The penumbra between the Legal and the Moral
I may have commented hereish before on distinctions, such as between culture and race. Definitions are useful, but they are only a starting point.
Today Malcolm Turnbull compared the response by the public, using social media, to regulation by groups like ACMA - particularly in relation to the Alan Jones "died of shame" comments. I haven't examined Turnbull's comments in detail, but I want to contrast the role of enforceable laws, and enforceable moral standards.
It is difficult to make a law with beneficially fuzzy edges. Of course, whether a law applies may be tricky to interpret, but as laws are often designed to be clear, they are often written to have a certain Boolean / binary applicability. Moral standards, however, are often very woolly indeed.
Take the age of consent - There's something strange about the idea that one day, it's totally-not-OK for two people (one a teenager, the other an older adult) to have sex, but the very next day, because a certain number of orbits of the sun have occurred since the time of the younger party's birth, everything is just hunky dory. The suggestion that the difference between statutory rape and informed consent is astrological is pretty ridiculous, but that's how the laws of consent are written.
Let's restrict ourselves to laws based on morals, and assume that the morals are reasonably well accepted. I should hope that when such a law is applied, it is applied because someone did something unambiguously wrong. Penalising someone for statutory rape, using jailtime, shouldn't be a matter of "well, what you did was mostly OK, but a little bit dubious". By the time the law gets heavily involved, I should hope that there's a much higher unsavoury-to-reasonable ratio. This necessitates that there will be a large range of activity that is legal, but is overwhelmingly immoral.
This is why statements such as "as long as they're both consenting adults, anything goes" are nonsense. I recently heard this in the case of IIRC an 18 year old man kissing his 65 year old boyfriend after footy matches, and some people were taking umbrage that homophobia was being condemned, but ageist comments were being bandied about. Now, it may well be that the 18 year old was of mature mind, and that there was no power imbalance. Moreover, knowing so little of the case, it may be that an 18:65 relationship has less power imbalance than an 18:35. Having been the younger party in a relationship with such an age imbalanced ratio, I know that there were power imbalances, resulting in some pretty nasty stuff. It might not always be the case, so writing a law to cover that could be tricky. There has to be some penumbra between a cop taking the older party off to jail, and a good friend having a quiet word, asking the older party if they are doing the right thing. In the middle, there's the point where a casual aquaintance can take an interest for the common good.
Going back to media regulation - the job of legal bodies such as ACMA is to look at things such as defamation, breaches of professional ethics and so forth. It has nothing to do with a broadcaster being an arsehole. Admitedly, because ACMA and many "self-regulation" entities are so toothless, their level of punitive action would be just fine for adressing poor behaviour that doesn't warrant flogging ("You accepted a story posted in a different paper without checking that it was fabricated! Naughty journalist! No elephant stamp for you!"). It is not appropriate for regulatory bodies to make rulings on whether a statement is arseholatry ("Yulnupingu got Australian of the Year because he's black"). This is the area where public campaigns are appropriate, and denying income through aggregated choice decisions is
Conversely, it shouldn't be expected that the public should have to understand the ins and outs of sagas like the cash for comment incident. This is where a media regulator with teeth is needed, to exact penalties and deprive income, not because the broadcaster is a twerp, but because he has decieved people.
Today Malcolm Turnbull compared the response by the public, using social media, to regulation by groups like ACMA - particularly in relation to the Alan Jones "died of shame" comments. I haven't examined Turnbull's comments in detail, but I want to contrast the role of enforceable laws, and enforceable moral standards.
It is difficult to make a law with beneficially fuzzy edges. Of course, whether a law applies may be tricky to interpret, but as laws are often designed to be clear, they are often written to have a certain Boolean / binary applicability. Moral standards, however, are often very woolly indeed.
Take the age of consent - There's something strange about the idea that one day, it's totally-not-OK for two people (one a teenager, the other an older adult) to have sex, but the very next day, because a certain number of orbits of the sun have occurred since the time of the younger party's birth, everything is just hunky dory. The suggestion that the difference between statutory rape and informed consent is astrological is pretty ridiculous, but that's how the laws of consent are written.
Let's restrict ourselves to laws based on morals, and assume that the morals are reasonably well accepted. I should hope that when such a law is applied, it is applied because someone did something unambiguously wrong. Penalising someone for statutory rape, using jailtime, shouldn't be a matter of "well, what you did was mostly OK, but a little bit dubious". By the time the law gets heavily involved, I should hope that there's a much higher unsavoury-to-reasonable ratio. This necessitates that there will be a large range of activity that is legal, but is overwhelmingly immoral.
This is why statements such as "as long as they're both consenting adults, anything goes" are nonsense. I recently heard this in the case of IIRC an 18 year old man kissing his 65 year old boyfriend after footy matches, and some people were taking umbrage that homophobia was being condemned, but ageist comments were being bandied about. Now, it may well be that the 18 year old was of mature mind, and that there was no power imbalance. Moreover, knowing so little of the case, it may be that an 18:65 relationship has less power imbalance than an 18:35. Having been the younger party in a relationship with such an age imbalanced ratio, I know that there were power imbalances, resulting in some pretty nasty stuff. It might not always be the case, so writing a law to cover that could be tricky. There has to be some penumbra between a cop taking the older party off to jail, and a good friend having a quiet word, asking the older party if they are doing the right thing. In the middle, there's the point where a casual aquaintance can take an interest for the common good.
Going back to media regulation - the job of legal bodies such as ACMA is to look at things such as defamation, breaches of professional ethics and so forth. It has nothing to do with a broadcaster being an arsehole. Admitedly, because ACMA and many "self-regulation" entities are so toothless, their level of punitive action would be just fine for adressing poor behaviour that doesn't warrant flogging ("You accepted a story posted in a different paper without checking that it was fabricated! Naughty journalist! No elephant stamp for you!"). It is not appropriate for regulatory bodies to make rulings on whether a statement is arseholatry ("Yulnupingu got Australian of the Year because he's black"). This is the area where public campaigns are appropriate, and denying income through aggregated choice decisions is
Conversely, it shouldn't be expected that the public should have to understand the ins and outs of sagas like the cash for comment incident. This is where a media regulator with teeth is needed, to exact penalties and deprive income, not because the broadcaster is a twerp, but because he has decieved people.