ribit,
re: "...at some point they (lawyers) start thinkin that if something isn't illegal it is therefor moral."
Funny you should bring that up. There's a personal story along those lines that has stayed with me for MANY years...
I had a discussion with a co-worker about morality. Her definition? Obeying the law.
That cracked me up. "So," I asked, "if a person in the country runs a stop sign in an area he's familiar with, when he can clearly see that there is no risk to anyone, he's immoral?"
"Yes," she said. "Being moral is doing the right thing even when no one is watching."
Yikes! We talked about it further, and she stuck to her guns. Moral people obey even bad laws, in her view.
Wow. I wonder how she would deal with the FACT that every American breaks two laws per day... that it's impossible not to since there are so many laws on the books that we are guilty of breaking a law if we do certain things, and guilty of breaking other laws if we don't!
I figured this little insight would probably lead to the woman developing a nervous twitch, so I let her be.
Sadly, this story doesn't strike me as being as funny as it did back then. I've learned that there are a LOT of people who think as she does. There are many more who think differently but with similarly bad logic. This may even be true of MOST people... a sad fact which works to the detriment of us all.
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