Breaking the Law to Save a Life: Justified or Unacceptable?

Suppose you and your friends are hanging out and one of them gets hurt, there is no cell phone connection, it is raining outside, and you cannot call 911. What would you do in this situation? These kinds of situations will make you break the law, for example, in the situation above I’m pretty sure that in this scenario the other friend would have to take the injured friend in his car and he will end up over speeding while driving the car under the pressure of the problem.

Over all I believe that It is not okay to break laws but in some cases it’s ok to break them when it comes to self-defense, life or death.
People argue that laws are meant for the safety of the public.

There are always new laws coming out just for the sake of protection and safety of public. Then there comes these situations where the laws do not help you. For instance, I work at a gas station and it is a place where most of robberies happen for little amounts cash and we always have to be aware about these kinds of situations.

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Sometimes these kinds of robberies include weapons and sometimes they don’t. One day, at night time when my friend and I were working together at the gas station a guy came in to the store. I started to notice some suspicious behavior coming from him, and those suspicions were proven when the man came up to the counter and demanded money.

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I stood there in shock for a second because I did not expect it at all, he continued on and then he tried to threaten to beat me up. my friend then came behind me and tried to help in a way he thought would be best in that second and just for self-defense we had thrown the first punch towards him, so he would be selfless and he could not do harm to us. Then after all of this had happened, we called the police. In this situation, I felt that we had just two options, either my coworker would have let him steal the money through hurting me or together we defended our store and ourselves in what we thought was best. This is where the ethical issue of ‘egoism’ comes in role, in which it Machan stated that each person should live so as to achieve his or her rational self-interest. I think our self-interest was that we wanted to save ourselves rather than thinking about the robber, his true motives, and why he is trying to steal.

However, there are some people who break laws and they are not even aware about. It could be a person who is getting late for something such as work and in result speeds up their car. There was case of a police officer in Oklahoma who gave himself a ticket for over speeding, this is an example of how even those who are the ones responsible for giving other tickets or holding others accountable make mistakes and break the law. Another example could be a person who is a heavy smoker and has a bad habit of smoking and he is at a place where it is a no smoking area and he did not see the sign and smokes the cigarette, which is against the law. He did not do it intentionally, it was by mistake, it could have happened with anyone, it is wrong to break laws but what if you are not aware that you are breaking law?

Another question arrives as we go in this topic further, what if the law is wrong? There are many cases in which the laws that are made for the sake of community of the country are not even helping them. We could take an example when slavery was legal in the United States, as mentioned in the American history though memories of the civil war run deep, Maryland never remembered to nullify its ratification of an 1861 constitutional amendment making slavery forever legal . So, what would the people do in such a case, would they let the government do cruelty with the people or the would they put the people in jail who would try to fight against the law. I believe it would be fine to break the law in such situations. Even if we try to compare the bad and bright side of this law, there would more bad sides then good.

Littering is a huge problem is our world today, every day when I walk outside to go to work or while I’m driving I notice the abundance of trash everywhere. We may not know or even care, but littering is actually illegal. This example is huge in regards to breaking some laws, because although this is a huge deal in which affects our economy nonetheless the world, we still see people continuously litter in our communities. Littering could be good topic for debate as an ethical issue. Since, it is an ethical issue, Deontology would come up in the debate to figure out if littering is good or bad. Deontology is often associated with philosopher Immanuel Kant, he defined it as ‘reason’ as faculty of humans that bear consequences on will allow us to make decisions not based entirely on instinct but also on the understanding of the nature of acts we perform. Deontology is simple to apply. It just requires that people follow the rules and do their duty. This approach tends to fit well with our natural intuition about what is or isn’t ethical.

Furthermore, there are some other basic things that are illegal but people do it. Such as playing poker for money at home, jaywalking. Believe it or not , there are several states that prohibits even a friendly game of poker in the comfort and privacy of home, if it involves money. For example, Mississippi forbids all gambling, except for charitable reasons (and on cruise), and New Jersey only allows gambling only authorized by the state. However there are states that allows gambling but have some restriction for profitable, private card games. Also, jaywalking which is although illegal but there could be some scenarios where you have no choice just to jaywalk. What if someone is in hurry or want to help someone on the opposite side of the road and there is no intersection for another mile so they have to break the law.

At this point there would be just two cases where they can follow the rule and let the person in help hanging, or could break the law and help the person in need. I believe most people would choose to break the law and it would be really ok to break the law in such situation. Alongside a much needed increase in safety awareness, correcting traffic rules to facilitate smooth pedestrian and traffic flow, remains key tragedy. However, because of development plans, it is due for removal . There are also some lights which gets red while crossing the road that the old people who cannot walk fast have trouble. This is the not the fault of the public who uses the road it is bad infrastructure it will be absolutely right to keep moving in this situation because they cannot stand in the middle of the road because that is more unsafe. So either the government has to work on it or people would keep breaking the law.

While breaking the law is not ideal or correct, there are certain situations that might require a person to break the law. This could be to save their own life or to save the life of others. There are other situations in which a person might be required to break the law due to an emergency. There could be a person that might threaten you and you have to safe yourself in which case you might break the law. However, people don’t break have to break intentionally they could break it by mistake too, or they might do that is illegal and won’t be aware about. Certain laws might not necessary be right and it would be right to break those laws. Even though, we should always obey the law, but also there can be situations that present themselves which could lead to a person to break certain laws in order to save his/her own person or the lives of others.

Updated: May 03, 2023
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Breaking the Law to Save a Life: Justified or Unacceptable?. (2022, Mar 28). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/speeding-we-should-always-obey-the-law-but-sometimes-break-law-to-save-someone-life-essay

Breaking the Law to Save a Life: Justified or Unacceptable? essay
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