Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

I'm going to take a break from debating.  But in a nutshell, governments are founded on the principal that they have the right to rule, make laws, and enforce them.  That's a moral claim, and without it being accepted by the masses, you wouldn't have acceptance of it by the masses.  Law flows inexorably from that.  This or that person may say that X doesn't stem from moral claims, but when examined, you will always find the moral claims, and the person arguing the exception is making a claim to different morals, not the absence of them.  You are wrong in thinking that morals aren't the justification for any law; you're simply looking at specific examples incorrectly.

ETA: There are no laws or enforcement without taxes; what legal policies to apportion that revenue to creating and enforcing is based upon moral claims.  You may feel that things are distributed unfairly, which would be the case if there were no moral mandate for any particular example, but that's a claim you have asserted but not supported.  Usually that simply devolves into you disagreeing with the judgement of lawmakers, not evidence that the lawmakers didn't have moral intentions in creating the law.

PS.  Don't be stupid.  There is an unlimited number of examples.  Basically any criminal law has a moral justification.  You're conflating laws being identical with morals with laws being justified by morals.

I know you are taking a break from debating, but a question that I am just interested in your answer, not going to debate it
Do you think it would be possible for a society to function if all laws were thought to be mere social contracts where the government is given power to enforce them to make the country function well. This would be as opposed to believing the laws are based on objective morality? Firmly in the realm of thought experiment as I don’t think it could happen that the majority of people came to that decision. Not even sure there is a sensible answer to the question, but interested anyway