Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn's Words Of Warning To The Western World

“At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned.” This quote by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn is from a speech of his entitled ‘Words of Warning to the Western World’; it critiqued

As he describes, “no man ever gave up his liberty merely for the good of the public. Such a chimera exists only in romances. Every individual wishes, if possible, to be exempt from the compacts that bind the rest of mankind” [Beccaria, Chapter II: Of the Right to Punish]. Beccaria believed that out of necessity, humans joined together to form societies; those societies have a duty to the people within them, and the people have a duty to the society they belong to. He asserts that when society is formed, a scale of crimes is formed as well, ranking crimes from the worst of the worst to petty crimes. However, the issue with this scale of crime is that it sets a system of morality that constantly fluctuates and that “the ideas of virtue and vice, of a good or a bad citizen, change with the revolution of ages; not in proportion to the alteration of circumstances, and consequently conformable to the common good; but in proportion to the passions and errors by which the different lawgivers were successively influenced” [Beccaria, Chapter VI: Of the Proportion Between Crimes and Punishments]. From that, Beccaria concludes that the punishment for a crime depends on how the crime affects the society. Beccaria’s morality is harder to define than Locke’s; morality, for Beccaria, is influenced by the social contract set in place and affected by human passion and error

Beccaria’s morality, on the other hand, was based on the social contract binding humans and the societies they make up in addition to the fluctuating vices and virtues of a certain time. Lastly, Swift alluded to his belief the morality of his time was based on seemingly petty things, such as religion or class divisions, but hinted that true morality, to him, would involve humility and common sense above all. Each authors’ form of morality is different, but the common thread is that morality is “always higher than law” (as Solzhenitsyn argued) and law simply enforces the principles of