Do not confuse ethical and legal.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Four arguments I see far too often, especially the first two:

"How dare you call X a criminal - what they did was entirely right and good!"
"How dare you argue that X should not be prosecuted! What they did was utterly evil!"
"X has done nothing wrong; their behaviour was entirely legal."
"X is a bad person because they have broken the law."

The first two of these are complete nonsense, the third wafer-thin, and the fourth, while not entirely without merit, is by no means overwhelming.

The word "criminal" means "a person who has broken the law", not "a person who has done something immoral". Yes, Gandhi, Mandela, the White Rose, etc, *were* all technically criminals, and (insert popular conservative hate figure of your choice who has not broken the strict letter of the law) is not. There is *no* implication from morality to legality (unless you have absolute trust in the people who made the laws, I suppose...).

There *is* an implication from legality to morality - for a society to work, the law should generally be obeyed even if you don't agree with it - but a) it's by no means overwhelming, some laws are sufficiently bad to justify breaking them, and b) it's only one-way - being illegal is sometimes a causal reason why actions are (slightly) immoral, but being legal does not make things morally justifiable.

But I don't see this direction being argued so often. I'm posting this primarily as a rebuttal to posters I see using the morality or otherwise of actions as evidence when arguing as to whether or not they are legal (there have been a number of wars about this on DU recently and less recently, in both directions - c.f. Zimmerman, Manning etc).

If you think that someone has(n't) done something immoral, by all means argue about the ethics of their actions. But don't use that as an argument that they are(n't) a criminal, and be very, very circumspect when using it as an argument that they should(n't) be prosecuted - good people have to be bound by the law, and bad ones protected by it, as well as vice versa, for it to work.

[msongs]

1. everything the nazis did was legal according the laws they themselves passed to provide cover nt

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. International law doesn't work, sadly.

In an ideal world, there would be solid, consistently-enforced international laws with an enforcer with teeth.

In practice, all we can manage is that sometimes supranational organisations lock up people who have committed atrocities and try to put as much of a legal framework around it as possible - which isn't much, but seems to be the least worst alternative.

I wish I had a better answer, but I don't.

I note in passing that vast numbers of people who killed/murdered/executed innocent civilians under the Nazi regime were never prosecuted, because they had not broken national law; only the senior leaders were prosecuted at Nurenberg, for violations of "international law".

[defacto7]

3. Thanks.

Excellent explanation and logical lesson. It's good to have the terms defined and understood properly.

[delrem]

4. Nice concise analysis of a most important distinction.

Thank you!

[Live and Learn]

5. Perhaps the conundrum comes from connotation the word "criminal" has to begin with.

Since the vast majority of people have broken a law (moral or not) the vast majority of us are criminals. For some odd reason however, a vast majority of us feel superior to those that have actually been convicted of crimes whether the laws themselves were moral or not.

[DontTreadOnMe]

6. Excellent post

Here in the good 'ole USA, we have some laws. Some people agree with, some laws people say need to be changed or abolished.

It gets tiresome with some here on DU who say that the "law" doesn't matter.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

7. Arguably in some cases it doesn't, but you're still breaking it.

I think that, for example, Rosa Parks was right to break the law, and the fact that it was illegal didn't matter to the ethics of that action.

But the fact that she was right to do what she did didn't change the fact that she was breaking a law by doing it (and the fact that she was breaking a law by doing it didn't change the fact that she was right to do what she did, but I don't see people making the mistake in that direction so often).