The principle reason for the moral confusion which seems to pervade the twenty-first century, in America and elsewhere, is the almost dogged determination of so many people to avoid the use of a power given to them by God; the power of reason. To illustrate, here is a true story. Fortunately it came to a good conclusion, but it might have had a disastrous ending. Late at night a car was being driven in a tough and nearly deserted neighborhood in St. Louis. It came to a red light and stopped. A lady driving alone came up behind it. Three young and menacing-looking men approached the lady's car using vile language, with one of them carrying what appeared to be a baseball bat. They were rather obviously durnk. The lady honked at the car in front of her to move on. There was no other traffic in the area. Streets in all directions were deserted. But the car in front refused to budge. Why? As the driver later explained, the light was red. The apparent hoodlums came on and on. As they reached the lady's car the light turned green and everyone in both cars, which then moved on, was safe. The nearly-victimized lady was furious, chased the car down through deserted streets until it pulled into a well-lit gas station where, in the presence of a police officer the story was told.
This is a perfect example of slavish dependence on a rule which had no logical application under the circumstances. Every day or so you can hear about some small child in the first or second grade being reprimanded or even suspended because he is found to be carrying a few cough drops or something like that against a rule prohibiting "drug possession". This is called "zero tolerance". Or someone compliments another person, usually female, on an attractive dress and is accused of sexual harrassment. Now and then a judge will hand down an absurdly harsh sentence because of a hard-and-fast rule in a case where common sense cries out against it, as in a case a few years ago wherein a judge sentenced a boy to five years in prison because of some minimum-sentence rule when all the boy was charged with was the possession of a single marijuana cigarette. (If you think the judge had no choice, he did. He could have ruled that the statute, or at least its application in the case at hand, amounted to a violation of the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. If appellate courts want to reverse something like that, let them do so). And then there are horrific cases in which a judge or prosecutor demands the death penalty for someone when there is actual proof that he was innocent of the crime charged. "He had a fair trial", it will be said. The insanity of this escapes the judge or prosecutor, or he doesn't care about human life, or perhaps he is just incredibly stupid.
But don't we need rules? Yes, but we do not need to reach absurb results in the application of rules when they were obviously intended to apply to something else. When Abraham Lincoln was criticized for by-passing certain constitutional rights during the Civil War he explained that he had to violate some Constitutional provision here or there to save the entire Constitution, which was being torn apart. A prominent 20th Century jurist would say "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". Would the Founders favor a rigid adherence to the letter of the Constitution if that would probably result in the destruction of the whole Constitution? Does it not sometimes make sense to follow the spirit and intent of the law with constructions and applications which common sense dictates that the drafters and ratifiers of the law would have approved? There should of course be a presumption in favor of rules and a very good and compelling reason when their application is modified or even ignored. Obviously, any society needs rules, the fewer the better in my opinion, but some rules are necessary. Reason itself so demands.
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