Friday, March 11, 2022

An Especially Arbitrary Class Of Laws

Most social customs and personal preferences will go unchallenged and even uncontemplated until it becomes inconvenient to do otherwise.  Some customs and preferences are even codified into law, and some entire categories of modern law are rarely more than especially arbitrary ideas given the force of governmental authority.  Laws pertaining to driving often, but not always, have this nature.  Even when no one at all is in danger and no one misperceives himself or herself to be in danger, these laws are treated as moral obligations and used as a petty way to generate unnecessary money for the government.  When they are challenged, some people are so accustomed to having these laws and expecting others to follow them that they will actually insist these laws are all pragmatically or morally necessary, when this is simply untrue in some circumstances and unprovable in others.

Driving while intoxicated or driving at 60 miles per hour in a neighborhood street teeming with pedestrians are objectively dangerous because a driver in these circumstances has little to no genuine control over whether they will hurt themselves or others as long as they are drunk or moving too quickly to react in time to pedestrian actions.  Driving like this might not result in disaster, but it is objectively dangerous.  Driving over 60 miles per hour on a highway with minimal or no traffic or driving over 25 miles per hour in a residential area with no one out walking, much less crossing the street, is not inherently dangerous to anyone whatsoever.  It should not take more than a few moments to realize this once a person actually focuses on the issue without making assumptions.

Crossing a solid white line on the road, going over 45 miles per hour with no other vehicles or people around, and stopping at stop signs when no one is around are all examples of driving behaviors that pose no intrinsic threat to anyone.  The only reason these and plenty of other driving-based actions are illegal (at least in some states) is because of idiotic slippery slope fallacies, the ability for the government to obtain money through ticketing traffic violations, and culture-preserved fear of driving outside of the arbitrary, often pointless rules imposed by local or federal government.  There is absolutely no logical justification for these laws when there is no provable truths from which it logically follows that traffic laws like this should be made.

Reckless and dangerous driving is very distinct from driving past some randomly chosen number of miles per hour or not stopping at a sign when there is no moral or safety-oriented reason for doing so.  Someone is either put in unnecessary or careless danger by how they handle a vehicle or they are not, but many driving laws are actually about treating slippery slope fallacies as if they were valid.  They are about stopping something that might or might not happen (destruction of life or property) by outlawing something that is not inherently dangerous, like not stopping at a four way intersection in a neighborhood when there are no approaching cars, people, or pets to run into.  No course of action is obligatory because of what might happen; an act is either morally permissible or not because of its own nature regardless of the law (and if moral obligations do not exist, they are not brought into existence by laws).

Those who look to conscience, law itself, or social consensus for moral stances might have yet to realize that absolutely nothing about any of these things is philosophically authoritative.  It does not logically follow from something feeling or seeming morally good that it is, or from something being legal or illegal or perceived one way by a majority of citizens that there is anything morally good or abominable about it.  For those who claim to look to the Bible for moral revelation, as plenty of the American conservatives who support authoritarianism and a default respect for United States laws in most cases, if they only took a small time to rationalistically examine their own basis for endorsing many traffic laws, they would immediately find that there is nothing but fallacies and preferences holding their ideas up.

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