Why is an appeal to authority wrong, when we are literally talking about the speed limit, which is a law posted by an authority? Obviously what is legal is not what is moral/ethical, but if the speed limits should be changed, that is a different conversation than if the law should be enforced.
What is the point of a law that is not enforced? I guess Americans are used to seeing a posted number and then having to do mental math to calculate what the real number is (prices). That feels literally insane to me. I feel like I am living in Crazytown, USA.
Appeals to authority are logical fallacies because they are blanket excuses to ignore evidence in order to satisfy an opinion out of convenience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#In_the...
They’re not saying it’s logically objectively correct that people should go 65mph on a highway, due to the fact that authority has stated it thusly.
They’re simply saying that because the authority has made that law, the authority should enforce that law.
Now, they might be committing the Just World fallacy by complaining about the unequal treatment average drivers get versus immigrants.
There is some ground we can cover to discuss how to reasonably increase traffic law enforcement without just shutting it down with a poorly applied accusation of logical fallacy.
WRT speeding, I think automatic speed enforcement would be pretty simple. We already have automatic tolls and traffic cameras everywhere.
You're looking at it like:
This is a law. It is not perfectly enforced. We must perfectly enforce it.
Everyone else looks at it like:
This is a law. We pay lip service to it's utility, and pay fines out of tradition, but are fairly certain it probably shouldn't even be a law anymore, but unfortunately other systems are cripplingly dependent on it as a revenue source. It's not actively causing much harm. If it were perfectly enforced, so many goddamn new problems manifest. If it isn't enforced at all, so many problems manifest. Leave it alone.
You should sit and meditate on the legal system, and maybe do a bit of reading up on some examples of terrible/counterintuitive outcomes of legislation.
Having done exactly that, I've come to the conclusion that legislation/enforcement is more about making threats against the governed populace, and in reality, many things passed as law could not survive being perfectly enforced without becoming severely disruptive.
Besides which, this is the United States. Law enforcement is technically an extra obstacle placed in the way of people engaging in the pursuit of their own happiness. Only the pursuit is guaranteed. Not others being safe other people's pursuit thereof.
There was a reason why "home of the brave" was a moniker; and it had nothing to do with warfare or the natives. It had to do with the fundamental level of courage necessitated by living in a culture in which liberty was valued above all else. Everything was okay by default. That was radical thinking at the time.
Those are exactly the people I want to limit though - the kind of people who decide “driving while black” is a crime they need to investigate.
There are many laws on the books that are rarely enforced and its not a recipe for disaster. Some laws are just old and achieve functional obsolescence. Some laws exist only so that they can be enforced as helpful to prevent or investigate other unrelated criminal behavior. The only disaster here is irrationally limiting the discretion of judicial and law enforcement agents to appease some blind appeal to authority.