Ethics provides the basis for, or a justification of, law; law is the ethical minimum, and so on. Whether such claims are reasonable or not, they often tend to blur the essential difference between ethical-moral questions and questions of legal norms. The core of ethics is “the good,” or “virtue”; the core of jurisprudence is “justice,” or “order.” Ethics pursues “the good,” or seeks “virtue”; law proclaims “justice,” or safeguards “order.” “Justice,” at most, is only one aspect or one side of “the good”; and according to some other lines of thought, “justice” and “order” are even more often “evil.” “Norms” are the negation of self-discipline; “punishment” is the exercise of power. Law can perfectly well be understood as fundamentally wicked—only a mechanism of tit-for-tat violence that must be accepted in the real world. The making of law should not be based on ethics—in fact, modern jurists more or less pay no heed to the discussions of ethicists and moral philosophers. Law is not formulated in order to achieve “the good,” or at least not to pursue “the good” directly; rather, it seeks “justice,” “fairness,” “order,” and “precision.” By contrast, virtue ethics discusses how to “be a person.”
Law, politics, and such things may be fundamentally “evil”—after all, there would be no such things in heaven or in utopia. But this does not mean that people engaged in the professions of judge, lawyer, police officer, or politician are all villains. In fact, a good judge and a good politician need extremely high levels of awakening—“If I do not go to hell, who will?” “Until hell is empty, I swear not to become a Buddha.” That is truly admirable.
What exactly is the relationship between jurisprudence and ethics? I still haven’t figured it out; everything above is just nonsense!
March 24, 2007
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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