It's not obviously wrong to break a law to save a child's life though. In an extreme example, would you speed to take a dying child to the hospital? I think it would be wrong if you would refuse to (unless you had some calculation that speeding would make you less likely to save the child).
Laws are ethics - they are rules that tell us how to act. Right and wrong are descriptions of morality - which is about good and bad. It's certainly a violation of the clearly established rules to beat a man to save a child, but it's not obviously wrong to do so. I would say it's not wrong at all.
>It's not obviously wrong to break a law to save a child's life though.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what was said. The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds, especially for the institution tasked by society with enforcing the law. They may be justified by utilitarian ethics, but a police department setting the precedent of "if we believe the need is great enough, we are free to ignore the law" is both wrong and illegal. That's the fundamental principle at stake here - the same base argument that leads governments to suspend civil rights for the sake of security. "It is terrible for these people to die, so we need more power to prevent it." A ratcheting system that cedes ever more ground to autocratic forces. It's not like this process has been particularly hidden from us; there are many here who remember the US before the PATRIOT Act was put in place, after all.
The cost of not beating this thief might have been a child's death. The cost of beating him is instilling a norm that police have the right to beat prisoners. And because the change in societal norms is so slow, and the grief of a dead child so sudden, this always seems like a good trade. You would be a monster for saying that the rights of a car thief are worth a dead child. Until police prisoners have no rights. Until political prisoners have no rights. Until people have no rights.
End-to-end encryption is evil! Only a criminal would want to hide their activities from the police! A social credit system rewards pro-social activity and prevents instability! This state of emergency is only temporary - life will return to normal very soon! A surveillance state is much safer than a free one. As long as you have no issue with the state.
The civil rights we benefit from are measured in the blood of innocents. As cold-hearted as it is to say, if we are not willing to allow innocent people to die to protect civil rights, we will not have them for long.
> The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds
That...depends on your chosen deontological framework. In deontological ethics some acts are morally obligatory (or prohibited) independent of their effects on human welfare, but which acts are obligatory or prohibited depends on the deontological framework selected.
You could select a deontological framework where “obedience to the letter of the law” is always morally obligatory, but I think most people who subscribe to deontological ethics would nonetheless reject that framework.
Certainly, but it appeared to me that the post claiming that what the police did was wrong was indeed operating from the framework that a police department not subjecting itself to the laws it upheld was wrong in the deontological sense. Hence the claim "Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves." That's not a utilitarian statement - it operates from the framework that the action itself regardless of circumstances was wrong, and while a jury or judge could exonerate them, they still have the duty to place themselves under arrest.
Laws are ethics - they are rules that tell us how to act. Right and wrong are descriptions of morality - which is about good and bad. It's certainly a violation of the clearly established rules to beat a man to save a child, but it's not obviously wrong to do so. I would say it's not wrong at all.