Question

What is the main difference between legal rules from any other kind of rule of conduct such as moral and religious rules?

Answer 1

Ethics is the moral principles which govern the behavior of a person or the conduct of an activity. Morals are concerned with the principles of right and wrong conduct, and human character's goodness or badness. Law is the system of rules that a given country or community recognizes as regulating its members' actions and may enforce through the imposition of sanctions.

If you are an ethical person you can abide by the law. You can be ethical if you are Moral. If you're decent, you can abide by the rules, too. But, together, you can never be all three.

Morality governs personal , private interactions. Ethics governs the interactions between professions. Law governs the whole of society, frequently dealing with interactions between total strangers. Some people are talking about their personal principles, some are talking about a set of rules and the same set of laws regulates everyone in a society. If the law conflicts with our personal values or a moral system, we must act – but we must be able to tell the difference between them in order to do so.

Morality requires that men act according to a sense of ethical duty. Morality does not have such State regulatory power. It is autonomous (which comes from men's inner life). It rules men's inner life. If the promissory note is time-barred then the debtor's legal obligation is moral responsibility. Moral duty is of course not enforceable before the law court. It also comes with a corresponding right. Yet right before the court of law is not enforceable. There is no such morals enforcement organisation. Moral rules do not even admit, in principle, legislative changes. The mediation of caste leaders, village elders, etc. will settle the moral disputes.