The Conflict Between Law and Morality (PDF)

Polemic Paper from the year 2016 in the subject Law - Philosophy, History and Sociology of Law, grade: 89.00, Bilkent University (English), course: Englis-102, language: English, abstract: It is obvious that law and morality both seek our piece of mind and justice. As a description in the Oxford Dictionary law is the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. Law establishes this with the enforcements and punishments if you step over the lines shaped by laws. Morality which is described in Oxford Dictionary as: morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper also has punishments for bad acts and rewards for good acts like guilt and denouncement for crimes and praise. These two phenomenons might seem very diverse but they have one obvious thing in common: they affect the way we live.

The problem is that it is inevitable to say that there is a huge conflict between law and morality and this conflict shows itself on some specific examples. In today's world some of the law experts may claim that law is absolute. Its importance is over all other regulators like morality. However the conflict between them proves that moral principles are still stronger than legal principles for some cases. Although today one can argue that as long as law permits certain social practices such as same-sex marriage, abortion and legislation of prostitution should not be considered as legally wrong, they are moral problems of modern world, which proves that moral principles are still stronger than legal principles.