Thomas Dalton wrote:
Who is trolling here ? Slavery was legal and immoral. My question was about things that were illegal.
The distinction is irrelevant, you can reverse it pretty easily: Since slavery was legal, rescuing someone else's slave and freeing them (a moral act) was illegal (it's theft, basically).
Hmmm! Just like taking someone's intellectual property and freeing it. ;-)
Of course, morality is an entirely subjective concept. At the time, slavery was generally considered moral, since the people being enslaved were considered lesser beings. It was when those morals changed that people started to call for abolition. The law generally follows morals, but lags behind a little. During the gap between morals changing and the law catching up you can have immoral laws.
The law doesn't necessarily follow morality; it often reflects the self-interest of those in power.
Ec