Transition to Democracy for Iran - Part 9: The Roots of Laws in Modern Societies

In Part 3 it was explained that the opposition to the IR regime must base its thought system on moral philosophy and use ethics as the basis of its logic. Then, the important contribution of Martin Luther around the year 1500 to the establishment of a meaningful basis for laws was described. He broke the fake holiness of the Pope by demanding a fixed reference for laws. But his preferred reference itself was a bad basis for law, for it was the Bible. 

Some 250 years later, David Hume showed that such a self-contradictory and inhumane text, full of vague instructions and false claims, cannot be considered the basis of laws. Instead, Hume exclaimed that we should use human morality, which should originate from a sense of fairness as a principle of justice. 

But Hume couldn’t clearly explain what human morality should be and how we should develop laws based on it. Hume’s works influenced someone else, though, Immanuel Kant.  Kant decided to develop a complete framework for human morality, which led Europe to the age of enlightenment. Everything that is good in European life today, they have thanks to the enlightenment movement. The main advancements of the industrial age, democracy, freedom, human rights, equality, peaceful relations of nations, the free market system. All of these came about, directly or indirectly, because of the enlightenment movement and as some of its results.

At the core of this movement stood the rejection of the core of religion. Kant was originally a devout Christian from a Christian family. But after reading Hume’s works and thinking about them, he realized that laws cannot originate from religion. The most important reason for this was that religion is full of contradictions. Which isn’t surprising, since it is not a logical system. When a new development is achieved in human society that was not a subject matter for Bible or Quran or Torah, it becomes impossible to find a direct answer to this modern issue. A solution will hence depend on the interpretation of bishops or Mullahs or Rabbis. 

Interpretations are always limited to the knowledge of a few humans and dependent on their personal leaning or desire. And so, we cannot use this system as the basis for laws. This internal conflict means that laws based on religion are not the same for everyone. People will never be equal if laws are based on religion. You can see this reality in every corner of the world, where religion dictates the rules. In Texas (USA), women are discriminated against. In Pakistan, Hindus are discriminated against. In Iran, Sunnis are discriminated against. In Israel, Muslims are discriminated against.

After a lot of hard work, Kant made a system without any contradiction. The summary is like this:

1. In order to live in a civil society, the relationship between citizens, as well as their relationship with the ruling system, must be regulated by laws that apply to everyone equally.
2. Laws should be based on morality.
3. Morality should originate from logic (not religion). One of the simplest forms of logic is „do not do to others what you don’t wish upon yourself; do not take from others what you do not wish to lose“.
4. If a question can be answered scientifically, then logic is equal to science. Only If the question cannot be answered scientifically, then logic is what the (democratic) majority finds to be the case.
5. Science is our best knowledge of the natural truth. The natural truth is independent of the observer and hence should be the same for all humans (within statistical margins).

An example how to apply (3): if you are driving down the street, would you be happy to see someone double-parking, blocking your way, causing trouble for you and your plans to get to work on time? Probably not. Hence, do not double-park yourself, no matter what justification you come up with in your head.

An example for (4) is what you saw with COVID. A pandemic is a purely technical (medical) problem, all decision makings should have been based on technical (scientific) solutions. But some countries decided to ignore science and that cost the lives of thousands.

Ad (5): We might discover new information that would change our best knowledge of the truth, this means that we could change our view and accordingly, change a law. Science generally requires rigorous foundations, which is why it is logical in application.

A contemporary of Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau put his ideas into a clearer social setting. He called it a social contract between the people and the rulers. The idea of the social contract is that people who govern are not special. They do not own the right to rule. They are just humans, like anyone else. In order for certain people to have political power, they should be parties to a social contract with the population. To this day, in democracies, parties that want to govern, write up the drafts of “ruling contract” that they publish before elections.

The modern practice looks like this: political parties describe their methods, their solutions, their aims and their strategies. They can talk freely and assemble people. If the solutions of a party seem more interesting than the rival party, an individual can vote for this party rather than the others. So, parliaments are constructed and a group of representatives discuss with each other about the best solutions to the society‘s problems. If there are scientific solutions, they will be adopted. If an idea is more prevalent in the society, it will be strongly represented in the parliament. A weaker idea will not have many representatives. This way, individuals in the society can indirectly and by rule of majority decide how laws should be made, changed or applied. And this is why education is the most important duty of any society. And exactly because most human societies currently have ineffective and biased education systems, they do not advance much on social aspects.

When we want to obtain a right (change a law), we should understand what the root of law is. Based on the moral philosophy explained before, in the democracy that we want to establish in Iran, we will have only 3 ways of turning a concept into a law:

1. it is based on human rights;
2. it is based on a scientific or technical solution to a problem, while respecting human rights.
3. it is based on the will of the democratic majority, while respecting human rights. Should be applied only if there is no scientific solution.

And this is how we justify the legitimacy of the political system that we want to achieve. No law is based on the personal desires of the ruler. No law can ignore human rights. No law is arbitrary, no law is fixed forever. Science and people decide the laws.

First Author	Year	Title	Link
David Hume	1748	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding	READ HERE
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy	2022	Kant’s Moral Philosophy	READ HERE
Immanuel Kant	1781	Critique of Pure Reason	READ HERE
John Rawls	2001	Justice as Fairness - A Restatement	LINK
Christine Korsgaard	2018	Fellow Creatures	LINK
Norman Schofield	2011	Political Economy of Institutions, Democracy and Voting	LINK
Isabella Kasselstrand	2023	Beyond Doubt - The Secularization of Society	LINK
Andre Heywood	2021	Political Ideologies - An Introduction	LINK