Sorry i didn't mean it doesn't have a moral compass, society in general has a sense of what's right and wrong, it's just without laws and people to enforce them it has no way of ensuring that everyone in that society follows those morals, without them it has little consciousnesses.
Your getting too philosophical. The bottom line is no one wants a group of people that follow the do as I say not as I do mentality. If you are to enforce the law you yourself should be capable of following it. If you are given the responsibility of taking someone's freedom you should be capable of carrying out that work with integrity. You should be held to the highest levels of integrity because of the seriousness of that role.
No disagreement here, but you could avoid that dependency altogether by policing yourself. And one can never get too philosophical on Bit-Tech Forums.
I don't think you can avoid the dependency on law enforcement by policing yourself. Policing yourself allows others to avoid the dependency on law enforcement to protect them against you. In order to avoid the dependency on the agency of law enforcement, you have to trust that others will police themselves. In an ideal society that might work - you have stated as much for societies comprised of about 100 people. We know that in metropolitan cities it's unreasonable to expect everyone to police themselves. We are left with two options: 1) we surrender our right to police ourselves and allow the agency of law enforcement to take on that role; 2) we maintain the right to police ourselves (which I believe necessitates the right to defend one's self from others). Is there place for a third option: Allow the agency of law enforcement to police us, yet maintain our right to police ourselves when law enforcement can't be present?
While we maybe able to hold ourselves to similarly high standards as the police the same can't be said for the other million people, and frankly i wouldn't want them to either. As much as people may not like it when someone questions established laws and rules there are times when a society needs people willing to break those laws and rules, to not follow societal norms, to question the established order.
I am speaking hypothetically. I don't believe that the majority of the general population functions to a solid and internally consistent moral framework, or is able to. So a police force is a regretful necessity. So is our right to set boundaries ourselves. However this comes with accountability.
I would disagree, the majority of a population do (imo) function to a solid and internally consistent moral framework, it's just that it may not be the same as yours or mine. I do agree though that a police force is a necessity, mainly to ensure that people who step outside a pre-agreed upon framework are held accountable.
Psychological research says otherwise. Most people's morality functions on social approval/disapproval (i.e. it is bad when people disapprove, but good if people approve). This is for instance why countries like Germany, Yugoslavia and Rwanda can have sudden meltdowns in which former neighbours genocide each other. It's why fundamentalist religions are doing so well, in the Bible Belt of the US and in the Middle East. People also happily embrace contradictory moral ideas: e.g. the same Christians who espouse ideals of unconditional love also ostracise gays. Isis embraces and kisses gay men on the cheeks before stoning them to death, to show them that there's no hard feelings. Hell, we have prosperity evangelism. How morally inconsistent is that? The majority of the population also functions at an intellectual and emotional level of a 12- to 16-year old. It's why we have road rage, excessive drinking and obesity problems, consumer debt problems and people voting for politicians who sound like paternalistic demagogues. This is a nation, let's not forget, that has an average reading age of 8 (12 for the working population), and the language you use does determine how you think. And it also has implications for self-regulatory behaviour, planning and problem solving ability, and Theory of Mind --hence altruism and moral behaviour. It's all connected... So I disagree. It doesn't take more than a casual glance at the world around you, or the news, to see that people's moral behaviour is quite messed up.
I'm to lazy to go looking for it but didn't you say once than humans can hold two morally incompatible views? EDIT: Even if a human does hold two morally incompatible views that doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a consistent moral framework.
Yes, I did, because their moral framework is inconsistent (I mean here: incongruent, rather than changeable over time). Morality has to be congruent to be, well, of moral value.
Sincere question here: What freedoms do citizens of the USA have that citizens of the UK don't have? When I say freedoms I am talking about useful stuff, like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Also [Citation needed]
I would think the differences are negligible. Meanwhile the US implements nudey scanners at the airports and conducts mass surveillance on its people. I would think that is the opposite of the actions of a state that seems to have freedom as an underlying principle.
I am more than happy to be educated on the subject; I doubt they have more rights than us in the UK. If my limited understanding is right, they occasionally have more "freedoms" if you include things like car insurance or the right to own something that has literally no other purpose than to hurl projectiles at lethal rates at, anything but another human, unless grey area, death to all humans.
Historically speaking I would say the UK had more freedoms and America had less, purely because (historically) America set out what freedoms citizens had, while the UK didn't America defined what it's citizens were free to do and what they were not, while the UK's approach was that freedoms are never given only taken and that the state had to justify the need to take away it's citizens freedoms. How that translates into present day freedoms I don't really know, but I'm willing to bet that if the UK isn't a less free society than America today then it's certainly heading in that direction.
Are you talking about England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland? I think you have to be specific. I myself am more familiar with England, English history and English law, than I am with the other countries and their history. As for the last part I think that holds true.
I was talking about the point DXR_13KE raised over the UK, but now you've raised the distinction between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland's legal systems I see I've accidental conflated the differing legal systems. TBH I'm not sure how the UK wide legal system works, can England pass a law that doesn't apply to the rest of the UK, and visa versa?