Obeying the law and some thoughts for now

tim wood

Should we obey the law? Why should we obey the law? What laws should we obey? Quick and easy answers are yes, for the good of all and everything, all of them. Live long enough and it’s not that simple. Socrates obeyed the law: he was condemned to drink the hemlock; his friends offered him escape but he refused. In terms of the law, his refusal was based in his sense of debt to his community. But given the different governments he had lived with and lived through it seems clear that his ideas of community and government were not identical, or his decision would make no sense. We can suppose that Socrates was simply living and dying in accordance with duty under the guidance of an idea, namely community as both idea and guidance.

What is law? An imperative established by the community. As such, either an expression of reason/rationality or of arbitrary power; i.e., either just or unjust. Should we obey unjust laws? And it would seem the answer is yes until it must be no, and the no even being a part of the yes. And here a lot could be said and argued.

But the conclusion I arrive at is that while a superficial obligation is obedience, deeper is to be a legislator. Every person then under not a passive obligation to merely obey the law, but a radical obligation to evaluate and to act to correct its flaws, usually by legal and lawful active participation in government at whatever level is possible, in whatever way is available.

By radical I mean only that we are all subject to law, even when we live in places or in such ways that it seems not to affect us – injustice hurting us all. As such a danger to the well-being of the community, and the practitioners enemies of the community. Or a simpler view: unjust law is like a dog that bites, or worse; a hazard and harm to the entire community. And there are ways to handle such things, but they must be done, they don’t just happen by themselves or by accident.

In peaceful times, injustice is often absorbed into and lost in the background noise of life – not of course for victims. We seem in the 2020s to be in a period like the 1930s where much injustice was sown – and if we ignore it, who knows what we all will reap?

kindred

Laws should be obeyed as long as they are just. If they are unjust then adjusting laws either by legislation change or rebellion/revolution is the right course of action.

In a democratic society such as most western nations if the citizens interests differ to that of government then they have the right to elect politicians or representatives better aligned with their own interests. If the tax is too high then choose vote for a political party that taxes them less etc.

Most laws are there to create an equal society for everyone and protect certain rights, where justice is dispensed quickly in the face of injustice then such laws should be obeyed, if they don’t then amended or scrapped.

Tarskian

Should we obey the law? Why should we obey the law? What laws should we obey? — tim wood

Our sense of justice is part of our biological firmware.

Civilization corrupts it, though.

Therefore, the best reflection of what is preprogrammed in our biological firmware, are the laws of the earliest societies for which we have records.

You can find this law in the Torah and the Quran mentioned as God's law.

While God's law is meant to bring justice, man-made law always aims to justify injustices to the benefit of the ruling oligarchy.

What is law? An imperative established by the community. — tim wood

No, true law is preprogrammed in our biological firmware.

Whatever else happens to masquerade as law, are rules meant to further the interests of the ruling mafia.

Or a simpler view: unjust law is like a dog that bites, or worse; a hazard and harm to the entire community. — tim wood

Therefore, it is necessary to unite behind the understanding that man-made law is just the product of the ruling oligarchy meant to benefit only themselves.

It is necessary to combat their attempts at overruling the sense of justice built into our biological firmware.

In religious language, it is God who has provided us with our biological firmware. We must never allow the ruling mafia to associate themselves as partners-lawmakers to God.

kudos

↪tim wood

Should we obey the law? Why should we obey the law? What laws should we obey? Quick and easy answers are yes, for the good of all and everything, all of them. Live long enough and it’s not that simple.

Seems like the real question is: 'Should we obey a law that is not enforced?' There is no option to not obey a law that is enforced.

What is law? An imperative established by the community. As such, either an expression of reason/rationality or of arbitrary power; i.e., either just or unjust.

I would argue that norms and customs are created by communities, while laws are not. Did you sign a social contract ("I hereby agree not to commit theft, extortion, etc.")? A real state doesn't need to do this, the individual is already a genus of the state. However, it is an idealism to think of ourselves as being the 'parts of the whole,' in summation, which means that we must live in a just and fair democracy. Our idealizations as an individual organ of the whole allow us to subvert it.

Those who fight against the law in order to attain their own ends are simply living out their own will that involves their self-determination, whereas those who fight against the law in order to change it attempt to change the state itself. However, organization into states is not a consequence of human civilization, it is also itself a sign that individuals have a will, not just for their own gain, but to ultimately reflect their reality as more than just parts of a whole, by transcending what they can do by themselves.

To put it another way, often in my life I have seen the 'prisoner's dilemma.' i.e. two prisoners who can either cooperate or betray each other for their own gain, which would lead to a less than ideal result for both persons. This is a type of allegory for the concept of actualization itself, something we often forget in our rationalizations. People often feel the need to become instruments of non-ideality. There is an imperative to live life that often gets confused with the universal idea of living life.

Tarskian

There is no option to not obey a law that is enforced. — kudos

Actually, there certainly is.

A law is enforced only in a particular jurisdiction. Outside of it, there are other sovereign states with their own laws.

Therefore, you can avoid annoying laws by engaging in jurisdiction shopping.

You can physically move elsewhere, you can set up companies elsewhere, you can buy assets such as for example real estate elsewhere. You can even switch to a different passport and avoid passport-based harassment. You can divorce yourself completely from any particular ruling mafia by replacing it by other ones.

Hence, if you do not like a particular ruling mafia, you can certainly get rid of it completely.

NOS4A2

We should obey because we do not want to get harassed, kidnapped, or killed by others. So we do our best: shuffle along in the hopes that every move, thought, and word stays on the correct side of some largely-unknown code.

The law, as a whole, is unjust. We had no hand in its creation, no agreement to abide by its dictates, and no opportunity to exist outside its scope. Everything about it is an imposition. Everything about it operates on the idea of coercion, theft, and the violation of human rights.

schopenhauer1

By radical I mean only that we are all subject to law, even when we live in places or in such ways that it seems not to affect us – injustice hurting us all. As such a danger to the well-being of the community, and the practitioners enemies of the community. Or a simpler view: unjust law is like a dog that bites, or worse; a hazard and harm to the entire community. And there are ways to handle such things, but they must be done, they don’t just happen by themselves or by accident. — tim wood

Ironically, you make the case for why one who sees the injustice of procreation would be so vocally against it.

tim wood

Laws should be obeyed as long as they are just. If they are unjust then adjusting laws either by legislation change or rebellion/revolution is the right course of action. — kindred

That is, by working within the structure or destroying it. But it's generally recognized that working within notwithstanding the difficulties, is better than destruction, which is ultimately more difficult.

tim wood

Our sense of justice is part of our biological firmware. Civilization corrupts it, though. — Tarskian

A liitle too facile, imo. I don't know what biological firmware is, and I'd say that people corrupt it and civilization tries to maintain it.

Therefore, the best reflection of what is preprogrammed in our biological firmware, are the laws of the earliest societies for which we have records.
You can find this law in the Torah and the Quran mentioned as God's law.
While God's law is meant to bring justice, man-made law always aims to justify injustices to the benefit of the ruling oligarchy. — Tarskian

The Torah, for a guess, c. 1500 BCE, the Quran c. 625 CE. These don't qualify for oldest .Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BCE. Ur and the Egyptians, both c. 3000 BCE - and no doubt the Egyptians far before that. And never mind India and China and countless small communities that would have had laws. As to "God's law," what does that mean?
As to the justice of "God's law," you're kidding, right? And equally you're kidding with comments about ruling oligarchies, yes?

tim wood

Seems like the real question is: 'Should we obey a law that is not enforced?' — kudos

Answer: yes.

I would argue that norms and customs are created by communities, while laws are not. — kudos

Recognized, acknowledged, established and perhaps sometimes institutionalized instead of created. And if laws not a product of communities, then from whom or what?

Those who fight against the law in order to attain their own ends are simply living out their own will that involves their self-determination, — kudos

They're called criminals.

However, organization into states is not a consequence of human civilization, — kudos

A consequence of what, then?

People often feel the need to become instruments of non-ideality. There is an imperative to live life that often gets confused with the universal idea of living life. — kudos

Do you mean "ideality" instead of "non-ideality"? I hear the cry of a good thought trying to get out of your sentence, but I cannot hear it clearly enough to understand it. Clarify?

tim wood

↪NOS4A2

Ah, nos4. What is any reasonable person to make of what you write? Near as I can tell only that you're a complete fool, and often an annoying one. When you make sense, I'll attend, but for the rest, even these minutes in replying to you are minutes wasted.

tim wood

Ironically, you make the case for why one who sees the injustice of procreation would be so vocally against it. — schopenhauer1

I see you qualify your view as "one who sees...". Your beliefs get a pass from me. Anything more to it than what you happen to believe? That is, are your vocalizations expressions of belief only, or are they categorical in nature? E.g., "I believe life sucks," v. "Life sucks!"

apokrisis

Every person then under not a passive obligation to merely obey the law, but a radical obligation to evaluate and to act to correct its flaws, usually by legal and lawful active participation in government at whatever level is possible, in whatever way is available. — tim wood

Yep. This is in fact just how self-organising systems work. They require a constant interaction between their global constraints and their local freedoms. It has to be a two-way thing so that the overall system can continue to evolve and adapt. It is the basis of being an intelligent organism in the most general possible sense.

The trick is in the tuning of the balance. What neural networkers call the stability~plasticity dilemma. A system with too much local freedom can learn and change fast, but what it learns then can be prone to "catastrophic forgetting" – a sudden overwhelming breakdown of accumulated knowledge structures. An adaptive system needs to be regulated by its equally robust habits – the longterm wisdom to match the immediate intelligence.

So the design of any natural system – one that can develop and evolve, repair itself and reproduce itself over time – is always of this kind. A hierarchical balance of its top-down constraint and bottom-up construction.

In the human social system, this is how a good legal system functions. It is suitably stable but not rigid and thus brittle. It is wise but listens to intelligence. It expects to still learn something new.

NOS4A2

↪tim wood

Ah, nos4. What is any reasonable person to make of what you write? Near as I can tell only that you're a complete fool, and often an annoying one. When you make sense, I'll attend, but for the rest, even these minutes in replying to you are minutes wasted.

If I had wanted a reply I would have quoted you. But the topic was a good one, however naive and obsequious the opinion of it was. For future reference, don’t waste your opinions on someone who doesn’t respect them.

kudos

↪tim wood

(Laws are...) Recognized, acknowledged, established and perhaps sometimes institutionalized instead of created. And if laws not a product of communities, then from whom or what?

Is your question a philosophical one, or a matter of how one should act right now in reference to some dynamic of the moment i.e. a question of power? I ask this because if you want to make an image you can get ChatGPT to do it, or if you desire art you perhaps need to think outside the box. 'ChatGPT creates images' would be a correct statement, but does ChatGPT create art? This is the major problem with the empirical method.

Do you mean "ideality" instead of "non-ideality"? I hear the cry of a good thought trying to get out of your sentence, but I cannot hear it clearly enough to understand it. Clarify? — tim wood

I did in fact mean non-ideality, but you could also substitute ideality if that fits better. To further elaborate, squirrels dig up nuts in order to survive; they do this without questioning it. If a squirrel was somehow convinced by us that it could steal nuts from your pantry instead it would likely experience no problem of conscience in doing it. Substitute man for squirrel, man does the same. It makes more sense to him to steal than to do the thing that genuinely leads to his survival and happiness, because his story is told from the inside as well as the outside; his existence is idea just as much as it is necessity.

Tarskian

As to the justice of "God's law," you're kidding, right? — tim wood

No. I believe that it is built into our biological firmware. We were preprogrammed with a sense for justice from birth. Societal education, however, corrupts it.

tim wood

↪Tarskian

I'm thinking of "God's law" as presented in what many in the west take to be God's lawbook, the bible (I know nothing about the Quran oe Eastern religions). And in that, God's notion of justice doesn't seem very just. So I wonder it that's what you mean, or if you mean something else. As to biological firmware, consider this verse from Tennyson:

"Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —"

.

Tarskian

God's notion of justice doesn't seem very just. — tim wood

Society indoctrinates us from early childhood into believing this. That is why you cannot trust modern people, including oneself, concerning matters of morality.

tim wood

Is your question.... — kudos

You wrote that laws are not products of communities. My question: then by whom or what?

It makes more sense to him to steal.... — kudos

Maybe to some people. There's the concept of "necessity knows no law," but I don't think that's what you have in mind.

tim wood

↪Tarskian

All you have to do is read the texts themselves. God is clearly not a respecter of persons. But society tries to teach us to be respecters of persons.

kudos

↪tim wood

You wrote that laws are not products of communities. My question: then by whom or what? — tim wood

Make the analogy of the free market system. Companies make products like staplers. The reason the company made the stapler was because it was cost-effective. The stapler was also a product of itself, in the sense that the market organized itself such that it was rational to produce it instead of other products. Consumers also observe and say, "We consumers made it such that we had enough staplers." They engaged in day-to-day activities of buying staplers and other products for their purposes. The company itself was guided by our collective unconscious and thus was it really a rational actor? Were we really rational actors when we bought staplers because of the abstraction of use value? Examining the power structure reveals its rationality, but does not contain the essence.

If we want to know: how do we organize power structures to produce staplers, we realize the lack of necessity in caring at all about all the abstraction surrounding the product. It is easier to only focus on the seeing and feeling of it and it's quality of being, ignoring that quality. The question of 'by whom or what?' has presupposed a power structure, and is incapable of really seeing the essence of the philosophical question i.e.: the part we don't 'need to see.'

Tarskian

All you have to do is read the texts themselves. God is clearly not a respecter of persons. But society tries to teach us to be respecters of persons. — tim wood

I do not interpret the text like that. It spells out particular types of misbehavior to avoid, but that is exactly what morality is about. I expect these scriptures to remain the dominant guidance for morality in the coming future. A society that teaches the opposite, is to be deemed degenerate.

schopenhauer1

I see you qualify your view as "one who sees...". Your beliefs get a pass from me. Anything more to it than what you happen to believe? That is, are your vocalizations expressions of belief only, or are they categorical in nature? E.g., "I believe life sucks," v. "Life sucks!" — tim wood

Yes, of course. Antinatalists believe that procreation is an injustice the one born. Someone might ask, "Why talk so much about such an unpopular opinion?". And the answer is similar to what you said here:

Or a simpler view: unjust law is like a dog that bites, or worse; a hazard and harm to the entire community. And there are ways to handle such things, but they must be done, they don’t just happen by themselves or by accident. — tim wood

tim wood

↪apokrisis

:100:
Yours worth the read!
A feedback system. I wasn't thinking in those terms, only just of half of it. On reflection, it seems exactly what the founders (of the US) had in mind, a system that could repair, maintain, and change itself, but not too quickly or too easily. I wonder if it just evolved as organic sense to them, or if they had some examples in mind? I read Madison's notes some years ago, but "feedback" didn't register- maybe it was there.

tim wood

I do not interpret the text like that. It spells out particular types of misbehavior to avoid, but that is exactly what morality is about. — Tarskian

You realize that the biblical God is the first practitioner of genocide, yes? And a serial offender at that. No interpretation required; it's just reading the words. And in the Laws sections it does indeed both prescribe and proscribe. Some of it still makes sense, some doesn't, and some disgusting. In my opinion we're in the middle of the age of the death of religions based on the supernatural. And it will take multiple generations because believers won't change, but will instead die out.

Of course the tension between science - call it science - and religion is unnecessary, because the creed is and has been we believe, and not, "we affirm as a matter of fact" - standards for beliefs being different from scientific standards.

Tarskian

You realize that the biblical God is the first practitioner of genocide, yes? And a serial offender at that. No interpretation required; it's just reading the words. And in the Laws sections it does indeed both prescribe and proscribe. Some of it still makes sense, some doesn't, and some disgusting. — tim wood

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Sovereign nations will fight each other -- that is human nature -- and the results are invariably ugly. Lions will attack and kill deer as well. Life as a principle requires animals to devour other animals. None of that will ever change. Welcome to the real world!

In my opinion we're in the middle of the age of the death of religions based on the supernatural. And it will take multiple generations because believers won't change, but will instead die out. — tim wood

In terms of successful sexual reproduction, it is rather the unbelievers who are slated to die out. Religious people are pretty much never anti-natalist. Seriously, who makes all the children? Religious people or atheists?

tim wood

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. — Tarskian

And this means what? You appear to be neck deep in nonsense and non-sequiturs. If you'd like to reset, try making a simple statement in simple terms.

apokrisis

I wonder if it just evolved as organic sense to them, or if they had some examples in mind? — tim wood

I think it was just commonsense once the big leap towards treating society as a designable machine for delivering desired ends became a thing with the Enlightenment. Madison and Bentham both arrived at the same conclusions around the same time. You just had to start thinking about nationhood in technocratic rather than conservative terms to see the advantages of a hierarchically organised liberalism.

So once Europe became organised as sovereign states, there was competitive pressure to move to state structures that could mobilise their populations to best advantage. Rational political science arose out of that need. Change eventually happened.

The systems principles have then been articulated with increasing clarity as a result of experience. The 1930s “hierarchy of norms” approach of Hans Kelsen is an example of that.

In general, the Anglo world does philosophise in terms of the mechanical, and so the pure systems science view doesn’t come through that well. Feedback is understood in the sense of release valves to stop boilers exploding. That kind of thing.

But German philosophy - the Naturphilosphie tradition - is rooted in a holistic organicism and so is more fertile ground for proper systems thinking. You see that then coming through in ecology, ethology, sociology, etc. The idea of nature indeed having a driving force of self organisation.

So there is a reason the feedback story might not instantly have come to mind as a first principle. The Anglo world is adverse to the general idea of holisism, while the Germanic tradition is strong on it.

Yet either way, a hierarchy of norms becomes generally accepted as the most rational social model of justice. You don’t want society to be a brittle machine. You want to plant a seed in fertile soil and watch it grow strong and resilient. Capable of adaptive change and dynamical self-balancing.

tim wood

Again :100:

I think it was just commonsense once the big leap towards treating society as a designable machine for delivering desired ends became a thing with the Enlightenment. Madison and Bentham both arrived at the same conclusions around the same time. — apokrisis

If I remember aright from reading, Madison has Randolph of Vir. introducing early on the form of government that the convention after debate finally settled on. I imagine the template were the state governments of the time, probably mainly Virginia's.

Not quite where the thread started, but imho yours a good place to close - I'm not going to improve on it. Anything further all yours.

apokrisis

Not quite where the thread started, but imho yours a good place to close - I'm not going to improve on it. — tim wood

You raised an interesting question that I haven't properly dug into. My focus has been on the more macroeconomic issue of nation states and their colonial empires. So the US experience only starts to matter for me when it entered the world stage as the Euro empires began to falter. :smile:

Obeying the law and some thoughts for now

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions