Day 5 – Q 2.In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics. Elucidate.
2. In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics. Elucidate.
सभ्य जीवन में, कानून नैतिकता के सागर में तैरता है। स्पष्ट करें।
Approach:
This question demands a convincing explanation of quotation that in civilized community laws are concurrent with ethics. To explain this, we can give examples, some historical and some current.
Introduction
- Ethics is a system of moral principles which is concerned with what is good for individuals and society.
- Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behaviour.
- The quotation, “In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics”, implies that there is a foundation of ethical values for the law.
Body
Law and ethics
- In performing our legal duties, we are also satisfying our ethical obligations.
- While in an uncivilized society, enactments of tyranny or barbarism may motivate an obligation to obey the law.
- But in a civilized society, the obligation to act ethically is not a result of supposed obligation to obey alone, but a result of the binding ethical values that have informed the content of the law.
Laws were and are not always ethical
- It is well known that those nations of the world, which are deemed civilized and well-constrained by the rule of law, may be governed by laws that are not ethically sound.
- Slavery, apartheid, and torture, have been perpetuated pursuant to the laws of some of these so-called “civilized” countries.
- Western liberal regimes of property, contract and tort law include doctrines and principles, the applications of which result in predictable hardship for the poor and the vulnerable.
- Laws that permit environmental degradation, capital punishment of the innocent and political corruption are hardly ethical waters for any ship of state.
- As an aspirational idea, a rule of law based on strong moral and ethical values has appeal.
- The conservative and the very religious may find it appealing because they believe the law should be a tool for moral alignment—it should make us righteous.
- The progressive and the secular may find similar appeal in an ethics-based law because they believe the law should further extend freedom, equality and tolerance.
Laws and Ethics in India
- Modern India adopted foundation of ethics in framing the laws, respecting the rights and dignity of all.
- To mention one, voting rights to all including women at a time when even most modern states of then had not given such rights to their female and coloured citizen.
- There were and are historical wrongs in Indian statue, such as Section 377 (Homosexuality) and Section 497 (Adultery) of the IPC.
- A person’s sexuality is his personal matter, it is ethically wrong to interfere in such personal matters. Therefore, SC struck down the legality of such interferences.
- Above mentioned aspirational quotation is very much in consonance with the concept of constitutional morality recently mentioned by SC judge in LGBTQ case hearing.
Conclusion
- Though there are concerns as we observe the protests on Sabarimala verdict or Triple Talaq ordinance, recent SC judgments give us hope.
- It can be concluded in the light of such other SC judgments that in the modern and progressive India we find the laws freely floating in a sea of ethics.
- There is need of flexibility for change, tolerance and adaptation with the moving waves in the sea of values.
Best answer: Invincible
Shilpi
