That's right, OP, the law doesn't define ethical behavior – this community's rules do. Thank you for trying to find the artist; five ethics points have been credited to your account, which can be spent to pay down your sin points at any participating location.

I'm so tired of hearing that blinding headlights are perfectly fine because they're legal and the car came like that

okay, Jared, but you're still an asshole for having them and blinding me at the four way stop so I almost ran over somebody in the crosswalk because they were absolutely invisible due to the glare from your lowbeams even though they just walked right in front of you.

For the people thst practice law, it is not uncommon to have charges dropped even if the law was very clearly violated, because it just doesn't feel.right to penalize them.

E.g., a battered spouse kills their partner or a parent is caught stealing baby formula in small amounts. Such cases regularly get thrown out

Legal and moral have two definitions for a reason.

So many people, especially conservative alpha males, are the biggest beta subs to positions of authority. Back the blue, please Mr officer man, step all over me.

Let me put my lawyer hat on real quick. Hmm, it seems the answer to your important legal question is: it depends. That'll be $500.

When I was in college, I had an ethics class where the class was presented with a conundrum, and here's the gist of it:

A man was hired to write something. He was instructed that he had to make sure to put a copyright notice into the work. (This was the time when if you didn't specifically put in a copyright, then it was automatically public domain.) For whatever reason, the man did all of the work, but did not add the copyright statement. Then, he quits the job, takes all of the work home with him and sells it. Were his actions ethical?

An overwhelming majority of the people in my class argued that his actions were ethical, to be paid to make a product and then take the product home with you and sell it yourself. So, at the time, I thought either that was some sort of psychology class experiment that I didn't know I was part of, or people are far more unethical than I ever imagined.

Obviously, the main argument for their side was that it wasn't wrong to take public domain material because it's not illegal.

I realized the truth much later. The average person, even the average college student, doesn't really think about things very much. They have never in their lives tried to think about whether something is ethical, and have spent their entire existence guided by emotions like a dog or something. So, asking them to think through a problem with only one step is about the maximum they're capable of. So, because they are basically incapable of thinking, when given an ethical problem that is even slightly complicated, they can just default to "it's legal," and then they don't have to think.

my political opinion? uh, being a good fucking person

Judge Dredd scowl intensifies

Such lawful, much ethics, very wow

The law: KYS

Them: Oh, well, the law is the law suicides

The law's fine print: (KYS as in Keep Yourself Safe)

Imagine a world where because O negative is the universal blood donor, everyone in the world came to the conclusion that the most ethical thing to do is to make them donate blood as often as possible.

So we then decide that it must be protected. So we decide they must donate, must avoid dangerous professions, mustn't be allowed to leave one country to live somewhere else, must marry other O negative blood having people and produce o-negative blood having children.

At what point when you curtail movement/freedom, can't choose who you marry, whether you have children, what professions a person can have etc have you created a caste class is one step above slavery (it might even be slavery honestly because you're also removing their bodily autonomy). This is turning a group of people into a commodity while firmly ignoring their humanity.

Ethics informs law. But ethics is flawed because people are flawed. People as a whole can be just as self serving as the individual and just as stupid (see mob mentality).

There are some people in this comments section who say some facinatingly horrible things because for some reason they assume that somehow a true democracy makes people less self serving and horrible. Despite all historical evidence to the contrary.

Skybreakers be like

This is literally the ACLU.

It could just be the circles I run in, but lately I see the opposite problem prevailing. People just decide that if a law doesn't suit their "ethics" or whimsy in the moment, they can go ahead and ignore it.

Silly stuff like "I dont want to spend 90 seconds finding a parking spot and walking into/put of the store, so I'll just leave my car right in front of the store entrance. Who cares about traffic patterns or emergency services or blacking access ramps for mobility impaired people?"

Or more serious things. Some friends of mine recently bought a vacant lot near me intending to build a house, and a workshop for their business. It's on a hillside so they would need to spend ~$3k to have a contractor grade the property. But they needed to handle the permitting themselves.... Which needs an engineer to verify their changes won't destabilize the land and endanger their neighbors. Analyze the drainage to ensure their changes won't cause flooding. Environmental impact survey to check for endangered and protected species on tbe property. Comes out to $7k. All of a sudden my extreme left-wing, progressive friends sound just like my conservative Uncle at Thanksgiving, ranting about how the big government won't let them do anything. Meanwhile, since I live nearby I have been feeling a lot more comfortable knowing that my neighbors are required to go through these processes before doing any projects that could impact me. We have been getting more extreme weather lately and I had a landslide on my own property a few years ago.

They also wanted to build a separate workshop building for their business. It is just the two of them now, but they hope to grow and have employees, and want to have some seperstion between the work space and their living space. Which means extra parking, and the workshop needs stuff like a bathroom and break room. And the business needs regular truckloads of pallets of chemicals that they use. And they also use resin 3D printers which need to ventilate toxic fumes outside. This property is zoned for residential and entirely surrounded by single-family homes. Their plan was to just build and hope they were too small to get noticed by the city.

Would they be able to do all of these things without causing disaster? Probably. In my own uneducated opinion, I think they were probabky correct that there are nk endangered species present, that their plans would result in thr land being more stable rather than less, that drainage would not be concerned, and that there business woukd be small and quiet enough that the neighbors would not notice or care.

But none of that is the point. Everyone who does this stuff always thinks its fine. Disasters like that are things that happen to OTHER people, not me! A LOT of regulations are written in blood, but people want to ignore them because they are inconvenient or a hassle or they just don't want to consider the impact to anyone else. Often laws are there to remind us of the ethical considerations we would otherwise overlook.

René Descartes be like

Cyclists are no picnic either. Settle down with your portable supernova on your handlebars.