The Rule of Law

Not a good in itself.
Fatwa 64, which effectively justifies the systematic rape of women and girls, says it is necessary to set out rules because "one of the inevitable consequences of the jihad of establishment is that women and children of infidels will become captives of Muslims".

Among the disturbing list of rules are that 'owners' of mother and daughter captives, or sister captives cannot have intercourse with both and that owners and their sons cannot have intercourse with the same woman captive.

They also state that owners should not cause the captive women to abort if they are pregnant, should not sell her to an owner they know will treat her badly and should treat her with "compassion"....

In order to deal with the women captured by fighters, IS has established a department of "war spoils" to manage slavery.
The confusion is easy to fall into. Aristotle himself says that justice is lawfulness plus fairness, to paraphrase very loosely, and it can thus kind of sound like obedience to the law is a good in and of itself. But that isn't really what he means: on a closer reading, he means to say that it is good to obey the law if the law is properly structured.
Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one's lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well. This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour. And therefore justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues, and 'neither evening nor morning star' is so wonderful; and proverbially 'in justice is every virtue comprehended'. And it is complete virtue in its fullest sense, because it is the actual exercise of complete virtue. It is complete because he who possesses it can exercise his virtue not only in himself but towards his neighbour also; for many men can exercise virtue in their own affairs, but not in their relations to their neighbour.
Emphasis added. Law is justice insofar as it commands the behavior that virtue itself would command. In that way, obeying the law is complete virtue from the perspective of your neighbors: though it does not insist on your virtue in private matters, where neighbors are concerned, a rightly-formed law mandates that you act rightly toward them.

ISIS clearly thinks it is doing something moral here by regulating away the worst practices of its fighters, and thus mandating that they treat the women they take as slaves with 'compassion,' both while raping them and at other times. In fact, they have codified the worst abuses into the law: the slavery and the rape themselves. Now the law will permit them to feel good about themselves for avoiding a few bad practices in the performance of their monstrosities.

15 comments:

Cassandra said...

Law (especially unenforced religious fatwas) isn't sufficient to make justice certain. It can't be, because humans are fallible and even perfect laws - which this certainly isn't - won't be perfectly enforced.

But I would argue that when it places limits on abuses, it is a greater good than no law at all. In the absence of law, what external restraint exists? If this fatwas restrains some who - in its absence - would commit worse abuses, isn't it better than no law at all?

There's an old saying about how the perfect shouldn't become the enemy of the good. Or in this case, maybe just the marginally better (while still evil).

Naturally, I'm horrified that any law would codify the right to enslave another human being in today's world. We know slave owners had legal rights to "own" human property even in Western societies, so this sort of thing is hardly novel.

Obviously the merit of the rule of law rests with the merit of the laws themselves. But even bad laws in many cases provide more redress than no law at all.

/proactively denouncing my ownself for being a rape apologist, or whatever

Ymar Sakar said...

Islam has always been Islam, but Christianity, what remains of it, is a bloodied stump of what the Apostles and Middle East Christianity had, close to the source of the waters.

The Law... obey it or else. That is all.

Ymar Sakar said...

"Now the law will permit them to feel good about themselves for avoiding a few bad practices in the performance of their monstrosities."

So is calling what they do in war, an act born of courage, a virtue. These things lead to the expansion of Islam, they do not lead, as Westerners like to think due to the temptation of the mirage, to the elimination of Islamic child rapists in Rot England. It is the reverse or the obverse in fact.

Grim said...

/proactively denouncing my ownself for being a rape apologist, or whatever

Duly noted. :) I'm sure no one here thinks you guilty of any such thing.

This will have to be read with the discussion below re: Tamir Rice to attain the full effect. The law can't just have any content to be an improvement over lawlessness. In spite of all the problems of chaos, it does at least have the advantage of not codifying and justifying a system like slavery. It may be that you would have effective slavery under both an anarchy and a Caliphate; but the Caliphate is still worse. It is worse because it upholds and defends slavery as an institution, whereas under the anarchy slaves could always hope to get the upper hand.

Under an anarchy they might catch their masters sleeping and cut their throats, or their Achilles tendons and then return the favor of enslavement on erstwhile masters. Under the Caliphate, the next day agents of the state will ride in and restore the masters to authority -- or, if that is not possible, at least restore the slaves to bondage. They will feel particularly just and righteous in doing it, too, because they are following the law.

That's the problem with divorcing the law from virtue, and it's why we cannot accept this as an improvement even though it may provide a few additional protections.

Anonymous said...

According to the actual Islamic scholars from the various schools of Islam, the Daesh don't have anybody of sufficient academic stature to issue a fatwa. Just cuz some a$$hole puts "fatwa" in the title doesn't make it a fatwa.

http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com

What really tickles me about point #1 is that it says that the Koran and the Hadith have to be read as a whole. This is a fundamental principle of both legislative construction and claim construction (in US patent law). Then, point 2 says you have to pay attention the grammar.

Nothing about this new "fatwa" takes it outside the ambit of the Letter to Baghdadi. Indeed, points 12,14 and 15 appear to have anticipated this latest attempt at a "fatwa."

Just saying'

Valerie

Grim said...

I'm not sure how useful the letter is. The law cited is currently the law in a certain geographic area, without regard to the opinion of anyone about whether it meets proper Islamic standards. The question at stake is whether the rule of law per se is valuable.

It seems to me that formalism about whether this really satisfies Islamic standards or not is fine, perhaps even useful from a propaganda perspective, but in an important way beside the point. This is the law that presumably is being enforced within a certain area. Is it important that it be a good law? Or is law a good in itself?

Cassandra said...

In spite of all the problems of chaos, it does at least have the advantage of not codifying and justifying a system like slavery.

This doesn't make much sense to me - seems to me that if the law doesn't mention slavery at all, society has effectively allowed slavery to exist without any restraints whatsoever!

IOW, it's not considered harmful at all, and slaves have absolutely NO rights under law. That doesn't seem better to me than a system where they have *some* rights under law.

That said, I stand by my earlier comment that as "law", a fatwa's pretty worthless - it's not really enforceable by the State. More of a moral command than anything else, like the 10 Commandments.

Anyway, I had no thought of "accepting" it - just recognizing that some restraint, however feeble, is better than no restraint at all. I'm not really sold on equating a fatwa to "the rule of law".

Ymar Sakar said...

Religious fatwas in Islam, from a proper Caliph or Islamic mullah, is enforced with more universal completeness than gun control laws are enforced in Democrat fiefdoms.

It's sort of like people thinking they have to obey the President's "order" that they talk about Healthcare at Thanksgiving Dinner...

The religious hierarchy in Islam is based first on descent from Mohammed and his uncles' dynasty, the Abbasids and related branch families. Secondly, it is based on present day control and influence. Third on the Shia's Ali, married to Fatima, Mohammed's daughter, of the Fatimid dynasty. Fourth, on military power. Although 4 may as well be the same as 2.

The Shia and Sunnis differ only on who the second Caliph was, after Mohammed. It's a political and religious succession crisis. As a result of some other factors, the Shia have been more amenable to change over time. Iran had a western Shah even. And the Mullahs seem satisfied with a division of powers, the power behind the throne (theocracy), rather than the original and classic Islamic Caliph system in Iqta. IS, however, being pure Sunni, prefers the Caliph and Caliphate instead. Since the position is vacant, only direct lineage connections to Mohammed would allow them to succeed or military power in jihad, both makes them emulate Mohammed and thus closer to Allah.

There is no religious Islamic scholar, no matter what he thinks his credentials are, who outranks the Caliph or even a minor replica like Yassir Arafat (religious fervor plus military might).

IOW, it's not considered harmful at all, and slaves have absolutely NO rights under law. That doesn't seem better to me than a system where they have *some* rights under law.

They have the same rights as any other property under Southern Slavery 2.0 in 1830 North America or Islamic Caliphate in 785 AD North Africa. If they wish for more rights, they could become a third class serf, and pay the Jizya, 25-75% of their income and assets, so that Jihad can take more slaves to breed more jihadists in the next gen. And of course, if the Dhimmis paying the Jizya find it unconscionable that their money is being used to wage Jihad on their fellow pacifist religious believers, they can just convert to Islam, become a Muslim, and then become peaceful.

Whether this is 21st century AD or 8th century AD... doesn't matter, since Islam is Islam. They don't change as much as people would like to think, given the history of the West itself.

The reason why they want to stop abortions is because they are thinking in generational terms. The child born now, will be a jihadist in the future. That is the Way of Islam.

Anonymous said...

"Or is law a good in itself?"

Absolutely not. History is rife with examples of bad laws ginned up for the purpose of stealing property and killing people. The genius of the US Constitution, which is the foundation for all of our laws, is that it provides guidelines that help define "good laws," or at least define some classes of bad laws that cannot be used.

In the US, people exercising the power of the Federal government can't do anything based on a religious excuse, or shut down criticism of their actions (1st Amendment). They can't strip the people of their ability to change their government by force (2nd and 3rd Amendments). They can't perform searches or seizures against their political opponents without due process of law (Amendments 4 and 5). They cannot do show trials (Amendment 6 and 7). They cannot just dump somebody in jail and keep them there. (Amendment 8).

And that is just the Bill of Rights. Our entire structure of government is generally directed to dividing up governmental power so that any individual's ability to run amok and abuse others, by means of bad laws or bad application of good laws, is limited.

Law in and of itself is not sacred, nor is it necessarily even a good thing.

Valerie

Ymar Sakar said...

In the US, people exercising the power of the Federal government can't do anything based on a religious excuse, or shut down criticism of their actions (1st Amendment). They can't strip the people of their ability to change their government by force (2nd and 3rd Amendments). They can't perform searches or seizures against their political opponents without due process of law (Amendments 4 and 5). They cannot do show trials (Amendment 6 and 7). They cannot just dump somebody in jail and keep them there. (Amendment 8).

The Left does all of that and more in the current US totalitarian regime system.

The question people should ask themselves is if the US Constitution was designed to stop and prevent such abuses, then who is responsible for ensuring the US Constitution itself isn't hijacked by HIV or subversion type viruses?

Cassandra said...

Well, I'll go on record as saying I think the rule of law per se, has tremendous value for several reasons:

1. Societies that operate under the rule of law (as opposed to the rule of powerful men) must state - openly - which acts will result in punishment/jail/fines, etc. Laws that are in the open can be reviewed, debated, discussed, changed.

There is real value in setting down the law so people can see what it is and see whether it is being upheld (as opposed to having police "disappear" people in the middle of the night and imprison/torture them without the tiresome necessity of filing charges, producing evidence, holding a trial, or providing post-conviction appeals).

2. It provides a system of remedies for both official and private misconduct that doesn't consist solely of, "You did something I don't like, so I'm going to shoot you/beat you up" or "You have something I want, I'm bigger/better armed than you, so I'm just going to take it."

3. It provides a stable, orderly, and predictable framework for making decisions, interacting with others, and conducting business.

All of this doesn't mean that bad laws aren't harmful (or that merely having laws somehow ensures justice in every case). I don't think anyone here has claimed that law is sacred or perfect. It obviously isn't.

Finally, it makes no sense to me to equate a fatwa with "the rule of law". Few Muslim countries have the rule of law, frankly. ISIS certainly doesn't come remotely close.







Grim said...

Some of those are contingent: for example, it's not always the case that a nation with the rule of law permits the law to be debated. Sha'riah law, perfectly applied, would also not be open to being changed.

Still, no one doubts that there are potential advantages to a rule of law. I remain convinced that I would prefer an anarchy to a stable state with a rule of law that regulated my enslavement or other serious abuse. At least with an anarchy, there's always a chance the wheel could turn.

Ymar Sakar said...

The South also had the Rule of Law, Jim Crow. Fat load of good that did white Republicans that were lynched by the KKK, who were funded by Democrat Senators and various other lawyers and politicians propping up that Law of the Land.

Grim said...

Well, indeed, Jim Crow may be a good example of a 'rule of law' that isn't preferable to anarchy -- especially not for black Republicans in the South, but really not for a lot of people. It was the era of brutal chain gang labor, too, and an insulated elite using the law to dominate and deprive people of their natural rights under color of law.

Ymar Sakar said...

Sherman can be blamed for the existence of the insulated elite, since if he had done as the South blamed him for, he would have wiped them out to the last clan member, not merely burning down their plantations and property.

One point for Ghenghis Khan's effectiveness, historically, over the "merciful" version of American Total War, which isn't even total as it has turned out.