On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 3:49 PM, Michael McKinney <archangel620@gmail.com> wrote:

I guess I see moral crime (drug use and possession) different from societal crime (murder, rape). While one is based in the belief that doing harm to oneself is wrong, the other is based in the idea that harming another is wrong.

Eh. Generally, the case against drug is is that it leads to economic damage to society, just as much as any other property crime, through lost work, lost production, and lost pay, not to mention the social welfare burden that drug abusers place on the rest of society.

(That, and a lot of anti-drug laws, at least in the US, were the result of social engineering efforts to criminalize and marginalize the minority populations that used those drugs, resulting in racially based enforcement policies, etc etc etc.)

If we look at the general view of the galaxy amorally, violent crimes will be the only consistent across each world (morals are related to cultural norms).

Not necessarily. For example, violent crimes may only be wrong if the victim is the perpetrator's social equal or social superior.

It was, for example, not a crime to beat a slave to death in the United States. Slaves were property, and owners can dispose of their property however they want. Beating a slave to death was a property crime if it was someone else's slave, and if it was your own, only a financial burden.

For that matter, spousal rape was only criminalized in the US in the mid-1970s, the last two holdouts making it illegal in 1993.

While dueling was illegal in historical Europe (say, 1500-1900) duels were still fought, although usually with some level of discretion. As long as you kept it out of the public view, nobody looked too closely, unless you killed someone with political connections and a lot of visibility.

While I agree that morals are related to cultural norms, that doesn't necessarily mean that violence is universally criminal.

Dan

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine kook." -Alan Morgan