In St. Kitts-Nevis the laws legislate many aspects of our behaviour. Laws, in the form of statutes and ordinances, tell us how to drive, how to operate our business, and what we can and cannot do in public and even in our private lives. They are the formal written rules of society. Yet, they are not comprehensive in defining moral behaviour. There is a law against hitting one's mother or father (batter/assault) but no law against financially abandoning them. Yet, both are considered morally wrong.
We have laws against bad behaviour, such as robbery, house breaking, burglary or embezzling from one's employer, but we have very few laws prescribing 'Good Behaviour', such as helping the sick or a victim, or contributing to charity. The exception to this would be 'Good Samaritan laws' which are quite common in Europe. These laws make it a crime to pass by an accident scene or witness a crime without rendering assistance. Here in St. Kitts-Nevis, such laws do not exists. The Police may summon you as a witness to a crime but you can refuse to give the evidence by not testifying as to what you know about it.
St. Kitts-Nevis has so many laws that not all of them are enforced regularly and people routinely break them and go unpunished. Some actions prohibited by law are thought to be private decisions of the individual and not especially wrong or harmful. Some people in St. Kitts-Nevis object to laws against cannabis, some sodomy and other laws regulating sexual behaviour, because they feel they are private behaviours and outside the parameters of social control.
Others object to certain traffic laws such as 40 mile-per-hour speed limit on the Frigate Bay Road, Kim Collins Highway and Fredrick T. Williams Highway. When laws prohibit behaviours that are not universally condemned, such as laws prohibiting alcohol, drugs and prostitution, enforcement is more subject to criticism and, not incidentally, more prone to corruption because the ability to rationalize under enforcement or preferential treatment is greater.
We still have laws which some people consider to be immoral, such as begging, trading on Sundays, among others in the Small Charges Act. These laws cause me to ask this important question: “Can one be a good person while obeying a bad law?”
Many times what is legal or illegal is confused with what is right or wrong. However, the two are not synonymous. Many persons use the law as their only source for judging moral behaviour. In this view, if something is not legal it must be right. Politicians and Police Officers, for example, who are exposed to behaviour that violate public trust and others who take advantage of their position for private gain, often justify their actions by excuse that there was no law against such behaviour. This rationalization is not satisfactory to us, of course, because the law is the basement of appropriate behaviour. Not the definition of it. One can follow the law to the letter and still violate professional ethics.
