People, culture, values, morals and ethics predate law. The code of Hammurabi reflects those aspects of ancient Babylon.
Law must reflect to some degree and scope, the morals of its culture or people. If this does not happen for enough time and affects enough people, then you see a regression to tribal or vigilante justice.
Law is a form of centrally managed punishments that strongly influence individuals to behave according to the local population's values, morals and ethics.
What if a small class of people with enough resources, wit and motivation can hack this system to their favor? How will the rest of the population react when they realize this had been going on for years? Will they be able to "patch the bug" in the code of law and stop the exploiters?
What happened with the CEO of a system that is antithetical to American values, culture and morals, is an individual workaround to a long running lethal bug ignored by the maintainers of the code of law. This was ignored because the maintainers are a cog in the machine of that small class.
I agree with law and democracy, but we may no longer have that since the bigger population has no agency to shape laws. We may just have some other unnamed system that on the surface looks like law and democracy, but under the hood seems to be an oligarchy.
I agree with most of what you wrote as hypotheticals, I just disagree it describes things as they are.
I don't know why you are so eager to think people don't have agency or can't influence society. So many things change all the time. Just one example - twenty years ago most gay people lived in secret, because being out was a huge problem for society; the idea of gay marriage was ridiculously distant. Today, in most places, it's seen as a non-issue.
That didn't happen by chance. It happened because of the hard dedicated work of a lot of people, who convinced society to see things differently, and won.
While I feel similarly to you I would argue that society have two well working indicators of disconnect between enacted laws and average morals/perception of reality:
- violence
- sentiment towards violence justification
And if anything this murder shows the extent of issue of the disconnect above.
Law must reflect to some degree and scope, the morals of its culture or people. If this does not happen for enough time and affects enough people, then you see a regression to tribal or vigilante justice.
Law is a form of centrally managed punishments that strongly influence individuals to behave according to the local population's values, morals and ethics.
What if a small class of people with enough resources, wit and motivation can hack this system to their favor? How will the rest of the population react when they realize this had been going on for years? Will they be able to "patch the bug" in the code of law and stop the exploiters?
What happened with the CEO of a system that is antithetical to American values, culture and morals, is an individual workaround to a long running lethal bug ignored by the maintainers of the code of law. This was ignored because the maintainers are a cog in the machine of that small class.
I agree with law and democracy, but we may no longer have that since the bigger population has no agency to shape laws. We may just have some other unnamed system that on the surface looks like law and democracy, but under the hood seems to be an oligarchy.