Anonymous #2 12w

I just realized the post I quoted is deleted, it was saying abortion was murder, which is defined as an unlawful killing

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Anonymous OP 12w

Legality and morality are actually not in the least bit related. I know the way we talk about justice in our society is very morality-coded, but as someone who is very well educated on the law, it’s just incorrect to say that legality is a result of morality. For instance, in antebellum America, people knew slavery was immoral, and had for centuries, but it was still legal. When the emancipation proclamation was made, it wasn’t made for moral reasons, it was meant to cripple the South in the war

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Anonymous OP 12w

Sometimes the law and morality just happen to line up

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Anonymous #2 12w

Not in the least bit related? I can agree with you that sometimes laws exist without having moral backings, or are sometimes contrary to morality, but I cannot agree that they are entirely unrelated. The vast majority of our laws exist because of views on “right” and “wrong” in the world. Laws against murder and theft have existed for thousands of years in hundreds of societies, precisely because of an innate human understanding that these are wrong. Abortion is fundamentally a moral issue.

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Anonymous OP 12w

Laws and governments enforcement of them were made to get rid of the need of private justice (think eye-for-an-eye, you offend my family we duel type shit) and to facilitate a common understanding of how to operate in society. While some laws have moral origins, the conflation legality and morality opposes the historical reality. Law has never been an attempt to enforce morality, it has just incidentally done so at times

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Anonymous OP 12w

And also, I would argue that you have a very self-centered worldview if you think all humans and all human societies have an understanding that murder is wrong, innately

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Anonymous #2 12w

Not just self-centered, historically inaccurate

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Anonymous #2 12w

Can you enlighten on the history of laws surrounding murder or the intentional killing of one another in the context of legal systems and why they come about?

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Anonymous #2 12w

Ok then, name a society in which murder, being the unjustified killing of an innocent person, has not been both immoral and illegal

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Anonymous #1 12w

I can, but I fear the word count in YikYak is not conducive to me writing a literal book, since that’s what you’re asking for

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Anonymous OP 12w

Much of Europe (historically), Sparta, many Arab societies, Vikings, need I name more?

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Anonymous OP 12w

Like even Canada lmao (again, historically)

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Anonymous #2 12w

I’m not asking for a book. I’m asking for a summarization that communicates what you mean without giving only a declarative statements about the subject you appear to be well educated in.

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Anonymous #1 12w

A summarization of a history spanning millennia is kinda hard to give and still be accurate, and also your request is vague as fuck, so I have no clue how to satisfy it. What do you want to know about the history of laws surrounding killing?

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Anonymous #1 12w

Cuz also the answer of why they came about varies wildly depending on which society we’re talking about

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Anonymous #2 12w

Yes but even in these societies killing other fellow citizens was still considered murder. There has anyways been a notion that murder is wrong and illegal. The question is who we extend those legal rights to, which is fundamentally the abortion argument

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Anonymous OP 12w

That’s what I’m saying, is no it hasn’t always been considered that

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Anonymous OP 12w

Like I literally gave you examples of societies where this was or is the case

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Anonymous #2 12w

Can you pick a couple to summarize, which are most similar in your opinion to the current legal system the United States has installed.

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Anonymous #1 12w

The most similar that comes to mind I would say is Canada, because unlike the other examples they (excluding Quebec) use a common law system like the U.S., which is funnily enough uncommon, as most countries use a civil law system. Canada is one of those examples I was talking about where originally, honoring killings and duels were very common. Extrajudicial killing was very much imbedded in society. TBH im not the Canadian legal history guy, so idk exactly when they got to changing things so

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Anonymous #2 12w

That extra judicial killing was codified and enforced as murder, but like essentially it got to a point where it was undermining the gov’ts ability to be the sole enforcer of justice, which creates all sorts of legitimacy issues

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Anonymous #2 12w

For the most part, it was a similar story with the U.S., but definitely I think they aren’t the strongest examples since pre-established European ideals were sort of imported over into the legal systems

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Anonymous #2 12w

But yeah murder being wrong is definitely not pre-installed into humans, it’s an idea that we arrived at. Which, like, thank god

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Anonymous #1 12w

You could also take a more literal approach and say, murder is defined as unlawful killing, so any time that humans existed prior to or without laws, murder didn’t even exist as a concept

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