{"id":6712,"date":"2016-01-21T04:06:03","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T04:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/01\/21\/of-cats-and-mice-laws-and-criminals-3\/"},"modified":"2016-01-21T04:06:03","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T04:06:03","slug":"of-cats-and-mice-laws-and-criminals-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/01\/21\/of-cats-and-mice-laws-and-criminals-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books<\/em>, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where there are no laws there are no criminals.  That is not much better than saying that where there are no chemists there are no chemicals. <\/span><\/p>\n

Just as there are chemicals whether or not there are any chemists, there are moral wrongs whether or not there are any positive laws prohibiting them.  What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally<\/em> wrong before<\/em> (logically speaking) it is legally<\/em> wrong.  And it is precisely the moral wrongness of murder that justifies having laws against it.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet there is a sense in which criminals are legislated into existence:  one cannot be a criminal in the eyes of the law unless there is the law.  And it is certainly true that to be a criminal in the eyes of the law does not entail being  guilty of any moral wrong-doing.  But the anarchist goes off the deep end if he thinks that there is no moral justification for any legal prohibitions, or that the wrongness of every act is but an artifact of the law's prohibiting it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Lichtenberg on Religion and Stoicism<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Ernst Bloch on Law and the State (Revised))<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Ad Ignorantiam and the Law<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>If You Understood Me, You Would Agree with Me!<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Why Lichtenberg is not on Facebook<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Still Perfect After All These Years<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101: Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists. That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where … Continue reading “Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[279,181,8,677,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anarchism","category-aphorisms-by-others","category-crime-and-punishment","category-lichtenberg-georg","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}