Ask Lemmy

I don't think you can boil it down further, and that's why Western law is an evolving patchwork of codes and penalties that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Too many nuances, situational factors, edge cases and value priorities that vary from persn to person (and culture to culture) to decide every imaginable scenario consistently.

If you're not familiar, you might gain some perspective from a summary read about Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems. Goedel's Proof deals with systems of logic, where logic is something we hope for in systems of law. Goedel's Proof shows that a "sufficiently powerful" system of logic is necessarily incomplete - that is, we can pose problems in mathematical-systemic terms that have no solutions under that system.

In mathematical logic we have "axioms" like "1+1=2" or "a triangle is a plane figure defined by exactly 3 lines". In law, axiom-like propositions are called "maxims", often stated in Latin, and convey foundational legal principles like "contracts must be honored", or "people can own things". In a hypothetical properly Communist society, and by "proper" I mean to exclude failed would-be Communisms like the USSR or PRC, "people can own things" isn't necessarily a maxim; they might instead have a maxim that codifies "things belong to the State" and exclude any notion of individual ownership.

The implication for legal systems is that there are inevitably legal disputes that can't be decided strictly by the letter of the law, so we have to fall back on fiat of judicial opinion.

I think you might be approaching this in the wrong way. There is no objective right or wrong when it comes to ethics. Life and humans are simply too complex to create simple, objective rules that would be interpreted in exactly the same way by a decent number of humans for a reasonably complex situation. And you don't even have to include ethical dilemmas for that, like deciding whether to shoot down a plane hijacked by terrorists or interrogating a kidnapper via torture.

Nonetheless, many homogeneous groups get to a decent degree of ethical alignment, and asking people for their ethical rules or guidelines is an interesting question to get inspiration and to find out how others try to navigate the complexity of the world. Just don't expect these rules to be objective.