Morality, Justice and the Law

Anyone out there want to chat on the topic? As a lawyer and ethics instructor and part time historian and political scientist, I guess I have some views. I am trying to reply to a "what are your thoughts" query but I guess I don't know how so I guess I am starting a new discussion on the topic. We get our morality from one of seven schools of thought (as well as three detraction systems that deny that morality even exists), the most traditional, for those of us in the West, the "formalistic" school which includes as its founders, Jesus Christ and Emmanuel Kant. We get our "law" originally from Hammarabi and Moses but more modernly from legislatures in democracies that believe that whatever the majority wants can be law. Actually, in most modern democracies today, it is whatever the powerful lobbies want that do not have sufficient opposition to resist. Justice then is a hybrid between old concepts of right and wrong, and new ones, eminating out of a revolution in thinking starting in the 1600's and culminating into what is called "The Age of Enlightenment" by the 1700's. My theory is that the discovery of the New World in 1492 and the invention of the printing press in the early 1500's caused a revolution which resulted in the Renaisannce, Nationalism, Mercantilism, The Enlightenment, and the abolition of monarchialism and even slavery by the 1800's ushering in a new world which fears the old of superstition and intolerance but often is beset with its own problems of modernistic thinking that transcends many traditional values. It is one thing, for example, to say that any race or any gender should be part of the law making process. Quite another to ignore ancient wisdom regarding how to behave with other human beings or what our relationship with God should be based on the successful world religions which include not just the Western success stories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but the Eastern, in Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucionism. If you want justice, you can start by reading Amos in your Bible but you might finish with Brown v Board of Education (US Supreme Court) or the Nuremberg Trials. You might start with whether or not there is a God, that is the god of morality and thus knows what justice is whether we do or not, and then, whether or not the "masses", that is, the electorate, can, by virtue of modern electoral processes in a republic, transcend ancient wisdom and replace it with new science or modern lifestyles. One will always suggest that ancient wisdom is so old that it cannot encompass modern problems and dilemmas and that new wave thinking is the only way of the present and future. But if ultimate justice is grounded on an absolutist basis, that is, that ultimate justice never changes, that is, that ultimate justice is perennial, true for all times and places, then the universality of certain principles, such as "Thou Shalt Not Steal" must be put into the context of modern communisim, capitalism and other forms of theft as well as modern ideas of "beating the system" for one's personal advantage. Since the idea of communalism, the commonwealth or any nationalism of group consciousness seems to be falling to smaller group consciousness or indviduality, we may no longer honor the "Social Contract" of Rousseau, Locke, Smith, Jefferson or even Lincoln, since we may agree on some modern universals such as that there should be total equality, at least among Americans and possibly the world's inhabitants, but what if that effects our pocketbook, our own liberty or our own conscience? I would say that the question is rather broad and requires some course instruction as to what the great thinkers throughout history have said on the topic. And, I find it harder and harder to find anyone out there that takes ethics, history, the reformation of ideas really seriously anymore. I guess it is more common and more fun to make fun of anyone serious about anything important these days.