Tham khảo tài liệu 'ethical choices and legal obligations_2', khoa học xã hội, hành chính - pháp luật phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 54 Temptations in the Office day before the president signed the bill it wasn t wrong. Legally speaking that is. You don t have to be a lawyer to know this is correct. When Congress passes a bill prohibiting certain conduct and the president signs it or the state legislature passes a bill and the governor signs it what used to be legally OK suddenly becomes not OK or vice versa. If you adhered to the maximize-profit-but-follow-the-law approach you d say this and no more. Law and ethics on this view are coextensive that is the boundaries of one are the boundaries of the other. But surely there s a very important sense in which what s okay doesn t change with the stroke of the presidential or gubernatorial pen. Most of us think that racial or gender discrimination is wrong in a profound and enduring way that has nothing to do with what the law prohibits or allows. Indeed it s impossible to explain the passage of the Civil Rights Act without recognizing that a lot of people enough to elect a majority in the House and the Senate and a president had to have believed that such discrimination was wrong so that they wanted a law passed. If law and ethics are coextensive if that is the law entirely subsumes ethics then it s impossible to favor a change in the law on ethical grounds. There can be no sense of the ethical that isn t also legal. This can t be right. Profit maximization plus law then is also a circular argument just like the economic ethics view. Whenever people think certain conduct should be forbidden or encouraged by law they necessarily have views about right and wrong that aren t yet embodied in the law. The views they have by definition don t come can t come from what s then legal and what s not. You can only support a change in the law because you think something is wrong that needs to be put right if you have a view that there are some things that are wrong or right apart from what the law provides at any particular moment. Was racial or gender .
