Roads to good laws

What I listened to 

I chose to listen to (to watch, really) "Why do the British drive on the left?" for a couple of reasons: it was on the BBC News front page, so I saw it, and the title immediately brought a response to mind. 

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What it says

The narrator explains that the tradition of driving on the left might date from Roman times, when riding your horse on the left meant your right hand could hold a weapon towards passing strangers. Two explanations are suggested for the common modern habit of driving on the right: French nobility in the late 18th century wanted to blend in with people in the middle, while in the US, the larger carriages were drawn by teams of horses with a rider sitting on the back, left horse, making it safer for passing to drive on the right. 

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My response 

First, I didn't find the first suggested explanation for driving on the right very convincing. If the French nobles wanted to blend in a bit more with ordinary people, I don't see how riding their horses or carriages in the middle of the street would help that: having a carriage or expensive horses was already a sure sign of being of the increasingly hated nobility, and where you rode on the road does not seem to me likely to change that, so the explanation for the French habit of driving on the right doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, the explanation from the New World makes a lot of sense. Those inventive new people in the recently formed United States of America, freed of their colonial masters in the Old World, were doing things differently and already starting to lead the world with radical new thinking, including larger carriages and more of them, so since these made it safer for the leading riders to pass on each other's left side, they drove on the right side of the road.

But my first idea idea on seeing the title was about the rule of law, which sort of also connects with those radical Americans making the world new from the mid-18th century on. Some laws are purely matters of convention, with no particular moral foundation: there is no obvious moral reason, nothing to do with justice, for making up a law that everyone must drive on the left not the right, or vice versa. All that matters for safety is that there is a law dictating one way or the other. Traffic laws are not based on good morals, just on choosing from the options and then making it a law.

In contrast, marriage laws, for example, should follow good morals. This is why many nations have been changing their marriage laws in recent years: the old laws inherited from traditions based on religion, custom or whatever, were seen to be morally wrong, so they were changed to make them more just. My own country, Australia, was very slow to do this, but after defeating the religiously inspired bad morals of people who wanted to keep the bad old traditional laws, even Australia finally legalised same-sex marriage just before Christmas last year, so that all Australians are now legally able to marry the person they love without regard to sex.

This is a sign of moral progress. We see the same moral progress in laws that made slavery illegal, in laws that allowed women to vote and in laws that protect the basic human right to free speech, where the excellent US Constitution has again set a good moral example to other countries since 1789 – the same year the French had their revolution.