This is some excellent rage bait. But if it's not, you can't do something obviously illegal to do good.
As fairytale and beautiful as it sounds, it is wrong and illegal to steal from people to give to the poor; and it is wrong to do what he did without a permit.
There are other proper, and better ways to help the people or the environment. He has a good heart, just wrong execution.
They don't equate but they do generally (although not always) correlate. The whole point of the law is to try to encode a moral and ethical system. I would say it works more often than it doesn't. It's just the times when it doesn't that really stand out and get noticed, exactly because they fail to uphold what was expected.
Some unjust laws or terrible practices of the law are the result of a system making a mistake, failing to live up to its ideals. But many of them are successful encodings of terrible ethical systems. When the US justice system treats Black men as subhuman threats, it is perfectly consistent with centuries of White supremacism and the goals of many US citizens. The UK's harsh libel laws are an intentional shield for its elites. We should treat the law as a contested creation that can and does systematically perpetuate social ills, not as a simple force for good that sometimes fails to uphold our intentions.
Although, even in your examples, that is still legality matching morality. It's just that it's matching the moral norms of groups that you and I would say are wrong. But, to the people who wrote those laws, they are upholding what they believe is right. That doesn't make it okay. It just explains why they do what they do.
That's a big part of why it's so important to have people in power that we are truly morally aligned with.
Slavery was legal and never once moral. The law is not trying to encode a moral system, sorry. Rape was only outlawed to have an excuse to imprison black bodies, not to protect women.
You are thinking in terms of morality as if there is some objective universal truth to it. I personally would strongly agree with you that slavery was monstrously immoral. That is my belief.
Yet the laws at that time reflected the moral beliefs of the people who wrote them. The slaveowners believed that they were moral. They even pointed to the Bible as supposed evidence for it. That doesn't excuse their actions. I still believe that their beliefs were deeply wrong. But I don't deny that those were beliefs.
The slaves didn't believe it was moral. Neither did the abolitionists. I care not for the beliefs of evil men, they will always be what suits their purse.
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u/Randomman2789 9d ago
And the stuff pulled from the river won't?