IS THE BIBLE REALLY THE LAW?

       These legal duties are not the same as moral duties.  Moral duties have a higher standard than legal duties.  For instance, there is an old law school example used to demonstrate the differences between legal duty and moral duty.  Suppose a person is at a swimming pool and a child is in danger of drowning.  A lifeguard would be under a legal duty to try to rescue the child.  This duty arose because that is what the lifeguard was hired to do.  On the other hand, if this same individual were only a guest, he could sit down and watch and do nothing because he had no legal duty to save the child.  The same may be true of a child in traffic or an occupied house on fire.  However, an able-bodied person would be under an extreme moral duty to try to rescue someone in peril, especially a child.

       Several years ago, I presided over a sad case where a young child was walking home from school beside the road way.  This little girl was hit by a car and knocked up in the air over cars in the opposite lane several feet away into a ditch.  Those around were so shocked that no one attempted to help until a man came on the scene and rushed to her aid.  He may not have had a legal duty, but it was obvious when he testified in court that he was a compassionate person who felt a strong moral duty.

       A more disturbing example is the following true story which comes from the state of Nevada.  A few years ago, a horrible example of the difference between legal and moral duty occurred.  An eighteen year-old, 6 feet tall male was seen in a toilet stall in a casino on the California-Nevada border.  He had a seven year-old girl, weighing less than 50 pounds, trapped and struggling against him in the stall.  This horrifying scene was observed by his friend who tapped him on the head, but could not get him to stop.  The friend then left and went for a walk.  He did not tell the security guards, nor did he notify the police.  A half hour later, the man in the stall told his friend that he had molested and murdered the child.  The friend did not question him.  The child’s broken body was found stuffed in a toilet bowl.  The accused and his friend had left for Las Vegas by that time.  The accused was later apprehended and charged with murder.  The friend was a student at the University of California at Berkeley.  When questioned as to why he did nothing to stop the murder of the child, he is reported to have made several statements:  that he was not going to lose sleep over somebody else’s problems and that he felt more sorry for the accused friend than for the child because he had lost his best friend but he did not know the child or her family.  In addition, he reportedly stated that the notoriety had helped invigorate his social life.  He became angry when asked why he did nothing to stop the murder, replying that he had done nothing wrong.  Attempts to have him dismissed from Berkeley failed.

       This is a shocking and glaring example of the difference between a legal duty and a moral duty.  In California and Nevada, as well as some other states, there was apparently no legal duty to assist a victim.  In other states, there is a legal duty to assist the victim of a crime.  While there may not have been a legal duty to assist the aforementioned victim, there was a moral and ethical duty to use all means to stop and report this horrible crime.

       The bible depicts an example of a person who did not have a legal duty to act, but did act to help save a victim when others who had a higher duty did not:

“ … A certain man went down from Jerusalem

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