The Letter and the Purpose
Public argument about law usually reduces to two formulas: rules must always be obeyed, or personal conscience outranks any text. Neither notices that legality, justice, legitimacy and the safety of breaking a rule can come apart.
A law of nature describes a stable connection. Parliament cannot repeal it by a vote. A legal statute establishes a rule of conduct. It can be broken — which is precisely why the text provides for consequences.
Law combines several functions: it forbids dangerous actions, defines property and contracts, distributes authority, sets procedures, limits power, makes behaviour more predictable and states what will happen in a dispute.
Laws are not always just. They can protect privilege, persecute minorities, ban harmless acts and hand the authorities convenient instruments of pressure.
Still, the existence of bad laws does not mean that personal moral feeling is a reliable substitute for law.
The inner moral law is especially convincing inside the person who formulated it. The trouble starts on meeting another person whose inner truth demands the opposite.
Law is needed partly because people disagree with each other and cannot begin every dispute by establishing the structure of the good.
It helps to distinguish:
- legality;
- morality;
- legitimacy;
- reasonableness;
- the practical safety of breaking the rule.
They can coincide, but they do not have to.
An unjust law should sometimes be challenged or broken. That decision requires an understanding of the price: a fine, prison, the loss of a job, damage to the people close to you. A heroic pose does not pay those bills.
Obeying every rule simply because it is written down is dangerous. Treating personal conscience as sufficient exemption from all rules is dangerous too.
The mature position is less comfortable: know the rule, understand its purpose, see the consequences and take responsibility for the decision.
The price of breaking a rule is best counted in advance and in units rather than in feelings. Running a red light at night at an empty junction seems harmless: the point of the rule is to separate traffic flows, and there are no flows. The bill is issued anyway — a camera, a fine, an insurance coefficient, and in a bad case a cyclist without lights who was not in the calculation. Understanding the purpose of a rule helps you choose which one to break, but the bill is not issued for understanding.
A rule describes not the current situation but a set of situations, of which you can see one. Someone who breaks it knowingly usually pays not for disregarding the principle but for the incompleteness of his own view.