| Subject: bertha swallowed a dictionary - a musing on weed smoking |
Author:
aileen
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Date Posted: 19:58:50 12/27/01 Thu
this has to be a joke... But I am guessing the writer had a damn fine time writing it. Fortunately my vocabulary is extensive enough I slogged through this... others on PNS may not be so fortunate LOL
In a way, Mahtab, I feel guilty. Because you have stressed the collective so strongly in your postings, I felt the need to redress the imbalance with an emphasis on the individual.
But actually, what is critical to the credibility and maintenance of any legal system is the dynamic between individual and collective values.
Your reference to public versus private behaviour recreates the Kantian dichotomy between the public citizen and the private individual. I find this dichotomy problematic because it lays the foundation for a potentially wide gulf between public and private values. Existential duplicity can result, with values espoused in public being repudiated at home. This creates an intolerable disharmony in the individual, which surely is noxious to the promotion of moral integrity of that individual.
The problem to be resolved is thus one of maintaining the balance between public and private values. Your example of the cannabis smoker is interesting in that respect. The miscreant's private,i.e.furtive, use of the weed, as you point out, acknowledges the validity of the law prohibiting its use. Other common infractions (driving and tax offences) fall into the same category.
But what happens when the values encoded in the law differ too widely from privately held values and when the popular respect required to maintain the law ceases to exist? Under such instances, laws quickly become unenforceable and/or unenforced, and/or the regime enacting them is removed from power and/or the law is defied with contempt. How does one then redress the disharmony between the individual and the law under such conditions? Draconian measures will surely enforce adherance to the law, at least in the short term, but their very invocation points to systemic weakness and an inability to persuade by reason.
I suspect you will respond with the argument that the law should be in accordance with the Creator's plan for us. That's well and good, and it is a point that has lain at the heart of legislation for millenia. Even the codes of law in Britain invoke their authority historically from the Creator and the ten commandments.
But law is in practice an act of interpretation, and its enforcement is a deliberation to find the correct balance between justice and mercy. To that extent, the realization of justice becomes a fully human exercise, as subject to human cognitive finitude and error as any other.
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