If you try to decide on the basis of what is legal, it is the worst form of ethics/morality.
Legality allowed things like slavery, discrimination, and so many harmful things that continue today. It allowed things like ignorance, hate and others to hurt people. It protected murderers while putting innocent people behind bars.
The laws protect guilty people and punish innocent people. Guilty people say they are innocent, and innocent people try to help the police and unwittingly look guilty.
I am not advocating breaking the law. I am simply stating that if the law is your only guide in your behavior, you may want to reconsider how you make decisions.
As a matter of course, people who pushed society forward got arrested and broke some laws. Many civil rights leaders were arrested dozens of times. What does an arrest mean when the rights they are fighting for are larger than themselves? No amount of arrests can stop an idea, and that is of equality of all people.
Online and in real life we see the hate of those who would try to deny equality. We see horrific images of people beating protestors who are peacefully protesting. We see a government that is trying to limit the rights of speech it disagrees with. We see the country divided first by ignorance, then by apathy, and finally by intellectual dishonesty and laziness.
We have ignorance of what was fought for in world wars. We have the apathy of the voters who voted for someone who would deny human rights. We have the intellectual dishonesty and laziness of media that enabled these conditions to happen.
We all are guilty here, and pointing at each other doesn’t help anyone. We all have a choice. That is, we can hold people accountable for their actions or not. I intend to hold people accountable for their actions. What do you plan to do?