Western's Freedom: Legality and Legitimacy

With everything that is happening in the world today, I am referring to censorship, the alienation of goods, imprisonment for drug use or tax evasion, among other problems that affect our freedoms, a need arises with respect to political power and the exercise of the powers, faculties, functions and attributions that derive from it, it is necessary to distinguish between the concept of legality and that of legitimacy.

The difference between legality and legitimacy has been a fundamental issue of political theory and law since the beginnings of human thought. To understand these concepts it is necessary to understand what the law means. At present, the Act is nothing more than a set of rules of conduct whose failure to comply with it is punishable by penalties. Whether the law corresponds to positive law or natural law.

Legality is related to the observance of and respect for the rules in force; it refers to the application of the rules laid down in positive law both for access to power and for the use and exercise of power, and for the taking of decisions and the issue and enforcement of the corresponding acts.

Legality then is everything that occurs within the legal framework given as valid by the whole social body. An act is legal when it does not violate a rule; thus, crossing the green light, throwing out the garbage according to the time stipulated by municipal regulations or not stealing from the neighbor are legal behaviors as long as they do not violate any law.

Legality is certainly an easier concept to apply since it is not as abstract as its counterpart. Sometimes we understand that certain behaviour is legal but illegitimate; for example, it may be that criticising neighbours is not a crime and therefore not "illegal"; however, we understand that it is not a legitimate act to speak ill of someone behind their back. We see that morality is not contained by the legal, but rather the opposite; and this is further complicated when we discover that sometimes the legal is opposed to what we feel is legitimate.

Legitimacy refers to the conformity between the same concepts of legality, legitimacy is associated with moral concepts since it is an abstract concept. When I refer to legitimacy, I am referring to the collective feeling, the widespread conviction in society about how and within which values it wants to be governed, which leads to the acceptance by the community of acts and decisions, in the understanding that they are in line with the prevailing set of principles.

When we reflect on where we are going as a society and realize the indirect changes we are undergoing in our ideological foundations, we realize that change is necessary and worthwhile. When we look at states threatening their citizens with taxes, which technically is theft, a way of distributing wealth, a way of taking away from those who earn their money hard to put it into the hands of those mediocre people who do not contribute to the betterment of society but live off it, we really understand what is happening and how necessary change is.

A rule, mandate or decision can be legal but illegitimate acts. A government may alienate a person's resources, by means of popular vote in a democracy making it legal, and thus be a legal government, but it may be illegitimate from the outset because it has succeeded by cheating, or it may fall into illegitimacy because of its behaviour in the exercise of command, when it abuses power and breaks with the values and principles postulated by society, or when it betrays the trust placed in it, seeking its own benefit in order to maintain a world status quo and not the will of its own people, or when it tramples on the rights and freedoms of its own people. Perhaps the most common European example today is the violation of freedoms, a clear example of Britain where the will of the people was never carried out, where privacy does not exist and where freedom of expression is increasingly censored.

When we look at the persecutions and violations of rights such as freedom of expression that are taking place in the West today, we understand that such acts do not shock society today, we do not care if our neighbor's freedoms are violated as long as I preserve mine, but how far will we go with this? until we are all consumed by the hand that punishes? until we follow the legal ways of the state get there? until the state will ignore legitimacy? until the state will ignore legitimacy?

Is it legitimate then for someone to oppose the laws of the state? I think most readers will agree that a man who violates these laws would not act illegitimately but would act illegally. These conflicts do not only arise when we look back or compare our systems of law with those of other cultures. Today, this conflict between legality and legitimacy is more vivid than ever and the debate is continually reopening.

It is a complex task to determine which are the inalienable individual rights that cannot be denied to any man regardless of the society in which he lives and its laws, due to the plural human cultures and traditions that coexist on our planet. However, despite this difficulty, there are also abuses that the vast majority of the world's population recognizes as such, however legal they may be: the slow extermination of the Roghinya people, the wars in the Middle East, modern slavery.

The current crisis of values in Europe has cruelly highlighted this conflict between the law and the just and legitimate. When the law condemns a person to imprisonment for having stolen a person's property, we may doubt that such a law is legitimate; but when the very people who uphold such laws pardon others who, because of their influence, social status or power, do not suffer the repercussions of their actions, we should have little doubt about the legitimacy of such laws and rulers. Therefore, just as a German citizen was morally authorized to disobey certain laws under Nazi oppression, we are today questioning our degree of obedience to laws that apply by violating basic human rights and using violence.

In short, the theoretical question of the relationship between legality and legitimacy has obvious practical and political consequences that should not be neglected in the analysis.

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_{Posted from my blog with SteemPress : Here}

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