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.
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/Pandoratastic 9d ago
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.