With all this shit going in the newspapers about head shops it’s very hard to get a proper understanding of why people are so opposed to the idea of a head shop. They seem to get their ideas from the media without giving it any intelligent thought for themselves.
A typical example of this is a friend of mine that told me that head shop stuff was fine but once it is banned then it is immoral to buy or take it. What he has done there is to draw a line between law and morality. Just because something is illegal does not make it immoral per se. And also just because something is not illegal does not make it moral either.
Law and morality are like a venn diagram insofar as there are substantial portions that overlap but there are areas that do not overlie and in this sense the law and morals are non-overlapping magisteria.
Take for example the case of non-action which in most cases is considered to be a legal right i.e. you do not have to act. If you were walking by a pool of water a foot deep and there was a child face down in the pool and you chose not to save the child even though there was no risk to yourself then the law would not hold you culpable for that. However, you would still be a fucking prick.
Here we can see how the law will protect immorality which smashes the idea of the equivalence between the law and your subjective morality. The law should not seek to legislate your morality it should provide a level of protection and predictability to people’s actions but it should not tell them how they should think.
Looking again at the example I gave above; there are three situations where you are required to act when you might like not to. First, where a close family member is involved so if the child was your child then you must take it from the pool. Then there is the situation where you have the contractual duty to act: e.g. you are a railway man and your job is to act to put down the railway barrier when a train is coming then if you don’t and someone is hurt you can not say that you didn’t have to act. Next is where you remove someone from a place where someone else could help: imagine you are at a party and there is someone passed out on the sofa and you decide to try help and you take her outside and then think ‘fuck it this is too hard’ and put her down outside. You have removed her from a place where others could help and are therefore culpable.
Here we see the law is a little more in tune with what most people would regard as moral; this is the intersection of law and morality.
Now why are drugs immoral just because they are illegal? This is a view that seems to be to be that of an unthinking person; a person that has not got the wherewithal to form an informed moral calculation. This a subjection of a primeval sense of right and wrong.
Our minds do moral calculus automatically every time we act and then it tells us what to think. If we surrender this morality to the State then you forgo your whole being and what it is to be a thinking person.
Look at an example of the following series of moral thought experiments: first there are five people on a train track that has a train headed straight for them you can pull a lever that will divert the train up another track that will only kill one person do you pull the lever? Most people will and say it is because of the rule save as many as possible.
Then consider the same situation: five people on a track instead on another track there is a fat man that you can push in front of the train to stop it. Do you push him? Again the rule applies in most people’s mind to save as many as possible.
Then consider that you are in a hospital and there are five sick people all in need of different organ transplants then a healthy man walks in. Do you kill the man to save the many? Most people say that they would not. Why what’s the difference?
You can see how morality is not a case of simple applying rules it’s a complicated interaction of mind and instinct.
Now this article is not meant to be an excuse to ignore the law and to rely on morality but it is a defence of personal morality over blindly accepting the law as the arbitrator of morality.
Because if we look at the equation illegal = immoral then we must accept the idea that homosexuality was at one point illegal (1988 in Ireland) then it was also necessarily immoral and then the judges that legalized it were in fact legalizing immorality!
Therefore for those that feel that something that is illegal is immoral must never argue for that thing to become legal or they are arguing for the acceptance of immorality. Albeit this would just be up until it become legal then it does not necessarily remain immoral in their minds but they are still accepting that something may not be immoral. We could not allow this because this would be a stagnation of the law.
So think about your morals do not be told what you should think and what you should not. Good night and I love you.
