That’s not a useful definition in a democracy. Who gets to define what’s justified if not the duly elected legislature? I bet if you put the current Texas law on the ballot today you’d get the same answer.

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ipaddr a day ago | parent | next [-]

If you put that on the ballot in other states this would be more popular than initially thought by most.

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aidenn0 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Participating in a representative democracy doesn't mean agreeing that the legislature is always right, it just means agreeing to accept the legitimacy of their rule. This is an important distinction. When someone says "the death penalty is murder" or "abortion is murder" they are making a moral rather than legal argument, and so long as they try to align the law with their morals on a soap-box and at the ballot box, they are true participants in the democratic process.

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Planktonne 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is a useful definition, because it allows you to talk about places where the law might be unjust.

You can't have a functioning democracy if it's impossible to criticise the current setup. This is the whole idea behind newspeak [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

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rayiner 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> It is a useful definition, because it allows you to talk about places where the law might be unjust.

Unjust according to whom? Wouldn't it be better to just make our premises explicit?

	▲	aidenn0 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		While some philosophers may disagree with me, all statements made by an entity with agency contain the implicit prefix "I believe that..." In terms of rhetoric, explicitly adding "I believe that..." to the beginning of a statement softens the statement to a degree that the speaker may not desire. When a vegetarian holds up a sign saying "Meat is murder" I don't think very many people are confused about "according to whom" or that they think the person waving the sign believes that killing animals is actually against the law. "I believe that killing animals for food is immoral and unjustified so we should stop" certainly lacks the punch of the original statement, and the number people who are confused about the original statement is small enough to justify the punchier language.