Laws limiting the height of your fence are debated in the following way.
First, the benefits and harms to you and your neighbors are considered.
These considerations are weighed against the relative costs to the rest of the community.
Rules are agreed upon that take everyone’s interests into account.
This is a moral exercise, because to debate something is to engage in normative deliberation. Indeed, your only mechanism for social appeal is moral: “This is the right thing to do” for some reason, such as justice, fairness, harm reduction, or whatever.
If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.
You’re right. Laws are constrained by pragmatism. It turns out, figuring out which books are important is trivial, and we already have analogous laws figuring out which natural habitats should be protected from construction, etc.
What do you think is the appropriate action to this? When you start to establish laws based on evil behaviour, you eventually get witch trials.
What?? Every law we have is a matter of moral debate. Why do you think murder is illegal, or rape? Because these are evil behaviors.
Not every law is a moral debate. Laws limiting the height of my fence is not a moral debate.
Remember the guy who bought an ‘art’ banana for $6m and then ate it? That also wasn’t a moral debate.
If you pass a law protecting rare valuable books, then you also need to decide which books are protected.
Laws limiting the height of your fence are debated in the following way.
This is a moral exercise, because to debate something is to engage in normative deliberation. Indeed, your only mechanism for social appeal is moral: “This is the right thing to do” for some reason, such as justice, fairness, harm reduction, or whatever.
You’re right. Laws are constrained by pragmatism. It turns out, figuring out which books are important is trivial, and we already have analogous laws figuring out which natural habitats should be protected from construction, etc.
You should start a non profit to buy and protect old and rare books.