wants done.

I don’t think anyone can force morals on anyone else. Morals generally refer to beliefs and you can force anyone to believe anything. You can force compliance but that’s a very different idea.


I read the first half that article and I think I see better where you’re coming from, but I think that article confuses several different issues. Giving one off aid packages to Bob and Sue and Pedro isn’t very efficient. That’s little better than having a patchwork of charities to deal with social issues like the ones discussed. What you need is an effective social safety net that will prevent people from falling too far and that will give them the resources they need to get back on their feet again, or in the case of disabled people I would say they need enough to live a healthy and dignified life. This isn’t the whole answer to the problem, though, as spending quality time with disadvantaged or disabled people is just as important as providing them with the essentials of life, and this is where citizens can make the free moral choice to give of themselves to someone else. (I agree with Jean Vanier that in a very real sense a disabled person’s disability is their gift to society, btw).

I have to say that I find this fixation on the constitution a bit odd. The constitution is a living document and it was always meant to be a living document that would change with the times, and it has been amended many times. I don’t see how it comes into play at this level. If we’re talking about slavery or the fundamental rights of the press then the constitution gives guidance to the courts on such matters. I don’t see how it factors into an issue like this.

 

The question then becomes, where is the balance? Not providing the essentials of life and access to good education hurts the economy because it keeps people poor, desperate and marginalised and keeps many of them from reaching their full potential and contributing that potential to society. (Wasn’t there a thread here not long about the lack of social mobility in the US?). This marginalization also promotes destructive subcultures like gangs which create a lot of crime and cost citizens directly and indirectly though the costs of incarceration.

So, like anything else, and morality aside, it pays for a country to invest in its people, and you have to invest up front in order to get paid back later.

 

I recognize that the government is not the perfect expression of the will of the people. You're right there. I didn't say, however, that legislation produces voluntary compliance; I said legislation is the governmental fruit of corporate voluntary compliance. At the source of the disagreement here, I think, is that you are seeing the populace as a collection of 260 million individuals, whereas I am characterizing as a single force with a will of its own.

The government decides for everyone with the power everyone has agreed to cede to that government. The government is your representative and acts in your behalf, even when you don't agree with what it does. You have implicitly agreed (or are under compulsion to agree) to be bound by what the government has decided for you. Thus you are responsible for any moral choice, good or bad, that your government makes in your name.

I agree that the will of the people, expressed in government, is often out-of-sync with the will of an individual who makes up part of that body. I don't deny that. I'm simply talking about a different entity, a corporate whole and not a collection of individuals.

And, I'd say, given my philosophy regarding government, that yes it is the government's responsibility to make these choices for us. This is the nature of government -- to represent and protect the interests of the society at the expense of the individual. And this is the one thing that is really nice about the representative democracy we use here -- it responds to the desire of the populace. We by-and-large want the disadvantaged to be aided by our government dollars and so they are. As a group, we've decided that's where we want our money going to. If it is government by the people, why shouldn't we be able to do what we want?

 

Good post. I concur.

 

Really? I didn't think anyone would agree with my crackpot ideas. Maybe it's no accident that when someone finally does agree with me, it's a Canadian!

 

Governments the world over (yes, including ours) already legislates morality, and that will always be the case.

 

It always has and it always will

Rocket River

 

And we all know Canadians are cracked.

 

If there's evidence you broke the law from the officer on duty, I think it's fair that you or your insurance coverage pays a brunt of the costs. So in a medically socialized world, there would be "risk coverages" from insurance plans for those who have to speed, smoke, or excessively eat.

This is more passive government guidance than active (such as sin taxes, prohibition, and enforcement). It gives the appearance of choice.

 

Rhester;

I think the problem you are running into is that you are defining morality too narrowly and only really looking at one issue of whether the government shoudl mandate charity. Grizzled's point is very valid that having laws of any sort is essentially government legislating morality. Making murder a crime is a moral statement that people shouldn't kill each other and the fact that you could still kill someone and a jury find your innocent or the DA not even charge you shows that even there moral judgements come to play.

Also in regard to your charity issue while the government doesn't mandate charity it does legally encourage it by providing tax deductions for charitiable contributions. So right there the government is already legislating morality. Its not forcing someone to be charitable but under law it has been decided that morality in terms of charity should be rewarded. That's a stance that I think few would disagree with.

The deeper question IMO isn't whether government should be legislating morality but whose morality should it be legislating? Its clear that in something like murder there is an essentially universal acceptance that it is wrong to murder someone but there are a whole range of moral issues that there aren't universal agreement on. That is what people usually mean when they say "Government shouldn't legislate morality." that government shouldn't be legislating on a moral issues that have less than overwhelming support.

One more thought. I also disagree with you that charity brings no material benefit to the one making the donation so it is a religious act. Charity might not bring an immediate benefit but by creating goodwill and fostering an image of decency that helps the person in their dealings with others. Also by helping the least among us builds a better society that has more opportunity and less crime.

 

The government shouldn't actively babysit us and definitely shouldn't be trusted to handle our money. 6 years of government control from a party that has fiscal conservatism in their principles has shown us that.

What they should do instead is enact programs which allow people who wish to be regulated, such as quitting cigarettes, to register for sin licences or similar voluntary yet government enforced measures.

I strongly believe that legislating morality is a quick and easy looking fix that reflects the poor shortcut attitude of our society. However, there are those who need that guiding hand. Soft paternalist policies give flexibility to those who find blanket restrictions suffocating.

 

I think the laws should be in place to help make a healthy society, not to legislate morality. A healthy society might mean all can have access to affordable health care etc. If there is sickness, disease running rampant because people can not get healthcare it will eventually affect you directly. So helping others is helping yourself. Hopefully society realizes this.

 

I don’t believe that people are intentionally skirting your issue. I for one am not yet sure I’m grasping the core questions that you’re asking.

Again, I don’t feel like I’m catching your point, but here is how I would answer this. Asking someone to take a family into their home and bear all the costs is different than paying a relatively small amount annually as essentially insurance in case such a disaster happened to you or anyone else. Under most circumstances I can think of the government shouldn’t demand that you take someone into your home, but that doesn’t happen now so I’m not sure where you’re going with that.

Also note that, as SC and others have pointed out, this is how democracy works. The people make decisions about what services they want the government to provide for them and then the government is given the power and obligation to implement them. If citizens refuse to respect the democratic wishes of their countrymen they aren’t necessarily criminal, but they are anti-democratic.

I can probably answer for bnb on this one because we are both Canadians and basic health care is provided by the government here. I personally haven’t volunteered to spend time with disadvantaged or elderly or disabled people in the hospital but people do do this.

At the risk of taking this off on another tangent, I believe that universal health care in the 21st century is something that every first world government is obliged to provide regardless of the will of the people, although that’s a moot point because I believe that even in the US the majority of the people want it but they just can’t decide on how it should be done. I would categorise it along with racial equality in this way. I think that in this day and age it’s now understood as a basic human right that all governments who can provide should provide.

I’m not sure where the random selection part come in comes in. Do you have laws there that require you to buy liability insurance for your car? It’s a similar idea to that. Everyone pays for insurance through their taxes but only some will be unfortunate enough to have to use it.

Yes, I believe that homeless people should be provided with food and shelter, and no I don’t think everyone should have a job with an equal wage. It doesn’t cost you anything out of pocket to see a doctor in Canada.

Where people have the freedom to choose then they have the freedom to choose. Where the people of a country have decided that they wish the government to establish a certain policy or program, be that requiring people to drive on the right hand side of the road or pay into a single insurer health care system through their taxes, then idividuals cannot choose. This is the nature of democracy, as opposed to anarchy. And note that both can be moral choices. When the people of Canada chose to implement a universal health care program, which was close to 40 years ago now, it was very much a collective moral decision. The push for it was even lead by a Christian minister.

I would certainly say that I feel good about the moral decision that my country has made to provide universal health care. It’s something that Canadians definitely take pride in. The individual who led the fight for it, Tommy Douglas, was even recently voted the greatest Canadian of all time in a CBC competition. Note that his party was never in power or even the official opposition nationally, but Canadians embraced his idea and eventually the governing parties of the day did too.
http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/

You’re quite wrong of course. And again I can’t grasp where you’re coming from on this. Pretty well every law and rule has a moral component of some sort, and many people are very happy that many laws exist. You seem to be advocating for some kind of state of anarchy or lawlessness. I trust that you’re not but I’m really not grasping the point you’re trying to make.

? I’m not following you at all here.

Yes.

Are you trying to separate out support for disadvantaged people out as a special case of some sort? I’m not sure why you would want to do that. Suggesting that governments have a right and even a responsibility to respond to citizen’s wishes in other areas but not when it comes to disadvantaged people seems like a very tough argument to me. I don’t understand why you would even want to do that.

This is the same issue. It’s done because the people have decided that they want to do it. And unless you’re an anti-democratic anarchist you respect the will of the people. Within the democratic process you can protest and lobby and try to convince enough people that this isn’t the right thing to do and thereby perhaps change the government policy, but if you believe in democracy you need to respect the will of the people and obey the laws and rules of their government.

In a healthy democracy the government represents the will of the people. If it didn’t the people would vote it out. The government isn’t a “final authority” of the people’s morality. It is a reflection of the people’s morality. These are really the basics of democracy rhester. I find your position very confusing.

Further to our discussion to this point, of course they should. This is exactly what governments do, and what they are elected by the people to do. Every law and rule has a moral component. If they didn’t they would do nothing and there would be anarchy.

In a democracy the government is a servant, of course, not a god. This was an interesting question in Christ’s time then kings and emperors ruled, and it can be an interesting question in totalitarian states. We could get into “give to Cesar what is Cesar’s” type discussions in those cases, but in a democracy the government reflects the will of the people. It is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Do you recognise that phrase?

It’s very hard to follow the point you’re trying to make rhester. In a lot of ways you come off sounding like an anti-democratic anarchist, but I know this isn’t what you believe. Since every law a rule has a moral component I think the "Don't legislate morality" calls are about moral choices that don’t impact the rest of society, like perhaps what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home. I don’t see any way it would relate to social programs for the disadvantaged as that is the kind of thing that has a very big impact on society, and they are also really no different in principle than many other government programs. I’m really not following why you are trying to single this group of programs out.

 

I’m really not following your issue here rhester. I think there are two key points that need to be stressed here.

1) Neither a government nor anyone else can force someone to love someone else. You can’t legislate that.

2) In a democracy it’s the government’s obligation to implement policies that the people want implemented. The people have decided that they want the government to provide assistance for disadvantaged people, therefore it is the government’s obligation, never mind its right, to do so.

 

I think more Canadians are pot pipe people than crack pot people, but I don’t do any of that stuff anyway so it makes no difference to me.

 

Rhester;

I'm going to apologize in advance because I don't have the time to read through you post with enough depth or reply with enough depth to answer your questions.

To give something of a quick answer I would say I would be against a direct law that mandates charity primarily because of I think legal force involved in making doing that would breed resentment among many and discourage charity. I also would be against government mandating housing homeless or refugees because that to me would represent essentially a government seizure of my property without due process and akin to the garrisoning of troops.

That said government already forces people to be charitably indirectly since a certain portion of tax revenues already go to paying for exactly what you are describing. At the same time the tax deductions provide another form of indirect legislation since you are taking money out of what you would've paid in taxes and using that for charity with the blessing and encouragement of the government. The issue you are getting at is whether government should be allowed to directly force people to be charitable rather than indirectly or through encouraging people with tax breaks. Whether indirectly or directly government is still legislating morality.