(no subject)

[chess]

I did have a nice, informative post about What I Did Today all ready to go, but Melis appears to not want to play nice with Yamsyn again, and I can't be bothered to reboot this thing right now, so you might get it later, or might not. As to 'what happened to all those posts you were going to post', I managed to screw up my net connection something chronic by pasting about 52k of text into the password box of my Dial-Up Connection, which did funky things to my settings and generally refused to get the heck out of the box even though I deleted it and replaced it goodness-knows-how-many times. Thankfully today I hit on the slightly counter-intuitive measure of deleting the username too and trying to dial up with the blank combo, out of pretty much sheer desperation, which resulted in it forgetting the Heap Of Junk I'd pasted into it. Anyway.

Laws are enforced by physical means. Morals are enforced by mental/social means.

Laws are debateable and largely transparent; there is an obvious mechanism by which they are created. Morals are presented as absolutes which are 'self-evident', and often are not even precisely stated; they emerge from social interaction (although sometimes they are handed down so much that the social situation they were formed in is not necessarily apparent; these morals take on some of the aspects of laws, and are often called laws by their adherants).

Morals can be said to be a 'should' - something to aspire to, the highest standard to which people can be held. Laws can be said to be a 'must' - the lowest common standards to be undertaken by people.

Comments

[jaq.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I enjoyed a chapter in 'The Science of Discworld', which discussed the idea that since human society, conventions of behaviour etc. evolved over the same time as we evolved in the physical sense, and hence the two are inseperable. I rather suspect this implies laws and morals are both parts of the same scheme, just in different degrees.

[passage.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't *think* cavemen ran a legal system. Or complained about people who cut the nose off the cheese.

[jaq.livejournal.com]

Not in that sense, but since our ancestors depended on acting as a group for survival long before they could even be called human (I've been watching 'Walking with Cavemen' ;-), they must have had some ideas of what was acceptable behaviour within their society.