The Interaction of Law and Morality in the Process of Their Transformation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the main regulators of social interaction in the states of the past and present: morality and law. The first, having receded into the background in the process of social development and giving way to law, continues to significantly influence the development of social relations. The analysis of the interrelation of these most important elements of human culture in the process of regulating social relations, their impact on each other and on society, testifies to the ambiguity of such influence. The law, which does not adequately take into account the requirements of morality and ethics, leads to the formation of undemocratic political regimes and arbitrary power, incompatible with modern ideas about the well-being and stability of society and the state. At the same time, the maintenance by law of ideological values masquerading as moral imperatives is a way of managing society based on the manipulation of mass consciousness. The fundamental values that guide society in its development are formed not only under the influence of factors of economic and cultural reality, but also under political concepts and ideological paradigms. Unfair use of the dialectical connection between law and morality serves, as a rule, the narrow-group interests of a few social strata that play key roles in states. The social purpose of the law is not limited to the regulation and protection of certain social relations. The law mediating the interest of citizens is obliged to protect society from the impact on it of various ideological, moral and other interpretations of reality that do not correspond to universal ideas about personality, freedom, justice, equality and other phenomena of the surrounding reality inherent in a modern developed state.