Being non-compliant with the law is unjust in a society where people value rule of law. You can't just ignore laws that you disagree with. If you don't like a law, you should write your representative and try to fix it. That's a farce now of course, but we should fix the process so that it's not any more.
It's a lot harder to change a regulation when nobody has any idea what the landscape looks like without it, or how people could function without the incumbents that benefit from that regulation. Someone building a service people genuinely want, creating something useful that didn't exist before, and not doing any harm to people by doing so, may choose to go ahead and build it to prove that it's possible and sensible to do so. Sometimes that's the right thing to do; sometimes it's the wrong thing to do. But I'm not going to automatically assume that because there's a regulation on the books that that has anything to do with morality; there's far too many bought-and-paid-for regulations to believe that.
The morality is in following the law of the land regardless of your personal assessment of the law's merits or your personal assessment of the motives of the legislators. This should happen unless the law violates some fundamental human right. Respecting the rule of law is a moral principle.
Morally speaking, the law should be honored while it is in force, and if it is not a good law, it should be altered through the means provided by the political system.
Pragmatically speaking, implementing that moral ideal is becoming increasingly difficult, as governments reach farther and farther into daily commerce, become increasingly impenetrable to anyone of ordinary means, and fail to cope with the rapid social changes driven by new technologies.
> Respecting the rule of law is a moral principle.
> Morally speaking, the law should be honored
Emphatically no; law and morality are two different things, that hopefully correlate, but law does not ever define morality. (If anything it should be the other way around, but far too often it isn't.)
> and if it is not a good law, it should be altered through the means provided by the political system.
I already explicitly observed one reason why that's not always feasible. Often it takes a fair bit of momentum to get a law changed; momentum needs interested people, and people get a lot more interested when you have a practical demonstration that the law prevents them from getting something they want.
Nobody is going to go fight to change regulations to enable a business that doesn't exist yet; sometimes they'll fight against it because the incumbent has a better media machine and told them to. Regulations can kill a new business before it ever forms.
> Pragmatically speaking, implementing that moral ideal is becoming increasingly difficult, as governments reach farther and farther into daily commerce, become increasingly impenetrable to anyone of ordinary means, and fail to cope with the rapid social changes driven by new technologies.
Exactly. So perhaps you should start by not giving it the benefit of the doubt, not thinking of it as a "moral ideal", and instead just treating it as something that happens to exist and has various consequences associated with it.
There's a good reason why most regulations don't have particularly severe consequences: half the reason we can deal with the ones we already have is that they aren't actually enforced. Selective enforcement is also a problem, but the solution isn't universal enforcement, it's repeal.
(Also a good lesson for prospective implementers of a system that happens to encode procedures and regulations: if your system doesn't have some means for a knowledgeable human to bypass it, it's broken, and people will need to find ways to work around it.)
Correct. The law does not mean anything if we simply discard and refuse to obey the elements that we believe are unfair. That would be anarchy. Part of the compromise we make in modern society is the willingness to submit to communal norms and standards that are codified into law even if we personally don't agree with the rationale behind those laws. Later, this same courtesy is extended to us when fellow citizens comply with a law that they find personally disagreeable but for which we had successfully lobbied. This is the compromise of living in a democratic society. We need to accept it and comply when the law makes a determination that contradicts our personal preferences, even as we continue to work on rectifying what we perceive as bad law through the democratic process.
In exceptional cases, compliance is not required because it would violate a higher moral principle, but most of the time, the moral thing to do is to honor the law.
If no one else is playing by the rules, why should you?
When you're just starting out, you hope you are small enough to fly under the radar. When you are big enough for government to care, you hopefully have enough money and lobbiest to influence (read: by) government officials.
It's a myth that is perpetuated by those in power, to keep power: If you play by the rules, you'll succeed. If you don't, your break your social contract, or worse, bad for society and must be punished.
In America they say "Crime doesn't pay."
What they really mean "The crimes that the poor and middle class commit don't pay."
