MORALITY VS LEGALITY

COMPARISON-CONTRAST COMPOSITION
Grace Ria L. Bernadas
III-WCRoentgen

Morality, as the dictionary states, is “a code of conduct held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong.” Morals are created by and define society, philosophy, religion, or individual conscience.
The principle of legality is the legal ideal that requires all laws to be clear, ascertainable and non-retrospective. It requires decision makers to resolve disputes by applying legal rules that have been declared beforehand, and not to alter the legal situation retrospectively by discretionary departures from established law.
A view perpetuated by the government, schools, media, and pretty much the rest of society is that morality and legality are pretty much synonyms and can never be separated. Or, rather, more virtue is placed on being law-abiding than on being moral. You see people looked down on for breaking the law and great emphasis placed on striving to follow the laws. Very seldom is breaking an immoral law portrayed as virtuous.
When dealing with cases and issues, you have to categorize them as a matter of morality or legality. While some may be both, the simple fact that an action may be immoral does not qualify it as necessarily illegal.
Let us take abortion as an example. In other countries, abortion is allowed, therefore considered legal. But for most people, it is an action that is not commonly practiced nor accepted, therefore it is deemed as immoral.
Morality and legality are the two topics never lost or forgotten in court and society, for the hardest thing to decide is not whether the person in question is guilty or not guilty, but whether the action he has done is immoral or illegal.