[gampleman]

Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.

[cluckindan]

Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.

Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.

Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.

[birktj]

The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.

[doodlebugging]

Social mores are synonymous with morals and it is our social mores or our moral values that form the basis of our legal systems where we use those mores (moral values) to define the actions that fall into the categories of right versus wrong and help us define how we should treat each other and what an appropriate societal sanction should be when someone steps over the line and does something to violate our social mores or does something that we consider immoral.

By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.

To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.

Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.

In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .

[cluckindan]

”To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong.”

No one has suggested that. My comment about theocracies was referring to the way religious morals direct lawmaking in theocracies, leading to things like death penalties for homosexual acts and zero tolerance of religious critique (denial of freedom of expression and persecution of political opposition).

[doodlebugging]

You started off with a suggestion that on the surface implies that morals and ethics are unrelated to perceptions or definitions of harm and intent.

>Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.

Morals, our value system developed by our own experiences that determine how we as individuals define right and wrong are the foundation of ethical boundaries that we impose on the groups that we form or join. Ethics are tied to morals.

Harm and intent are judgements that we make either as individuals or as group members when we look at actions and consequences (apply our moral and ethical guidelines) so that we can determine whether sanctions are necessary and reasonable based on our own shared value system.

Then you make a statement that appears to suggest that morals and ethics are unrelated when in fact, our individual morals form the foundation of ethical constraints that we impose on the groups in our societies just as they are the foundation for our religious value systems. In your either/or proposition here you apparently separate laws from morals. I disagree because laws, which follow from our own moral values and are just codified statements defining our own ethical framework so that we can all color between the same set of lines.

>Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.

Then you impose the burden of religion or theocracy with your last statement. This statement implies to the casual observer that since you reject morals (in the second statement) as a basis of laws in favor of laws based on ethics that those which are based on morals exist only under a theocratic framework. Since group ethics follow from shared individual mores this does not make sense.

>Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.

Morals, ethics, laws are entangled and require no religious framework for their application though as your examples demonstrate, it is possible to create a system where mores shared and recognized by all are subverted to serve a religious doctrine which is itself a permutation of an ethical system used to capture local groups and to impose a specific reward/sanction value system to aid compliance.

EDIT: I think that your use of "Unless" makes it easy for a reader to interpret the second statement as part of an IF/THEN type of statement implying a conclusion that you have defined in your third statement.

You're explicitly allowing ethics to form the basis of laws in the first part of your second statement and then using the "but" to disallow moral judgments as a basis. This is the IF part of the dialog.

The Unless follows and ends up defining the THEN part of the conclusion so that a reader can interpret your statements to conclude that IF ethics can be the foundation for laws THEN a system of laws based on moral judgments must form the basis for a theocratic system, of course.

[cheschire]

What is the definition of right and wrong if NOT a moral one?

[cluckindan]

Indeed! However, law is not a definition of moral right and wrong; rather, it is a spatiotemporally varying definition of societal and judicial rights, permissions and restrictions of conduct which are usually grounded in the locally prevailing morals.

Law in a democratic society is a manifestation of so-called social contracts considered binding for members of that society.

However, law in a non-democratic society can be the complete opposite, to the point of enabling immoral conduct, including but not limited to legal crime, persecution of political opponents, ethnic cleansing and offensive warfare.

[cheschire]

It’s subjective. It’s always subjective. A person can convince themselves they’re right to conduct all sorts of heinous acts if they simply alter their perspective enough.

Morals are fundamental to the process.

[cluckindan]

Laws aren’t subjective, though. So clearly there is a fundamental difference between laws and morals.

Could we even say laws are the society’s objective morals?

[contravariant]

It is a moral one, but laws have no morality.

[wanderingmind]

The jury pronounces the sentence. What do you think sways the jurors - legalese complexity or straight up morality?

[_heimdall]

Jurors decide the verdict, the judge determines the sentence.

[JumpCrisscross]

> maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent

Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.

Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.

[eleveriven]

Whether sentencing should reflect that is a hard question, but pretending all fraud is morally equivalent seems like willful blindness