Hierarchy of Laws

It's my opinion that there's a certain hierarchy of laws. Some rules and commandments are more important than others. When two laws come into conflict with each other, the right decision is to keep the higher law, even if you have to break a lower law to do so. Naturally, it's best to avoid breaking any laws or commandments, but when you cannot keep one law without breaking another, the lower law must yield to the higher law.

Case in point, I just heard a story about a dog who had been abused and neglected for years. Some compassionate people called the authorities repeatedly for years, hoping that they'd come and give help to the poor dog, but for several years, they didn't come. I understand that it's normally morally wrong to steal someone else's dog, and it's certainly illegal to do so, but I wonder if, in that circumstance, stealing (or rather rescuing) the dog and taking care of it might have been the right thing to do. They had tried to help the dog legally, but when that wasn't working, I think it would have been morally right to value the dog's health and safety over the owner's ownership of the dog.

It's the same situation with dogs and children left in cars on hot days. In some states, it's even legal to break into someone's car to rescue a dog or child who is trapped in a hot vehicle. In those cases, those in authority have decided that saving a life is more important than respecting others' property. In those cases, a higher or more important moral law supersedes a lower or less important law.

This concept of higher and lower laws borrows from Asimov's three laws of robotics. In Asimov's fictional world, all robots are programmed to follow three fundamental laws at all times, unless keeping one of the lower laws would involve breaking a higher one. The highest of these three laws is to never harm a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm, the second law is to obey all human commands, and the third is to protect itself. Thus, a robot typical in Asimov's world will always defend itself unless commanded not to or if its self-preservation interferes with the well-being of a human, and it would always obey a human, unless that obedience would allow a human to come to harm. Asimov's robots have their hierarchy of laws pretty well figured out, but we sometimes have a harder time determining which laws are more important.

Recently, a public figure had to choose between keeping a promise he had made and acting according to his conscience. I imagine that it must have been a difficult decision for him, and I don't want to pass any judgement on whether or not he made the right choice, but I will say that, in order to make a choice, he had to choose which was the higher law, keeping his word or obeying his conscience.

We, too, have to make similar decisions from time to time. We occasionally have to choose between being honest and sparing another's feelings. We sometimes have to choose to either help someone with a difficult task or to allow them the opportunity to gain strength and experience by doing it themselves. And no matter how much time one devotes to doing good, one only has a limited amount of time for good-doing, so they must choose which of the good things they could do are the most good things they could do that day.

Whenever a person has a choice to make, one should consider all of the moral and local laws involved, and rank those laws in order of importance, if they can. If there's an option that allows you to keep all moral and temporal laws, that's usually the best choice. But if, given the options available to you, you have to break one law or another, it's important that you determine which laws are more important than the others, because those are the laws you must keep, even if it means breaking the others.

As I understand it "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is ranked pretty highly in the hierarchy of laws, and I imagine that passively allowing a creature to die constitutes breaking a similarly high-ranking law. Breaking someone else's car window is usually illegal and immoral, but if breaking the window must be done to save a life, then it must be done.

There may still be consequences, in this world or the next, for breaking lower laws to keep higher ones, but there would be greater consequences, in this world or the next, for breaking higher laws to keep lower ones. Simply walking away and letting a dog suffer and die would almost certainly have stronger emotional and spiritual repercussions than those you would have to deal with if you had to break a law to save the dog. Similarly, there are consequences to both breaking one's word and betraying one's conscience, and if you have to choose between one or the other, what you're really choosing is which set of consequences you would rather face.

Personally, I would rather be responsible for a broken window than the death of an innocent. Choosing between my word and my conscience is tougher, and it may depend on the situation, but I think I would choose my conscience over my word, if I have enough moral courage to do so. As for the other moral laws we're supposed to keep, there are too many of them for me to rank them all in importance right now. I suppose I'll have to decide which laws are most important to me when one law or another has to be broken.

Life is full of tough decisions, and sometimes, there are no right answers. In those cases, one should consider carefully which moral laws are most important to them, and, in light of that hierarchy of laws, choose the option that, in their eyes, is least reprehensible. It may not be a good decision, but breaking a lower law to keep a higher law might just be the right decision.