We already have this in the UK. Big business (banks in particular) are allowed to get away with fraud on a massive scale, councils are free to abuse their power on a whim and when reported to the police, the crime magically disappears.
Can a crime be legal?
- Thread starter Mercenary Keyboard Warrior
- Start date
I think there are many criminal offences which are morally permissible but I'm not sure how a criminal offence can be legal. Stealing from a food bank to feed your starving child would not be deemed worthy of punishment by many but it would still be illegal by law.
This is one of those interesting cases where the act of stealing would be considered a crime under positive law, but would not be considered stealing under the natural law.
It illustrates a difference of approach between positive and natural law: in a humane and competent administration of justice, actions contrary to a positive law would be considered crimes but punishment would be mitigated by the circumstances. In a natural law system, consideration of the nature of the act itself would show it not to be an act of stealing at all.
One might also look at some of those cases where juries refuse to convict someone of a positive law crime as situations in which an intuitive grasp of natural law considerations show the drafting of the positive law to be faulty.
I'd rob a Bank in that 12 hours, keep what I need and Robin Hood the rest. Jumps on Fat Cat and gallops away!
the crime is murder, not "killing somebody"
I would probably word it, "all acts that are currently crimes will be considered legal for a 12 hour period"
Associate
- Joined
- 4 Mar 2010
- Posts
- 914
- Location
- Coventry
/thread.
As long as you get the idea of the film (Purge), then don't read in to the technicalities too much
^^
Permabanned
- Joined
- 8 Jan 2010
- Posts
- 10,263
- Location
- UK
let's all plan a ocuk hiest for crimes against equality in Haribo distribution.
Why not just buy them? £0.50 from Morrisons isn't breaking the bank is it?
I wish OcUK would stop giving them out. It is unbecoming everyone creaming themselves over bags of sweets.
Man of Honour
- Joined
- 27 Sep 2004
- Posts
- 25,821
- Location
- Glasgow
So do you believe there is such a thing as natural law then? And if that is the case then presumably you think for a law to be "good" it should flow from a natural law principle?
Yes, I've been convinced by those legal theorists who claim that certain principles can be discovered in the nature of things. Althought the foundations of thinking about the natural law lie back in the mists of time (the ancient Greeks were pretty hot on it as they became aware of the consequences of the emergence of the state), some of the most interesting work on it has been done in the last century or so. At the risk of having Godwin's law invoked, it's useful to recall the search by legal theorists to determine a framework within which the abuse of power by the Nazis (insofar as they constituted a state) could be challenged on legal grounds. Indeed, pondering the balance of power between the state and the individual has always been a fruitful source of reflection on the natural law.
No. Positive law will always contribute to the prudential functioning of a well-ordered state. Now on the other hand, if a positive law contradicts the natural law; well, that's an interesting quesion
