A legislator with a healthy legal consciousness must integrate the meaning of the laws they enact into the depths of the Christian legal tradition and the tradition of America.
Good piece. One of the moral challenges I give my HS philosophy students is: "Is it illegal to beat up an old lady and steal her purse because it's wrong? Or is it wrong because it's illegal?" It's obviously a trick question, since the latter is pretty much nonsensical, but when they answer the former, my next question is, "why is it wrong?"
Boy is there squirming. It's amazing how reluctant even my nominally Christian students are applying their Christian moral code to the origin of law. My students are almost all fundamentalist Protestants, so their families lack the background of Aquinas. (They see the problem, but lack the tools to solve it.) Most need to be guided to an individual derivation of the basics of natural and divine law before they can see human law as a reflection of that.
Augustine tells a story in City of God about a pirate supposedly talking to Alexander the Great (paraphrasing): “Who are you to seize the whole Earth? I do it with a petty ship and am called a robber. You do it with a great fleet and are called an emperor.'" Unless law is an extension of a moral order, it is simply an exercise in power and rapidly devolves into tyranny. (Which is why the pirate is wrong.)
I sure wish I understood this as well as you do when I was your age.
Good piece. One of the moral challenges I give my HS philosophy students is: "Is it illegal to beat up an old lady and steal her purse because it's wrong? Or is it wrong because it's illegal?" It's obviously a trick question, since the latter is pretty much nonsensical, but when they answer the former, my next question is, "why is it wrong?"
Boy is there squirming. It's amazing how reluctant even my nominally Christian students are applying their Christian moral code to the origin of law. My students are almost all fundamentalist Protestants, so their families lack the background of Aquinas. (They see the problem, but lack the tools to solve it.) Most need to be guided to an individual derivation of the basics of natural and divine law before they can see human law as a reflection of that.
Augustine tells a story in City of God about a pirate supposedly talking to Alexander the Great (paraphrasing): “Who are you to seize the whole Earth? I do it with a petty ship and am called a robber. You do it with a great fleet and are called an emperor.'" Unless law is an extension of a moral order, it is simply an exercise in power and rapidly devolves into tyranny. (Which is why the pirate is wrong.)
I sure wish I understood this as well as you do when I was your age.