I have a degree in Law and in Theology and I was on a training course to become a teacher at secondary school level, the subject being religious studies. We all had to present and lead a seminar. We were given the subjects to deal with; we didn’t choose them ourselves. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen my topic: The relationship between Ethics and Law. I feel it also came from the fact that in the past I had practised as a lawyer. This didn’t necessarily mean I was an expert in ethics. There is an ethics course, but if forms a small part of the overall qualifications you study for and only covers what you need to practise as a solicitor.
I therefore undertook the task of preparing for this seminar in great trepidation. I had a look at the vast variety of books that deal with ethics and felt overwhelmed. I prayed for help because I felt like I was going to fail and I did receive that help.
In a nutshell of what I presented, here is what I felt I was given as a fundamental basis for my seminar. It set out a guiding light for leading a life that follows what is legally required, but also has a conscientious eye to what ethically is right.
We need laws: to keep us safe, to establish a framework for commercial dealings with each other, to enable us to have an amount of certainty about what we are allowed to do and what we aren’t allowed to do and for many other reasons. Laws may not be perfect and you may not receive justice always as they can be manipulated, but we need them in order to be able to live peacefully together.
On the other hand we have ethics, what we believe to be right in the face of what is going on around us. We establish these ethical beliefs as we grow up; we are taught right from wrong and I also feel that we have an internal moral compass that guides us in our actions, a ‘natural law’. We don’t all have identical upbringings and of course some of us don’t have the benefit of a good moral teacher, possibly through bad parenting or bad associations when we are young. We don’t always listen to that moral compass and as we stray further away, it becomes weaker.
Overall this internal moral compass and teaching we receive guides us and we fundamentally know when we are doing wrong. In the same way that we know this, we cannot allow the law to tell us something is right if we believe it to be wrong. Laws can come into force that we thoroughly disagree with and it is difficult to obey those laws that do this. How we handle this is down to the individual but it is wrong to stay silent when we know something is wrong. Whatever we do to express this, however little, helps us not to condone these laws.
This leads me onto the idea of a ‘covering’. I believe we are forgiven for any actions we do in the belief that they are right and done for the best of reasons. Obviously the actions themselves cannot be evil as we would know that we shouldn’t be doing them.
To conclude, we need both law and ethics. Ethics can inform the law, but the law can’t form the whole basis of what we believe to be right. Law can only be a guideline of what the society we live in believes to be acceptable. It can go against our beliefs and this is where a line has to be drawn. We are not robots, we are thinking, feeling human beings with a right to freedom of thought and of speech and we ought to fight for that whenever it is threatened. When I say fight, I only mean peaceful protest by talking together, writing to those who make the law and making sure we express ourselves when we feel something is being condoned that is wrong.
This is a very wide topic and I have only covered a small part of what I dealt with in my seminar, but I hope that in some way it has helped explain how ethics and the law work together.
God bless,
Widows Mote 