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From Issue: 649 [Read full issue]
Ethics and Law
Equality between human beings is an ideal. Religions, philosophies and political ideologies have made the equality of them the essence of their teachings, principles and systems. Individuals must be treated with dignity and fairness. And yet a journey through societies and nations is all it takes to convince us that we still have a very long way to go: political philosophies have been elaborated, Declarations and Charters have been drawn up, ratified and signed, and laws have been passed, but the reality of inequality and discrimination imposes itself on us. Universally. Whilst equality is a de facto legal principle, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the law is not enough to establish it. Before we talk about laws and rules, we have to discuss and evaluate the very idea of humanity, and of its unity and diversity. And besides, there can be no law without ethics ... without a certain idea of man, of the good, and of social and political ideals, and there can therefore be no question of legal equality amongst men without a moral philosophy that establishes the nature of human relations.
A religious man as well as an activist, Gandhi described himself as 'Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish' and challenged all those religions by looking at their day-to-day social practices. He warned: 'Once we lose our moral certainties, we cease to be religious.' Practices and philosophies must, in other words, be consistent and must be considered together. The same questions run through our modern societies, both North and South, with the same intensity as in Gandhi's day, even though castes, classes and categories of our societies - be they 'developed' or 'developing' - seem to be less visible than they were in India in the first half of the twentieth century. The dialectical relationship is still the same, and the questions appear to be unchanged: the concrete inequalities of everyday life urge us to be critical of our basic philosophies and our conception of human fraternity, just as they must challenge the consistency of systems that claim to be egalitarian. There can be no law without ethics, and there can be no ethics without the law: we find the same equation in all religions and, with or without God, in all spiritualities and humanist and/or political philosophies.
Compiled From:
"The Quest for Meaning" - Tariq Ramadan, pp. 66-69