Hart was a legal positivist, meaning he took an approach to law in the social sciences and regarded law as a social fact. What the law is, he argued, and what it should be are two different issues. As he would say in his famous concept of law, morality can influence law, but laws and morality are separate social phenomena. But beyond that, I think as doctors and ethicists, we still have a lot of work to do to look in more detail at how we should balance legal structures in our work. Do we even have a moral obligation to obey the law? If so, how big is a moral obligation? How bad does a law have to be before we can justly recommend disobedience? 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!” But does this completely solve the theist`s problem? No, it is not. For one can still wonder how it is possible for people to behave morally, to agree on moral rules and laws, and generally to cooperate when there is no divine impulse in this direction. Have not modern philosophers, especially analytic philosophers, argued that moral statements are fundamentally emotional statements without rational foundation? And haven`t they irrevocably separated “is” from “should,” so that no foundation is possible? In this context, how is it that people come to agree on a multitude of moral and legal principles, often from culture to culture? And, more interestingly, how is it possible for legal and moral systems to improve over the centuries without having the very rational or theological foundation that modern philosophers have so effectively removed? Without a basis, some objective criteria, it is not possible to prefer a good moral system to a bad one. If both are equally emotional and irrational, they are both equally arbitrary – making any choice between them just the product of random inclinations or deliberate whims.
No election can be rationally defended. False (left) and right relationship between laws and moral rules. Unfortunately for those pushing this proposition, the existence of this authority is not as obvious as the existence of human authorities enforcing public laws. Thus, in order to control lawful but immoral behavior, the clergy over the centuries have found it necessary to harass, persuade, beat, and condition their flock to believe in this supreme arbiter of moral behavior. They tried to condition the children as early as possible. And in adults and children, they appealed to the imagination by painting graphic images of the tortures of the damned. We certainly expect people to act morally and ethically, even when there is no law or legal enforcement to draw the consequences. In particular, we hope that politicians will go beyond legal norms and make ethical choices, as they are elected leaders who are expected to promote the best interests of all citizens. Hart believed that a free society should allow for morally autonomous decisions on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. But all laws, he believed, should be reviewed to see what damage they could cause. Hart addressed the damage caused by abortion laws in Britain before they were liberalized in 1967.
In the 1950s and 60s, it was estimated that about 10,000 illegal abortions took place each year in Britain. This means that in 26 years, 260,000 women from all walks of life have been guilty of a crime punishable by imprisonment. But when Hart looked at the statistics, he found that there were only about 55 convictions each year. This indicated to Hart that the company had little interest in enforcing this law and that it had become a dead letter. He also pointed out that illegal abortion is part of a “highly profitable criminal industry” that provides “targets for blackmailers and corrupt temptations for law enforcement.” Bad governments provide other examples. In Nazi Germany, there were all kinds of laws made to deprive the Jewish people of their basic human rights. Aiding or even providing medical treatment to a Jewish citizen if you were a non-Jewish doctor was prohibited by law. But, of course, we would not regard such actions as immoral; Quite the contrary. Here, it would be morally reprehensible to follow the law. A related and undisputed hypothesis is that, to be binding, moral values must come from a source external to man.
Again, the analogy between law, judges and police emerges. In everyday life, we obey laws that seem to be created by others, judged by others, and enforced by others. Why should moral rules be different? According to this view, we have only a moral obligation to obey laws that we believe to be primarily moral – good laws – and only because of their content and not just because they are laws.