[Kim]

Will mankind ever progress beyond the need for written law?

[ComradeRick-CL]

yes yes there will. once communism is achieved these bourgeois standards of law, and morality will be thrown out the window. People will recognize the inherent laws of mankind.

[Korimyr the Rat]

We never really needed written law in the first place.

It's just infinitely preferable to unwritten law.

I do not believe that humanity will ever progress beyond the need for law; law acts as a limitation upon the exercise of brute force, which humanity will cling to for as long as the species exists.

[ComradeRick-CL]

I guess i give mankind more credit than you do. remember industrial capitalist society, and mankind for that matter is still quite young

[Goranhammer]

I actually laughed out loud reading that.

Yes, written law is needed, always was needed, and always will be needed. Regardless of what source it is required, whether you go back to Socrates and the Sophists, Hammurabi, or any other source of legal perception. Law sets a precedence and maintains societal harmony as well as boundaries. Kant said in The Categorical Imperative that mankind has an innate sense of moral law, but it doesn't force him to comply with it, and that his selfish desires will get in the way. Without a doctrine stating what is allowed and what is not, it will regress and regress until you reach a state of martial law or even anarchy.

Mankind has no infalliable law, and thus must govern itself through ethics passed on by the altruists of the past, and example itself for the population of the future.

[motojackal]

It's not written or unwritten law that is the problem.
It's the parasites who make the whole thing so complicated that only they can operate it, at a heavy price of course.

[Clausewitz]

Kant said in The Categorical Imperative that mankind has an innate sense of moral law, but it doesn't force him to comply with it, and that his selfish desires will get in the way.

I don't think that's what he said (in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals). I think he believed that man, if he were "enlightened" about the veracity of categorical imperatives would behave morally with or without the state - lying, murdering, stealing; they're categorically wrong, and inconsistent with rational behavior. A wise man - one who saw truth and hated inconsistency - would not behave that way under any circumstance. "Selfishness" that doesn't fit into the imperatives, to Kant, is bestial and "heteronomous." He also had a kind of rather Lutheran salvation theme to his work; people were inherently in that bestial state of "original sin" until the light of reason saved them from wrong. And there was nothing particularly innate about it, particularly as the later British intuitionist school argued for; it was all about hard reasoning.

I think humanity's pretty adaptable. Written law was a huge improvement over what came before it; I think that's beyond doubt. But humanity has variable preferences; most of us place value on the welfare of our family, and I think that that valuation could be extended to the whole of humanity given a certain kind of socialization.

It strikes me that if it's impossible for man to behave morally, some or all of the time, there's no use in protecting it in the first place with written law. We simply couldn't justify our own existence then, and certainly not our salvation. I don't expect the reality that we aren't selfless to simply pass silently, though.

[boko]

Kpax's view of this topic was actually very spot on also. Reading your conflicting descriptions of Kant is intriguing, I shall have to go back over it properly. Vital thing, the old categorical imperative. Particularly with Valentine's day drawing near. How does Kant explain gender difference and the presence of different needs for different people? How can 'necessity' be the same for one person as another? How can imperativity be non-spontaneous? If not, how can there be such a thing as the categorical imperative? I think, therefore, Kant and Kpax are both going in Bob.