One of the usual arguments that get trotted out about various things is that, well, it’s legal. We see this in politics. We see this in business. We see it in personal life when people get themselves into trouble.
Legal is a very low bar to set for behavior—be it the behavior of a person or the behavior of an institution. Legal is, in essence, the bare minimum requirement for being considered a functioning member of society.
The sad sidebar to this is that we hold public figures and businesses to a lower bar (the bar of mere legality) than we often hold ourselves or the other individuals we deal with every day. We expect and hope for more… or at least we should.
When you look at a lot of law and regulation it is built upon experience and pragmatism. A great deal of it came into existence because someone or some organization did something that had consequences negative enough for enough people that it was decided that this should not be allowed. Law is always chasing human behavior. It is always playing catch up. It’s kind of like the warning on the blow dryer telling you not to use it in the shower—because somebody actually did and it turned out bad.
This is because people spend a great deal of time, energy, and thought in coming up with ways to circumvent the law (particularly when great wealth or power are involved) or to stay within the (creatively interpreted) letter of the law while kinda, sorta breaking it or at least ignoring its intention.
Far more creativity on the part of far more people have gone into this endeavor than into any monument or great work of art. Says something about human beings, doesn’t it?
We have created this other thing called ethics. Ethics is concerned with those things beyond law that make society better, rather than merely possible at some minimal level.
Ethics is, above all, about trust (which is crucial in any society)—thus it becomes concerned with honesty in a broad sense. Ethics is also concerned with kindness—about how other people should be treated and how other people should treat us.
A good society needs to have both of these things—and they need to be rigorously enforced by appropriate means. in the case of the law, this is the government—courts and police. In the case of ethics, it is the people themselves—in who they associate with, trust, and commerce with.
Law is not necessarily ethical nor is the ethical necessarily legal.
What has always boggled my mind is that we excuse those with great power, we excuse those with great wealth, we excuse those who we choose to be our leaders from many normal ethical constraints… or even legal constraints.
I have always thought that those with great power, great wealth, that are (supposedly) leaders should be more constrained than the average citizen, not less… more harshly judged, not less… more harshly punished for transgressions, not less. This seems intuitively obvious to me.
With great power comes great responsibility—this applies to more than Spiderman… or should, if we knew what was good for us.
How long can you expect to maintain a society when the rich and powerful openly flout or misuse both law and ethics, with the connivance of the people? At what point do law and ethics lose their meaning and power?
We seem well on the way to finding out.
I have always felt as you do about those with great power and wealth, especially when in positions of trust and leadership, being held to a higher standard. Always thought it intuitively obvious as well. Seeing that so few in our society seem to feel the same makes me more and more pessimistic about the future of our country.
That we, as a society, no longer seem to possess or even have any notion of that value (not sure now that we ever did) will be the ultimate reason for the failure of our experiment in democracy. Followed closely by the fact that society, writ large, has no idea that this actually *is* an ongoing experiment, not a done deal that will continue to endure, no matter what.
FWIW, I think you parse out the whole legal / ethical thing pretty well.