Why should we follow the law? Beyond coercion, for the same reason that anybody else within a society should — because it is the outcome of a social decision. Can that clash with moral considerations? Yes, but it's not clear that one takes priority over the other. Individual morality clearly influences how a society comes to a decision, and an individual can decide that a law should not be followed because it conflicts with his/her own morality, but that does not in itself obviate the force of a legal obligation as someone within that society.
I don't accept your contention that society has agency in that way. It is just the fallacy of composition as far as I am concerned: People have agency, society is composed of people, therefore society has agency.
No.
Society is imbued with agency only through its leaders, and leaders are individuals. If you were to accept this fallacy though, I don't see how that does not extend to morals though. If society has agency like individual people, then that agency is subject to moral judgment just like individual people, whether through its leaders or abstractly.
Similarly, although different in kind, an aesthetic judgement does not rely on its morality. Is it problematic if an attempt to make something beautiful leads to harm to others? Morally, probably so, but that has no bearing on whether the end result is beautiful or not. Again, we may decide that the moral judgement is more important, but that doesn't take away from the beauty.
I fundamentally disagree. Everything can ultimately be viewed through the lens of morality, even things which may appear to be aesthetic, logical or pragmatic at first glance.
A law which harms people to maintain what other people deign to call "society" (usually out of self-interest) is an unjust law, regardless of any other justification.
A beautiful painting painted with the blood of innocent virgins is still an act of evil.
The fact that law, practicality, logic and aesthetics are separate consideration does NOT absolve things so judged from moral consideration.
Euthyphro's dilemma would, from the above, not apply here because it's not at all about deciding whether something is moral or not. I hold that morality is only one of a range of reasons to act, and may even be more important than the rest, but is not what all other categories of value are reduced to.
Human beings have no ethical responsibility to society as it is codified in law, they only have a responsibility to other human beings. A society that abrogates this responsibility is diseased and just waiting for an opportunity to die or fall to subjugation.
The law is there to serve as a framework for automating decisions in this regard, so that not every action needs to interrogated endlessly by philosophers.
But law itself needs to be maintained to balance its impacts, and when that balance is significantly disturbed or applied unjustly for long enough it creates the conditions for its own annihilation in revolution.
Sure, there are petty immoralities in the application of law, this isn't avoidable. But even these are still bad things and the law has a duty to actively and carefully avoid or balance them wherever possible.
That's a paternalistic attitude, definitely, and the question is what one believes about the maturity of Singapore society in this context. Are we more likely to rationally work out our differences, or are we still at the stage where smothering potential hostility is more prudent? For better or worse, the government (and many who support them over this) has decided that society isn't actually ready to handle such conflict in a productive manner.
There is a reason why teenager eventually rebel against paternalism. It is a temporary state, and the longer it is imposed the greater the blow-up.
You know what they say about the children of priests?
In this case I was assuming that we were referring specifically to the law(s) attempting to manage ethnic conflict. While I agree that the response to political opposition has been distasteful at the least, and also agree that it was also unnecessary (except perhaps during the 1960s), none of these have been the result of this particular set of laws.
No, I don't mean that the laws caused those conflicts, I mean that the conflicts that the laws will cause eventually when the gerrymandering stops working or when bringing in foreigners to sustain growth stops working.
I don't think Singapore has really needed to face a difficult time yet, but it will come.
Not sure where nationalism even got dragged in here...
Because I found the mythologies about Singapore to be very reminiscent of the mythologies of nationalistic Apartheid South Africa. It turned my stomach, and a lot of South Africans report similar feelings if they stay for more than a week or so.
It may not be the most nationalistic country in the world, but it is up there.