Das aber muß sich dem Bewußtsein des Volkes und der Juristen tief einprägen: es kann Gesetze mit einem solchen Maße von Ungerechtigkeit und Gemeinschädlichkeit geben, daß ihnen die Geltung, ja der Rechtscharakter abgesprochen werden muß. [..] wo Gerechtigkeit nicht einmal erstrebt wird, wo die Gleichheit, die den Kern der Gerechtigkeit ausmacht, bei der Setzung positiven Rechts bewußt verleugnet wurde, da ist das Gesetz nicht etwa nur >>unrichtiges Recht<<, vielmehr entbehrt es überhaupt der Rechtsnatur. Denn man kann Recht, auch positives Recht, gar nicht anders definieren denn als eine Ordnung und Satzung, die ihrem Sinn nach bestimmt ist, der Gerechtigkeit zu dienen. An diesem Maßstab gemessen sind ganze Partien nationalsozialistischen Rechts niemals zur Würde geltenden Rechts gelangt. [...]
Gustav Radbruch, 'Gesetzliches Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht', in: Norbert Hoerster (Hrsg.) Recht und Moral. Texte zur Rechtsphilosophie (Reclam, 2002) 46, 47 und 49.
The momentum of social norms in the direction of Market Pricing gives many people the willies, but it would, for better or worse, extrapolate the trend toward nonviolence. Radical libertarians, who love the Market Pricing model, would decriminalize prostitution, drug possession, and gambling, and thereby empty the world's prisons of millions of people currently kept there by force (to say nothing of sending pimps and drug lords the way of Prohibition gangsters). The progression toward personal freedom raises the question of whether it is morally desiarble to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behaviour that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that's just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violenec. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature. Why Violence has Declined (Viking, 2011), 636-637.
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946), verfügbar unter http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
