Shouldn't Adultery be a crime?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat

In a majority of states, dissolution proceedings are no-fault, and not subject to trial - just division of assets, custody, and child support. Who supposedly did what to who is generally inadmissible, unless it can be shown that there's something of such great magnitude as to be a risk to the safety of any children who might live with that parent. i.e. if one parent is a crack dealer and keeps loaded automatic weapons around the house, it's an issue.

This is the same in most jurisdictions I'm familiar with.

You haven't dealt with the US legal system. If you open up the door to "sanctions" for certain acts, you get the trial circus.

There's something else that needs to be reformed.

Not silly, nor moot at all. The point is the self-appointed powers of the state (or party, if you prefer) to decide which personal conduct matters to regulate.

It is silly, because that's what the law does anyway - it regulates behaviour. The division between what is subject to legal sanction and what's bad and isn't subject to legal saction is a pragmatic one. To imagine it as some moral truth laid up in heaven is simply ridiculous. Similarly with the distinction as to what is to count as a private matter and what isn't. Thus it's flexible. The plain fact is that we are often better off not subjecting certain things to the legal system because doing so does more harm than good. It's a moot point whether mild sanctions against adulterers will do more harm than good, just as it's a moot point how far the state should be able to interfere in family life to protect the welfare of children.

The one-fifth to one-third number that gets bandied around is the number of working people who don't have private health care benefits through their employers, not some mythical number of people who have no access to healthcare at all.

The fact is Americans spend a fortune on health care for worse service than Canadians get through the single payer system. Public health care is simply more efficient at allocating the maximum resources for the minimum cost than a private system. These are just the facts.

"A better overall result" is so vague and ambiguous that it is legally ridiculous.

Not really - it isn't vague at all. If the general level of welfare is increased it's a good thing. We make judgement calls like this all the time. And the utilitarian calculation has nothing to do with the law - it is prior to it, so saying it's legally ridiculous, is to miss the point entirely.

Mullah Omar, OBL, al Qutb and al Maududi will insist that "a better overall result" is obtained when all acknowledge Allah and live according to the one true law he handed down for all mankind.

The fact that these people get it wrong about what the result of their policies will be doesn't mean that the general notion of constructing a legal system to try and increase welfare as much as possible (preferably using some maximin principle) is wrong. To say that it is is to make the mistake of confusing an empirical application of a value principle with the value principle itself.

Jerry Falwell would have his own standard. The Libertarian Party has theirs, and you have yours. The real answer for when it becomes a legal matter is when the issue is such that even a private action is such a grave offense to public peace, security, or the basic functioning of society that there would be a substantial harm to the society as a whole of the activity in question was not made illegal. Legalized murder would lead to all sorts of potential stuff, including private wars, blood feuds, and a general breakdown of the entire society. Legalized property crimes would lead to the economic breakdown of society. Even relatively minor things like development and zoning laws fit in with that theme.

I agree with this.

Matters of personal morals do not. Is there any public harm in adultery if there are no kids and all parties consent to it?

Since I'm not advocating either that it should be punishable as a criminal offence or that it matters that much if children aren't involved or that there is any harm done it all parties consent to it I can't see how this is supposed to be aimed at my position.

[QUOTE]Not in a legal sense, no. Is there any public harm if it is not accepted by all parties and there are kids? Again, no - not if the affected party has the option to terminate the relationship and move on.[QUOTE]

Again - I never took aim at these cases, so I don't see what this has to do with me.

You can argue there's a private harm

This is sophistry. There is no such thing as private harm and public harm. There's harm, period. If there is a point here it's between harm to oneself and harm to others. But adultery is often a harm to others. Presumably you are going to say that if it's in a private relationship then that gives it some different status than if it's in some public arena. Bull - wife beating is harm that takes place in a private relationship - presumably you don't think the state has no interest in stopping that.

but there's at least the same degree of private harm from a non-adulterous, but self-aborbed husband or wife who sits down in front of the TV, ignores spouse and kids except to demand to be waited on, and is otherwise a useless waste of DNA. Are you going to legally sanction all forms of being a bad husband/wife/parent?

No and by my logic I don't have to. I've repeatedly said that I think that extreme philanderers are a social nuisance and that I think that some form of punitive recognition in a divorce court of this would be worthwhile. This doesn't commit me to any of this other stuff.

Frankly, the same goes for the deadbeats who go around fathering 20+ children that they can't support (I know a guy like this). Everyone else pays for the consequences of his intemperance in various ways.

The magnitude of public and private harm can't be distinguished between those types of situations and adultery. The remedy for the harmed party is (a) fix it, (b) accept it, (c) move on with your life.

Great - what if we treated wife beating this way?

In some cases, yes. And the (privately) affected parties have (private) remedies. No need for the state to step in, except to provide the judicial forum for the divorce.

"Private remedies" usually means "no remedy". Presumably in the days when it was legal for a husband to rape his wife, the wife had private remedies. No substitute really.

[QUOTE]Laws against adultery don't guarantee fidelity any more than the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act guaranteed sobriety.[QUOTE]

Nor do laws against wife beating.

Since they're equally arbitrary and subjective, then the state has the obligation to take the least action necessary to preserve and maintain compelling public interests.

So are laws, and we could go on. The fact is that the law can't work this way. At some point the law has to say "this is verboten" because it's a harm.

Only in your perverted version of it. "The rights of the many" over the "rights of the few" can be used to justify nearly every wrong in history. The notion that individual rights are paramount requires the state to take the least level of action necessary when it regulates those individual's actions.

It doesn't matter. If you have one person's free speech rights creating a situation in which twenty people can't exercise their free speech rights, the one person has to be gagged. Rights based systems that endow rights to guarantee goods and prevent harms can't avoid majority-minority conflicts any more than a straight utilitarian system.

So we have a party mechanism with the party members deciding by what criteria most people will be better off, and regulating all activities contrary to that criteria. Central Committee, or Mullahs, what's the difference?

Um, no... we have a democratically elected government that decides where to draw the line of state involvement and when to change it based on altered circumstances. You could take it one step further having a system of constitutional rights, but the same problem would occur.

The distribution of rights and freedoms should assure life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness. There is no universal "we." There is a collection of individuals, with a certain degree of common interests.

You know, not one argument I've offered here is anti-individualist in princple. My point is simply that if we are all going to get along and do well we need to be flexible about how far the reach of the law goes. This is simple pragmatism. If you had to sit down and work out how to run a country full of human beings and right them a legal code, these would be the sort of problems you'd encounter.

As opposed to a Cromwellian-Orwellian-Leninist statist gobbledygook?

Let's stop the insults there..