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# Umbrella Movement: Legality versus Morality
- URL: https://larrysalibra.com/umbrella-movement-legality-versus-morality/
- Published: 2014-10-28T05:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2014-10-28T05:45:00.000Z
- Author: Larry Salibra
- Tags: politics, blog, #Import 2024-08-23 13:31

Asks a friend of a friend on Facebook:

> Not absolute sure if legal legitimacy is close to moral legitimacy... Can contravention of the law be justified on moral grounds?

Legality and morality are not the same.

From \[Bastiat's **The Law**\] :

> "The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only  
> turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the  
> weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is  
> supposed to punish!"

And then:

> "When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his  
> moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be  
> difficult for a person to choose between them."

What we are seeing in Hong Kong is the breakdown in respect for the law because it is being abused and used as a tool to achieve what a [large portion of HK society feels](http://www.com.cuhk.edu.hk/ccpos/images/news/20141022-eng.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) is an immoral ends.

You can see this to a larger extreme in mainland China. The Party writes the law so the law says whatever is convenient to the Party; people see little legitimacy in the way the laws and therefore either ignore laws or follow them solely out of fear of punishment not out of a respect.

Society works best when people accept laws as the rules to the game - it is costly (and not very effective) to use force to compel large numbers of people to accept a system they find unjust no matter how "legal" that system is.