The Answer/Solution: Only enact legitimate laws.
In a society that strives to be free, which is to say that the people of that society believe that individuals should have as much freedom as is compatible with an orderly society, it is important that the power of the government to make laws regarding individuals' behavior be specifically and rigidly constrained. My theory of good governance says that there are only three legitimate categories of laws limiting personal behavior (aside from a vague class of regulatory laws that don't fit into my model and so I'm setting aside for now, such as air traffic laws, interstate commerce laws, etc.). The legitimate laws of society fall, I would therefore say, into three specific categories:
Protect people from one another (murder, rape, robbery, etc. Most crimes fall into this category.)Into which category do laws about assisted suicide fall? Or, said another way, how are the civil rights of the members of society at large threatened or damaged or compromised by old Mr. Middlecamp deciding to check out a little ahead of schedule? Who is the victim of Mr. Middlecamp's "crime?"
Protect people from the government (trial by jury, habeas corpus, search and seizure laws, etc.)
Protect the government from people (treason, sedition, laws against overthrow of the government)
1 comment:
Outstanding insights! I love your
three categories model (and think that most of the regulatory laws that you eluded to would fit into the first category, BTW).
Who are the victims for the vast majority of people currently in prison? Individual drug use, or prostitution, or pornography, using a vibrator in Texas, all seem to me to fall under the same umbrella as Mr. Middlecamp's scenario, except that my examples seem like a whole lot more fun. And war profiteering would clearly meet the criteria of a crime. So would spam. (So might all advertising, actually.)
Seriously: I wish we, as a society, would categorize our laws into those three categories, and drop all the ones that don't fit.
Like the activity of war, for example...
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