Government, judges, Alphabet Agencies, police forces, legal professionals etc… they make a big deal of taking an oath but current events seem to show that means absolutely nothing.
Is it just traditional?
Government, judges, Alphabet Agencies, police forces, legal professionals etc… they make a big deal of taking an oath but current events seem to show that means absolutely nothing.
Is it just traditional?
Comments
That’s only in broken countries, mate.
Even so, I’m sure you’ll find your local physicians’ college takes immediate action should a member physician break their Hippocratic oath.
I look at oaths the same way with the George Carlin philosophy, swearing an oath is bullshit
https://youtu.be/s-D3TQlSEaw?si=qWYee33O0574m0g6
People are usually not punished generally for oathbreaking but for something more specific they did wrong, taking the oath is what binds them to those standards though.
For example, when an official is prosecuted for taking a bribe, breaking the oath is not an element of the crime, but he had to take the oath to get that position and we say that that is part of why what he did is wrong.
What “current events” do you have in mind?
From the outside looking in. Taking an oath in America seems to mean nothing.
Just ask yourself if your ethical structure is dependent on anyone else following theirs. Be true to your own honor. Nothing lese matters.
This is a very interesting conversation at this point since the entire Republican senate and the Congress people in the house, violated their oath of office in supporting the attempted overthrow of the US government in 2020. And we have just gone on pretending that this is OK?
The real answer is that in the cases of things like physicians, lawyers, swearing in court, police officers, the military, it at least theoretically binds them to Legal standards and consequences beyond what someone who has not sworn the oath would experience.
Obviously people’s enforcement of this, and people’s opinions on the enforcement of this, vary widely.
Legally speaking it is also a method of marking the point at which someone takes over a role. For example the president is not the president until he is sworn in. Up until the exact moment that the next president takes the oath, the previous president is still the president. Undoubtedly, somebody has written a thriller in which some disaster happens midway through swearing in the next president, with all the amusing hypotheticals therein.
The most common example of the consequences of swearing an oath is probably joining the military, as swearing that oath literally places you under a different system and standard of Justice. The UCMJ is VERY different from either common law or the Constitution, with obvious consequences. For the most obvious example, anything a marine DI does would be extremely illegal in other contexts.