dlowan wrote:I am way less interested in the LEGAL judgement than I am in the right or wrong thing to do - whether or not it meant a conviction.
If I understand it correctly, the moral dilemma you posit here is between your obligation to the law (which would require warning the prisoner and possibly losing the confession) and your obligation to some sort of notion of "justice" (criminals should be punished for their crimes). An analysis of the dilemma, then, would focus upon the competing obligations: which outweighs the other? Is your obligation to follow the law more important than your obligation to see that "justice" is done?
As I see it, there's hardly any dilemma at all. In a democratic society, the laws embody society's collective sense of "justice." Breaking the law to promote justice, then, is a paradoxical, if not absurd, notion, since breaking the law, in and of itself, promotes
injustice.
Now, one might maintain that a small injustice (breaking the law) is permissible if it serves to avoid a great injustice (letting a criminal go unpunished). From a Kantian perspective, however, that argument has no merit: no one can assert that laws should be followed in
some cases, as that calls into question the validity of
all law.
Even under a utilitarian analysis, the duty here is clear: the greater good is best served by adhering to the laws rather than to some idiosyncratic notion of "justice." The alternative is placing the determinations of "just" and "unjust" in the hands of every individual, which would mean the end of all law, and all "justice," entirely.
