Law and Morality: The Dilemma of Separating Siamese Twins

The term 'unjust law' can serve as a starting point for understanding that laws can be immoral. We also have 'shysters' or crooked lawyers, who are considered unethical within their own profession. Obviously, morality and the law are not necessarily one and the same thing when two people can be lawyers, both having studied a great deal of the same material, and one is moral, whereas the other is not. The many protests we have had throughout history against unjust laws, where more often than not, the protesters were concerned with 'what is moral' or a 'higher morality', would also seem to indicate that distinctions must be made between law and morality. It is against this background this work attempts a surgical operation of separating what looks like a Siamese Twins. The attendant controversy that surrounds the separation of law from morality starts off with an exposition of the jurisprudence embedded in the naturalist and the positivists schools of thought. A discussion of the legal enforcement of morality is also carried out. This work argues that those who seek to separate morality from law therefore are in pursuit both of the impossible and the destructive.