Legality Vs. Morality: Who is higher?

There is a small inner circle of people in this colossal expanse known as mankind. The members of this inner circle are the thinking and rationalizing minds that shape the overall character of humanity. Because of the physical boundaries that divide people from each other, it has become the government's responsibility to shape the character of its peoples. However, the rules that are devised by the government are done so in such a way that they would uplift the character of the lowly ones, so to speak.

This is good in a way, as the government hopes to improve the overall character and morals of the lower grade people. But in time, what has happened is that the collective character of the country's peoples has degraded. There may be many reasons for this, but the one particular reason according to me is the notion that people consider the legality as their morality. In other words, their own morals have turned out to be down-graded to just topics of so-called philosophical discussion and they tend to try to follow or - in many cases -bypass the legal system.

In my opinion, people should try and look at their own morals and see how they compare to the current legal standards. If your morals are higher, well and good. But if the morals are lower than the legal standards, you have some catching up to do. It is imperative that everyone tries to go higher and higher on a moral path, rather than looking up to the legal standards and be stagnant at that level.

To give an example, consider the case of music piracy. We all know that music piracy is illegal and fraudulent. Still, we find many people engaging in this act. The government has tried to set up rules which should prevent people from committing such crimes. But people don't think that this legality is only a part of the higher morality that should govern all humanity. If only these people realize that they are in effect robbing someone of his/her livelihood, they may want to reconsider their motives. However, this is a sort of paradigm shift that may e hard to achieve.

The one quick-fire way of achieving higher moral grounds is to consider each action carefully. If an action is illegal, but you feel that it is morally true, then further scrutiny is needed. Mercy-killing is one such example. It is an illegal activity, but there are people who think that it is morally correct. In my opinion, the right thing to do is not to simply follow a personal morality, but also make efforts to make the morality legal as well. However, if something is immoral but legal, then naturally one must not take such an action. There are many examples of that as well. The other two scenarios ( moral and legal; immoral and illegal) are pretty straightforward to follow.

I must mention though that this path of constantly striving towards a higher morality is not as practical as it seems. The ideals are always easier to theorize than to practice. But i they were easy to implement then the world would not be in such a state as it is now. Although the betterment or worsening of this world and whether it is possible or not is another matter of discussion altogether.