Law and Morality

Haha, EnMarchant it looks like I’ve beat you to the punch.

I’ve been thinking about the Morality of Law and its basis on the requirement of Moral imperatives when ascertaining what is just. Morality is a code of conduct that has practical limits to how far it’s actually possible to live in accordance with. I see Laws as the definition of this practical limit of morality. Meaning morality might say, “We should never fight a war, as its wrong to kill.” The practicality of this is unreasonable, so the Law dictates that war is a final but legal option. I know this isn’t quite the most perfect example, as some will make a moral case for war. But the main point I’m trying to make is that Morality is the perfect or ideal rule, while the Law is the practical implementation of the ideal.

Not only does Morality guide laws, but also civil order must be taken into account. Meaning if I’m driving my car at 80mph down a street when I should be only doing 55mph. This isn’t immoral but its endangering public safety. Because groups of people must live in confined spaces, we must have fair rules to guide conduct. This way we will not treat or be unfairly mistreated by each other. People can live together knowing that certain rules, while not based on morality must be followed for continued peaceful cohabitation. So the law is not just an implementation of morality, it’s also a glue that binds society together to form civil units that can cooperate with one another.

I agree with your answer completely. Just to start off with, there are several areas of the law that have moral ramifications. I think you are focussing just on the specifc content of the laws. Which is fine with me. In this post I will list other possibile areas of concern. Next post I will deal directly with your post.

I think the morality of a law is to be found in its (a) legitimacy, (b) origin and making, (c) specific content, (d) promulgation, (e) application. Maybe there are more areas of concern.

Legitmacy = Authority. Is the ruler ONE, SOME, or ALL. Or, mixed - representation. Is the representation fair?

Origin/Making. Is the procedure of making the law valid. Is there a legislative body? Is there an executive? Is there a separation of powers? If there is a king, is there still some rule of law to guide the king? Or is the “rule of law” not a necessary political moral?

Specific content: Is the law itself fair? Does it overextend? Or underdefine? Does it reach into private areas? Is it biased?

Promulgation: Is it clear and is it known?

Application: Executive and police - Are they fairly constructed? Are their powers fair? Are their actions fair?

Regarding the kind of laws: Most generally, the law either Forbids an action (murder), Compels an action (taxes), or Proscribes a course of conduct of an optional activity (contracts, traffic laws). (H.L.A. Hart defines law as such.) In each of these three categories, we can wonder about the morality.

Here’s my clarification to your otherwise clear statement: Law and morality both approximate an ideal. I think the ideal can be named: Impartiality. Neither our laws nor our practical morals are completely impartial. Thus they both approximate the ideal.

Here’s my reasoning.

Consider the mental requirement (mens rea) in murder laws: Do they approximate the ideal of morality? Well, who posits this Moral Ideal in the first place? A single person, anybody? Or a philosopher like Bentham or Kant? Or a group of academics who study ethics? Or is it just in the air of a society? To me this is the most difficult question: How do morals get defined? For, we know how the law gets defined in our respective societies (legislative, etc.). Yet, if practical morals are nothing more than a code of conduct of a certain place and time (in the air of a society), then they are no different from the law except in formulation.

Does that make sense. If humans, in Law as well as in practical morals, are always only capable of coming up with an approximation of the Ideal, then Law and Morals only differ in their manner of formulation. The law in one country, for example, is created through a ruling class and in another country through a representative body. In both cases there is probably going to be a lot of input from moralists as to the exact wording of the laws. The law in a democracy favors the interests of the majority. But there will always be self-interests. These self interests will impact both the moralists and the lawmakers. Thus we are stuck inside a circle of practical limits on the Ideal.

Let’s say the only way out of this circle of “practicality” is to posit that the key difference between Morality-as-an-Ideal and the practical morals/laws is Impartiality. It seems, the impartiality of ideal morality is the key difference from the partiality of the law.

But this partiality is not necessarily undesirable - it is the nature of democracy. I said that I agreed with your statement. This is because I think in modern representative democracies the possibility of maximum impartiality is at its greatest. But the “good” of partiality is also present in democracy. Is this a paradox?

(By the way, I am not here making any comment on whether there is or isn’t an ideal. I’m just using Ideal in the way you used it - as an aspiration as well as possibly as a real universal.)
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Strength gives Authority, and authority gives Legitimacy. I believe in ‘Might Makes Right’. While this view is not moral it’s practical. In reality only the people who have the strength to backup their decree with a force can administrate a code of law.

One example would be the French revolution. The old Rulers didn’t have the strength to support their system of law, so the power of the people overthrew those Rulers and their laws. While the law was unfair and in part immoral, this was only a catalyst to trigger the people’s revolution. What changed the law was the power of the people. It was the weakness of the rulers to enforce the laws that removed their Authority and so their Legitimacy. It’s only those who have the strength that have the Legitimacy to make laws, as it’s the force that gives Authority and backups the laws.

There’s no perfect system of law, and there can never be one. The problem being “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” No matter how many checks and balances you have, so long as people can collude there will be the corruption of power. So what normally happens is, if the ordinary person is doing okay and there’s at least no visible sign of to much corruption, everything will keep going as normal. Only when there are blatant signs of mass corruption do people care enough to fight. Apathy is the saviour of the corrupt! So long as the corrupt have enough sense not to be too greedy, they’ll be able to get away with it.

But that said, the type of system I would like to live under would be as follows:

I believe there should be an accepted Constitution, which is the guideline and should include a definition of what the moral principles the people hope to live by.

I think there should be a legal team (which I’ll call ‘Constitution Administrators’) that review laws and recommend revisions, removal and future laws. These are not elected officials and who only serve for a short period of time about 3 years. It’s a requirement of everyone who wishes to practice law in the state that (after their first 7 years of practicing) they will at some time be required to be involved in the administration of these amendments. The people would be selected by drawing lots, and after you have finished your tour of duty you can’t serve again until at least 15 years have passed. They only have the right to abstain once from selection then the next time they must serve or else lose their right to practice law. As serving on the Constitution Administrator board is part of the oath they must take in the first place to practice.

A house filled with elected representatives then sits in two different houses. Any form of Party system is band. Each elected representative is there to represent the people who have elected them, not a political party who might have its own constitution.

I still need to give this more thought and will reply again later in a day or two to continue.

This is where I feel laws need to be derived from a Constitution, which can only be changed by a referendum. It would be the job of the ‘Constitution Administrators’ to make sure that Laws are a fair representation of the Constitution. They would also be the group that would table any changes to the constitution.

The public would also be able to set the agenda of what needs to be reviewed, as cases could be brought to a court for review by a jury of peers from the people. And then depending on the judgement it would be brought up to the Constitution Administration for review. Laws can be changed by the House of Representatives, while any Constitutional change must go to the people.

People would then only have the right to vote after they’ve spent time in a government run class teaching the both for and against arguments. So failure to attend class removes the right to vote, as only an informed electorate has the right to vote. Failure of anyone who does not go to the class and then failure to vote incurs personal tax penalties. Also if less then 60% of the populace turn out to vote then an additional tax penalty is incurred by the whole population. (This would mean that those who didn’t vote would be taxed twice). The people must partake in all votes, peer pressures is used in the form of a national tax to make sure people encourage each other to go to class and then to vote.

Civil Education: Like the way schools teach English, Maths, etc, they should teach Civic responsibility. It’s apart of the curriculum from the first time a child goes to school to the very last day they leave. Children must also be examined yearly on their understanding of their Civic responsibility. So it can be seen that every future member of society understands what responsibilities will be required of them to fulfil their obligations to society. Philosophy would also be apart of this civil education, to teach all children that there is more then one way to view a problem.

Again it’s impossible to have a fair system where power and people are involved. Once you mix national security and the right to privacy, it becomes very complex to see where the lines should be drawn. I believe everyone has the right to privacy; this also includes all purchases, and so it would be illegal for companies to track customer’s purchases, or any other type of profiling for profit.

Again I need to give this more thought and will reply again soon.

Okay. But let’s not give up on morals yet. Don’t you think that an authority based on strength alone would have no legal legitimacy? It would be coercive, to be sure. And in this sense it would appear to look like law. But on this formula, the law would be nothing more than a legitmate criminal system. In my opinion, only when the law approaches some kind of ideal, even a small one at that, we get away from the might = right standard and into true legal legitimacy. The legitmacy of the law’s coercive authority comes from the goals that the authority seeks to achieve and whether those goals are consistent with the society’s interests. It is directed towards the achievement of order, or safety, or a better economy, or equality. Coercion with a goal of mere coercion is not a “right” nor a legitmate authority. For example, the Nazi system was (unfortunately) a legitimate legal authority, but not because it was coercive. The German people believed in the goals of Naziism, even if that belief was in part formed by coercion. The legitimacy came from – well you’ know the story, and seen the support the Nazi party had. The people agreed with the party. Thus it was a legitimate authority.

In line with this, the French revolution is not only about a change in power but a change in law – where law is defined as that which represents the views of the people. The failure of the French monarchy to become merely formal (as in England), and thus not become modern (with notions like liberty, equality, and fair representation), is what weakened the king and strengthened the people.

But maybe I am blurring the distinctions that I had set down in my list? Am I confusing legitimacy with other aspects of the law?

Given all this, I think it sidesteps an important question, namely, what ??principles??? would establish the morality of laws. Is an educated public really a necessary condition for a moral law? Somewhat cynically, I think educated people disagree on the same things that uneducated people disagree with. Maybe they only argue differently and use different words. The educated say “federalism” and the uneducated say “stay off my back”. But for both the question still remains: What’s the right moral related to federalism? The European Union is constantly dealing with this question, and in my opinion it one of the most divisive legal issues in America. Would education really get us to a level of morals that would once and for all answer the common sense of “stay off my back”?

This all makes me think that the law, at least in some ways, is merely political. In this sense, what result of education would necessarily lead to a moral system of law? It seems to me that the making of laws, especially in a parliament or in an executive body, is a political not a moral process – though sometimes informed by moral voices and conscience.

I generally agree. I would argue that to find morals in a systematic way one must look to the constitutional congress, or “Administrators” that you speak about, or to the courts. For morals, I always return to the essentially non-democratic elements of the law – the court and their constitutional or common law analyses. This works for two reasons: (1) it is a non-political space of reasoned argument (I am idealizing a bit, I know), and (2) there is the fact of having real parties and real facts on hand to provide a necessary reality check on the otherwise abstract constitutional/common law analyses.

The combination of analysis of principles (the courts) and the voicing of interests (the legislator) is the basis of a moral legal system. The possibility of experimentation and change as well as a kind of permanence in the law is another aspect of morality. Educated voting without more, like strength without more, is not moral nor completely legal. In a nutshell: The legal system must be set up to represent interests within the context of principled analysis.

So you’re implying that there’s a legal code that is above all other codes, kind of like an absolute morality. Meaning there is only one legitimate legal system that is better then all others. I would disagree, what is legal is setup by the strong, and evolves over time. Take slavery in America, it was legal at one point, but now it’s not. So does that mean, when it was legal, it really was actually illegal? What is legal is subjective to those who have the power to control and enforce what they believe.

There have been two different types of Worlds. (1) A world before the coming together of nations, (2) and one of a Global Community (i.e. League of Nations, UN). In the first there was local autonomy, the rulers didn’t have to worry much about what their neighbours thought of their legal system. In the second the rulers have to agree to live by the rules of an organisation like the UN. Saddam is the perfect example: If he where ruling during the time of the first world, no other country would question is authority or his laws. While they might not agree with them, they would do nothing to stop him. But because he is living during the second, the Global Community doesn’t agree with the way he is ruling, as he is seen as a threat to global peace. (I don’t want to get into is the war right or wrong in this topic) It is the strength of the acting nations (US & Britain) that is using its strength to enforce the laws of the UN.

The point I’m trying to make is that the legal code handed down by the UN only has authority when it is backed up by the strength of its members. The League of Nations failed because it didn’t have the strength to enforce their laws, so when the laws were broken nobody did anything to punish the guilty party. It was shown while people wanted the League of Nations to have authority; it didn’t have the strength to deserve that authority. So when countries ignored the laws nothing could be done to reprimand the violating country.

Legality of law has to do with the strength to enforce it, nothing else. You could have the most corrupt legal system in the world. But unless there is somebody stronger then you and can remove you from power, you will be free to rule as you see fit. This is why America can refuse to acknowledge the International Criminal Court in Europe.

What keeps a democracy a democracy is the strength of its people. The founding fathers of the American constitution recognized this fact, in the right of the people to bare arms to protect themselves from others and corrupt leaders. Yes it is always best to have a system that is moral and fair, only because it will stop the people from revolting. This was the point I was making about, “Only when there are blatant signs of mass corruption do people care enough to fight. Apathy is the saviour of the corrupt! So long as the corrupt have enough sense not to be too greedy, they’ll be able to get away with it.” That’s why England has a King, or at the moment a Queen. They had enough sense to give the Lords and the commoners what they wanted to retain their status. While currently they have no authority to make law they live a privileged life, doing what for the common good???

I agree with you completely. But I think for the government to be for the people we need to remove Morality from individual religions and create a morality that can be accepted by peoples of all faiths. I think there should be a UN declaration for Human Morality, a principle that can be used for guidance when creating or reviewing laws. An example of a simple decree might be:

For a Moral code to work it must be reflected in the Laws of the State, and ultimately for a state to survive it must have fair and moral laws. Law and Morality need each other for an existence. I believe the only way you can have a code that works is if the people understand how and why it works that way. It’s easy to ignore things that we don’t understand. If you ask me, that’s why we have so many people who think Anarchism is a good way to rule. But as soon as you start to examine that system it quickly falls down, because there is no mandate for civil order. Most people are led by their own ignorance. This might be harsh but I believe it to be true, and that’s why I feel everybody who what’s to partake in the decisions of their state must be willing to understand how it works. Would you ask a Janitor to be the CEO of your company, not unless you’re insane. So why should it be any different with the running of a state? There’s also a bit of reverse psychology, in that most people if you told them they could have something would want it all the more. If you ask me current governments are using voter apathy to say in power, because they know only the committed few will actually go out to vote.

No. In limiting this response to the question of “legitmacy”, I think we generally agree that strength is what makes a legal system legitmate. But I’d like to clarify what I mean by “strength”.

I was saying that ultimately a legal system is legitimate when it has the support of the people. This I believe true in history and true in the future. It is a unversal statement. I used Naziism as an example of a legitimate government - Obviously I don’t think it is the best. As you said:

Democracy is a legal system supported by the strength of the people. But so was Nazi totalitarianism, and so were the monarchies in the middle ages. The rule of law, the common law tradition, the justinian code - all of these bodies of law were written and tolerated to restrain the king because the king cannot rule if there is no support of the people. If a king didn’t protect his people, through common law et al., this king would lose legitmacy. In the end, the people are the strongest element in society. The same goes with American slavery. It was legitimate because it was driven by the strength of the dominant people.

I am not talking about right and wrong at this point. I am only defining the meaning of strength.

I agree that strength in numbers is the legitmacy of the UN. But if NY and California decided to reinstitute torture against the “cruel and unusual punishment” requirement of the constitution, and they refused compliance with the constitution, they might be strong but not yet legitmate. They would need some longevity, I think. They might need to go to war aginst the federal government, and win, and then rewrite the federal constitution saying that NY and California determine the laws. At that point, they would have legitmacy, but for how long? Depending on what ensues, their legitmacy would either be permanent, or they might face extinction having failed to serve the people who in fact detest torture. But maybe we shouldn’t talk about the war.

I completely agree. That was the error of the French king before the revolution.

I agree with the need for a “moral” to deal with the relations and objects of people. And I too see it as a process of discvering operating “principles”. But this gets into defining what is and isn’t important, and the plain fact that people vehemently disagree on many things. What do you think of Rawls governing principle: That we should act in a way that would benefit the weakest member of society? He argues that if we set up a social contract, without knowing our ultimate position in that social network, we would make sure that the weakest member is treated well because we might end up being that weakest member. Thus his principle is based on a social contract reasoning with the twist that the contract is written before knowing class, race, status, gender, handicap, etc… There’s more to it. I’d like to discuss Rawls if possible because his theories are quite influential.

To me the law will always find its own equilibrium, based on what the people want and what the powerful few of the society want. The powerful few corrupt the system to there own ends, while the normal people are unable to manipulate it, as they don’t have the resources, whether it is contacts or money. Meaning if you have enough money or know the right people, you will more lightly get a judgement to go in your favour.

I haven’t read any of Rawls works. I’ll have a look around the web to see what I can find out. Do you know the title of any of his works that would be worth reading?

While it’s unfair to comment on somebody’s work, which I haven’t read… but… that won’t stop me and my 2-cent. I think his version is a little more contrived then mine. Nietzsche would definitely not agree with him. The only reason I can see people wanting to help others is if they realise that we should treat others, as we want to be treated. But even this is a little farfetched, as most people want to have a double standard. One for themselves and another for everybody else, which is always of a lower standard. Morality to me is useless, unless the Law reflects it to a degree. I believe we need to teach children that they should treat others like they would like to be treated, but without religious connotations. I think we would be living in a better world if we just had a little respect for each other.

Maybe you have done this to death, but I`ll still try to stir up further debate.

If a society`s laws are loosely based on its sense of moral justice, are they not likely to vary between countries and over time? Today we know that inequality is wrong; A century ago gay sex was wrong, and in many places still is. Morality is local and changeable, and so are ideas of justice

To me the ideal of equality, and thus plurality of morality and justice, prevents the conception of a universal code of human morality, and indeed invalidates the idea of international law. The world is a diverse place, and it cannot be assumed that “justice” (whose justice?) can be served throughout by one application of morality.

It’s a problem with the word morality, it has two different meanings, one being the objective whole of the matter and the other being the subjective way it is practiced. Now depending on who you listen to there is no objective whole of the matter and morality just is the subjective way it is practiced and thus there is no absolute ‘wrong’, just ‘wrong’ in respect to the people around you.

However the subjective nature of morality stems from it being predominatly dominated by religious writing for the whole of history, only recently throwing off the shackles of dogma with the emergence of Kant and Mill; both attempts to define an objective morality.

As Neitzche (I think) said, the trouble with Britain is that it has a justice system based on the morals of the Christian Church but few people really believe in Christianity anymore.

In all this means that we recently confuse the revolution of modern moral stances with just another changing moral stance, rather than the emergence of an objective moral system within more modern governmental structures. It can be interpreted as just another way the ‘wind’ of morality is blowing, in roman times homosexuality was fine, then in medaevial, it wasn’t and now it is again.

However it is my belief we are moving towards a more objective stance, with the political landscape gradually changing it’s stance towards a purely utilitarianistic outlook. There are teething problems within this as occasionally there are backlashes against this, leading to rises of strong religious belief in certain moral stances (e.g. southern US states, Muslim fundamentalism).

This is to be expected, modern morality is still in it’s infancy, it still has several objections and such to sort out, as well as establish it’s legitimacy against fable story religious morality. The trouble with utility as a moral stand point is that it is a sliding scale, it is not black and white, it is black through grey to white. There are situations where there are no clear moral answers.

That is the appeal of religious morality, it paints in two colours, black and white. It also shows the inadequacy of it as a basis for morality, life is not black or white, it is the sliding scale where not all acts easily fall in to one of the two headings.

Where does this leave justice and morality? Just because there is conflict at the moment between what is right and wrong doesn’t mean there ecessarily is no objective right and wrong, that is just plain fallicious reasoning.

I dont think you can dismiss religion as fundamentally flawed or wrong because it is a belief system. That is a common error of the “scientific” age. Religions gain authority because they offer some insight into life. Much of science is based upon equally questionnable beliefs, and is for most purposes simply the religion of the 21st century.
The Soccratic/Christian faith in truth, and the idea that knowledge and the good life go together, has been taken up again by “Science”. This new religion is simply a rehash of older thinking, drawing authority from the pace of technological development. Scientific “fact” is really only consensus opinion, and many of the “great” modern theories were originally suppressed for running against convention. The shifting nature of this opinion makes Scientific authority no more stable a ground on which to base morality than religion.

On a side note, I think that secularisation actually breeds fundamentalism by shifting religious authority to senior clerics who, without the concerns of stabilising a country, tend towards polar views.

Utilitarian judgement fails because it relies on a universal concept of “better” - which amongst differet cultures can be non constant. A pluralistic approach relies on toleration of judgement alternative to ones own, but again falls when cultures oppose each other - which judgement is right.

The answers would appear to be to create one culture/accepted ethical model (by conquest or diffusion), limit cultural interaction or to accept conflict of opinion and deal with them as they arise. Neither seems particularly likely, and I`d suggest that in reality the ideal of universal law/morality is insoluble.

I would be interested in challenging “the ideal of equality”. What is wrong with it? How does it “prevent the conception of a universal code of human morality”? Do you think that there is no standard morality by which to judge legal systems?

In my opinion, even if there are 1000 countries and 1000 conflicting legal systems, the one thing they all have in common is moral aspiration. This is one of the clearest most fundamental aspects of the law – to implement morality. No legal system is without a number of inner-consistant moral implementations. In the American system we use freedom as a basis of contract law. From the outside one can very easily see that contract law favors the rich. This is a no-brainer in my opinion. But contract law is nonetheless permeated with a morality of freedom or dignity of the individual.

My point here is that even if interests or legal systems conflict, and that there is no objective standard - This fact tells us nothing about the very real relationship between morals and law. Morals nonetheless exist, and moral relations nonetheless exist, and unless we only want to say that legal power is always arbitrary, or that the only factor in the formulation of a legal code is power and coercian, we must take notice of and improve upon the specific morals that do in fact permeate our respective legal codes.

Thus not only does contract law favor the rich it also affirms the dignity of most of the individuals living in America. That it doesn’t reach every individual is also a moral choice of the legal system in America. Thus: the discussion about law and morals must go on.

So often do I hear such an argument about science, but I don’t believe it to have any weight. I almost don’t want to get ito this here as this is a thread about law and morality but I will say a few defences against such a stance. Firstly science changes in the light of empirical counter evidence to a theory. Religion cannot. Secondly science is based on observable phenomena, while religion is invariably based on rumour and myth, taking for example the bible or the koran.

Neither do religions gain authority because of their insight to life, they offer precisely the opposite, they offer an escape from reality, they offer the ability to shift blame or responsibility to a higher being. For example, why are men better than women? Because the good lord said so (both the bible and the koran and quite clear on their stance on women). End of discussion. With science you must look at the facts. And the scientific facts say that intellectually we’re about even, it is testable, we can see where the answer comes from.

The only way that science is the religion of the 20th century is that 99.9% of the population today have no scientific knowledge or, worse, fairytale scientific knowledge that they are taught in school (even English ‘A’ levels still teach essentially lies to their pupils, although I have heard some writers call these ‘white lies’ to make it all easier to understand). Thus people tend to unquestionably trust their car to get them from A to B without every asking why is it that this works, how can I travel at such fast speeds and be confident that my brakes won’t fail, etc. Same thing for planes, etc.

However should any one of these 99.9% decide to question the fact that the sun is going to rise, that the plane will fly, etc. if they so desired they could go and find out why we scientifically believe these things happen, as well as trace the reasoning. That is impossible with a religion. What is the answer as to why Women have breasts? Because god said so. The scientific one is far more complex, but ultimately far simpler.

I was not offering science as a basis for a morality. Utilitiarinism is not “scientific” in any shape or form, it is supposed to be a priori. Nor is it defined on the the subjective notion of better, but on the distinction between pain and pleasure, the former being desirable and the latter undesirable. Most Utilitarians contend that pleasure is the only desirable thing in life, which is at odds with aristotle at least who also believes in virtue being good as well as a couple of other things I think, but I’m not sure about Socrates, having never got round to reading his ethics.

Where I think your opposition to an idea of an objective moral code, and thus an objective legal system, comes from is your belief in cultural equality. I have no such belief. In fact I have comprehensively argued against any such stance in “The Dangers of Islam” thread, so I won’t go too much into it here. I think it is possible to judge other cultures and not to view them all as equal. For example I feel that a culture that promotes facism is a bad culture, or a culture that believes in sacrifice, for example the aztecs.

What I am not saying is that there is a one-size-fits-all moral/legal code. However this is not because there isn’t an objective moral code, but because of the inability to apply it without taking in to account the existing belief sets of a culture. For example some cultures may not be able to apply certain concepts without revulsion from the pre-existing order.

For example in England our persistant obsession with peadophiles shows an inability to judge unemotionally. I also saw on the news today stiffer sentences for dangerous drivers, which may be necessary now our roads are so congested. However there were people on TV calling for stiffer sentences on careless drivers, saying people who killed through careless driving should be locked up. This is absurd, there is no intention on the part of the driver, so why should he be punished for a brief moment of carelessness with years of his life. This will not bring the dead person back, it will merely be vengence, which serves no-one.

I think you address the ideal of equality yourself. There will always be rich and poor, both within a society and when comparing other cultures. Can you say that the projected morality of “the rich” is strictly representative of a society`s morals as a whole?

Oh we cant duck out of this now . I think science is as applicable to morality as religion - it defines the way we lead our “modern” lives. I think your quick summary of the standard arguments and counter-arguments does both sides a disservice - maybe a further thread would be better. Simply I would say that “empirical” evidence is subjective, there are no facts.

DH Lawrence suggests that mankind demands miracle, mystery and authority; this has been provided by religion in the past, and is embodied by science today - promising the realisation of age-old human fantasies of utopia. As you say, that the internal combustion engine powers their locomotion is a miracle to many. As with religion it can be corrupted for the practice of war. Both science and religion aim to deliver man from the spiralling ascent into oblivion - that time will overtake our species. Science can advance human knowledge, but cannot make humanity accept this truth. Like the Christians of former times, believers in science are caught up in the self-deception that they can cheat death.

I consider utilitarianism as identifying the greatest happiness for the greatest number - i.e. for the greater benefit. I didnt` say this was scientific, but it is subjective.

The rape of a schoolgirl is a deeply ingrained cultural fantasy in Japan. This might offer further example of the divided and fashionable moralities of different cultures. In terms of your driving example, is the driver intentionally allowing himself to be careless (does that matter- he IS being careless). Maybe like shooting somebody without the intention of killing them, but doing so accidentally. The action is knowingly dangerous.
Either way, this only further illustrates that the collective morality of a society is a poor basis for rational law.