the allegory of the moral speed-trap

    I know someone who is not "a bad person", but who is doing something that I believe is objectively wrong. It is extraordinarily difficult for me to stand idly by in any case, but particularly in a situation where I believe that a moral wrong is being done by someone who knows that it is so but who persists in the face of the wrong. Should I be more specific?
    Imagine a situation where you come to work one day, and a colleague that you've known for a while (a year or two) comes in late, fired up about a traffic ticket. Colleague was ticketed for speeding, say, in a speed trap--passed a cop on the side of the road and knows now that the cop was timing and calling in to a second cop further down the road. The ticket is pretty steep, and again, Colleague is really angry. Says the ticket is bogus and they're taking it to court. The first, natural reaction might be to support them: they weren't the only ones speeding; no one was hurt by their actions, or would have been hurt had they gone on without being ticketed; why do cops seem to have a quota anyway?
    But later you think about it, and you realize that it's all smoke and mirrors. Colleague was speeding, admittedly. Speeding is against the law. Just because someone else was breaking the law, Colleague's actions were still illegal. "Everybody else was doing it" is a 3rd grade excuse, not a legal defense. That no one was hurt by their actions is both debatable and vacuous; by accepting that illegal behavior "has to" persist (and in fact by encouraging it, when we do it ourselves and allow it by other people), we subtly widen its hold on society at large. New drivers see seasoned drivers speeding "all the time". They have less experience behind the wheel (i.e. the mechanics of driving), are (arguably) more easily distracted, and are generally less familiar with streets and roads (i.e. the geography of driving). When those drivers figure out that "everybody" speeds "whenever they want", they extrapolate that other traffic laws--and laws in general--are more "flexible" than they once appeared. And anyway, to say that no one was hurt is just to take credit for luck; when a squirrel bounds into the road at the wrong moment, all hell can break loose. Finally, the quota argument is just ridiculous, given that Colleague admitted to speeding in the first place. The truly innocent don't seem to get those tickets.
    And that's really the point, isn't it? There is an old saying that bears repeating: If you do the crime, you do the time. If you're arrogant and foolish enough to speed, then be enough of a grown-up to accept the logical consequences of your freely-chosen actions. Fight the speed-trap if you must, but don't pretend that you didn't speed in the first place.
    And don't tell your friends--particularly your friends who happen to be attorneys--that you are going to fight that ticket on the grounds that you weren't speeding in the first place, just because you think the speed-trap is bullshit. It pulls you down to the level of the speed-trapping cops (or evil bosses, or whatever lower-level sub-human creature you might be contemplating). And it eliminates any vestige of respect that your friends may have had for you. Because you are, in essence, asking them to lie on your behalf. I don't speak for anyone else, but when I took my oath as an attorney in this state, I swore that I would uphold the laws of the state and the country. That means, among other things, that I won't commit, or allow, fraud.
    What I am trying to say (and I realize that in an allegory, one ought not be so direct, but this is one of those times when I need to be less vague) is that even when one strongly disagrees with a situation, or a person, or a method by which something is done, there are often a number of ways to go about registering one's disapproval and potentially making a change. There is almost always at least one "right way" and one "wrong way". Don't choose the wrong way, and don't ask your friends to stand by you and help you debase yourself when you choose the wrong way because "it's got to change". Don't do something that, to see anyone else do it, would diminish that person in your eyes.