I was reading a back issue of the Health Affairs journal and came across this paragraph, which more than anything, clearly elucidates how I feel about wise law and the importance of philosopher kings. A solution is to have less laws, or at least, less restrictive laws, and more powerful judges and rulers, as long as the latter are virtuous they will see the complexities of what is laid before them and rule with justice and magnanimity.

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As doctors we are restricted from helping those in pain at the end of their lives to end their own suffering.We are restricted from using marijuana to help those suffering from the nausea of chemotherapy.We run riskswhen using drugs “off label” for conditions that have proved to be remediable but for which the drug maker has neither sought nor received permission to list as a “use.” And we are asked to balance our moral position on these issues—and many others—against the possible legal consequences of acting in what we consider
to be our patients’ best interests. The laws that govern medical practice are not created by physicians or ethicists but by governments. Like most laws, they lack the ability to distinguish subtleties in the human experience that might require extraordinary interventions. Yet as physicians we must consider the needs of
each person and individualize our actions in our patients’ best interest.