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By: Terry Ahtziry Cardenas Banda, attorney, and former professor.
To begin the year in these festive seasons I find it appropriate to write about morals and good manners, appropriate behaviors for this season and begin the year in the best way. The moral is denominated as the set of beliefs, norms, and circumstances through which it is possible to be determined if a person along all his life managed to be a good person, besides his contribution in his social group that will determine the behavior to act according.
On the other hand, good customs are understood as the space that gathers all those habits that contribute the most to improving our well-being on a daily basis. Just as it is to maintain good health which is consolidated day by day, with the habits that are part of our lifestyle and the way we relate to others and our environment.
Morals are the rules or norms by which the conduct of a human being is governed in accordance with society and with itself. Therefore, morality is related to the study of freedom and encompasses the action of man in all its manifestations. In Mexico, from a legal perspective, we can appreciate the moral value and how it is defined with the thesis no. 313223 of the Supreme Court of the Nation. According to this thesis “, the law leaves the subjective estimation of the judge, set the concepts of good morals and public morality.” “The impudent or obscene acts, material elements of the crime of outrages to modesty, are all those acts that offend the moral sense or public modesty, but as the notion of modesty is variable according to the social environment and the degree of civilization of the people, it is convenient to leave the Judges the care of determining what acts can be considered as lewd or obscene. If one tries to establish a classification among the thousand forms that cover the crime that occupies us, it will be noticed that they can consist of outrage to the modesty and also to the good customs. In this second class, those acts that hurt public honesty are understood, and tend, for this very reason, to excite, favor or facilitate the corruption of people of one sex or the other. Fabreguettes, states that there will be an outrage to morality, when it is found that the analysis, description and carefully detailed painting of lewd and lascivious scenes, are intended, by the very nature of the thing, to seduce or pervert the imagination. This doctrine concludes that the crime of reference consists, in particular, in the shock of the act in question, with the public moral sense, should be contrasted the reputed criminal act, with the contemporary moral state of society where the crime is intended to have been committed. “
In the same way, from a legal perspective in Mexico, it is understood that good customs are not those that adhere to scientific and technical standards necessarily, but the rules that form the general and social morality of a human community in a few places and time determined. This defined according to the thesis no. 245812 of the Supreme Court of the Nation.
In other words, the Mexican regulations regarding morals and good manners must be left to the discretion of the court to determine when the actions of citizens represent a lack of morals or good customs and each crime in the individual will define the lack.
Morality from a social perspective is defined by society, social groups define what is right and wrong according to their customs and beliefs. But we should not be confused when we must focus on morality from a legal perspective when an act is wrong according to the law takes a totally different direction goes to what the laws established for crimes and their description in accordance with how the law establishes.
Morality is the basis for establishing when an act is appropriate or inappropriate, however, for an inappropriate act to be punishable or reviewed by the courts it must be embodied in the laws. Morality and good manners are the guidelines to determine the laws in Mexico and in most parts of the world.
