It Is Something That You Are Morally or Legally

I recently discussed a clinical case with medical students and physicians that involved reconciling opaque ethical issues with relevant laws. One participant sat down and said, “Well, if we know the laws, that`s the end of the story!” The philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) had a great influence in the 20th and 21st centuries. One of his best-known concepts is the idea of “alienation,” which describes how people in capitalist societies alienate themselves from their labor and themselves because of the way the production of goods is organized. Remember what makes a claim a moral right: If there is a moral justification for a claim, then that person has a moral right. From this definition, we see that for a person to have a moral right, all that is needed is that the person`s claim is morally justified. A term often confused with “inalienable” is “absolute.” An absolute right is one whose claim can never be balanced by other moral considerations. The right not to be tortured is widely regarded as an example of an absolute right. This means that there are no circumstances that ethically justify the torture of a person. Today, many people interpret the rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence as inalienable in the sense that they cannot be exchanged. Today, the inalienable right to liberty is so widely recognized that a person cannot make a morally valid agreement to sell himself as a slave.

Given the widespread seventeenth-century practice of entering into agreements to be a “contractually bound servant”, it is not so obvious that the drafters of the Declaration thought that inalienable rights could not be exchanged, at least temporarily. In this book, the term “inalienable” is used to describe a right that others cannot take away and that cannot be enforced, but can be lost. The fundamental distinction between legal and moral is easy to identify. Most people agree that what is legal is not necessarily moral and that what is immoral should not necessarily be illegal. Sometimes laws seem to protect the rich and the rich at the expense of the poor and disadvantaged. Sometimes laws seem unfair. So, is it true that sometimes a good person has to break the law to get the right thing? Can it be morally right to break the law? Or is ethics the same as the law? There are many actions that are immoral, but it should not be illegal. For example, it may be immoral to gossip about your friend`s private life, but most would agree that this type of gossip shouldn`t be banned. The fundamental distinction between legal and moral seems quite simple. People talk about both legal and moral rights. Although attempts are often made to give moral rights the force of law by making them a legal right, moral rights must be distinguished from legal rights. It is not a contradiction to say that a person has the legal right to do something, but not the moral right to do it, or to claim that certain laws are unjust.

Laws that treated slaves as property violated the moral rights of those who were slaves. The argument used to justify slavery in the United States was that the Constitution only guaranteed rights to citizens. The law does not recognize slaves as citizens and therefore does not grant them civil rights, that is, the legal rights of citizens. In addition, the law considered slaves to be the property of others. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stated that former slaves were citizens and that all citizens had the right to life, liberty, and property (although only men had the right to vote), and that naturalized citizens had the same rights as Americans born in the country. That same year, 1868, Burlin`s Treaty of Play was signed. He denied the possibility of naturalization of Chinese Americans, even though he allowed free immigration between China and the United States. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to prevent the immigration of a particular ethnic group to the United States, and it was not repealed until 1943. A constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote was passed in 1920.

Civil rights laws of 1964-65 prohibit all forms of discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and national origin. From an ethical point of view, it is crucial for professionals to distinguish between clients, patients and students who waive a right or choose not to exercise it – perhaps the right to further information – from those who do not realize that they have the right in question, or who do not know how to practice the right.