Criminal Justice and Morals Education
The law is basically law designed and governed by government or social institutions to control behavior, which by its very definition is a civilized matter. It is the basis of a legal system and determines how various conflicts are resolved. In broad terms, it can be understood as the art and science of civil society. It is based on the understanding that each individual has the responsibility for his/her own actions, and that social organization can only be maintained in an environment where individual freedom and responsibility are honored and protected. In a nutshell, the law governs how we interact with one another and how we can pursue our individual aspirations and pursue happiness as we see fit. The lawgivers interpret and make known what is just and unjust.
A law that exists to benefit one group over another is called a social law. A law that exists to benefit those who are the victims of other groups is called a criminal law. And there exist three kinds of social laws, the moral, the educational, and the corrective.
The moral law is the one that tells us that right and wrong are values we should follow. Virtually all laws that we follow today on morality or behavior are moral laws. If we are to follow them, we will not commit crimes. We will respect others’ moral values and refrain from doing what would be considered immoral by those individuals. Violating moral values is, as the saying goes, not a crime, but rather, immoral behavior.
The educational law seeks to inculcate into young minds the concepts of right and wrong. Through education, individuals are made aware of the differences among people and the obligations that they owe to one another. Obligations include not harming others, respecting other people’s rights, and so on. Within the legal system, these laws are enforced through judicial proceedings.
A law that commands obedience from the majority of the citizens is called the legislation. For instance, an instruction regarding respect for the law, the right to privacy, public order, pornography, gambling, and so on. All these laws are morally wrong. It is an instructionment that is illegal according to the moral and legally prevailing values. A good example of a legally wrong law is the law that states that a married couple is obliged to have a sexual intimacy for the rest of their life even though they are divorced.
On the other hand, a law that forbids unjustifiable discrimination against a particular class of persons is known as a penal law. It is a law that commands the state or the country to prevent unfair discrimination against a particular class of citizens. As for the third kind of law, the corrective law, it is an instructionment not to do something that would cause societal imbalance, or harm the existence and dignity of a specific group of human beings. This law forbids prejudice and discrimination against particular individuals based on their race, color, national origin, gender, religion, political or social beliefs, or age. There is also another kind of law that forbids harming another person, but there is no law that specifies how this could be done.
A lot of instances in the world contradict these three fundamental moral values. For instance, slavery is morally wrong according to all believers, and according to the seven articles of the covenant, God is prohibited from slavery. Slavery involves the exploitation of another person’s life in order to benefit oneself. Similarly, rape is morally wrong according to the moral values found in the Bible. Rape is considered to be a grave breach of the essence of morality according to the seven articles of the covenant.
A criminal law that prohibits robbery, theft, and violence is known as criminal law. According to many ethicists, an open university encourages immoral activities such as stealing, lying, harming others, and murder. The first sentence in the Oxford Dictionary defines morality as “the quality of behaving reasonably.” For that reason, an open university can’t teach moral values to its students because those values are not taught in universities. Thus, we can safely infer that moral values are not taught in universities.