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Hi. I’m Geoff Pynn, and I teach philosophy at Elgin Community College.
In this video, I’m going to ask: why should we obey the law?
Suppose you run a shop in a neighborhood controlled by a powerful gangster.
He demands regular cuts of your earnings.
He tells you what you’re allowed to sell.
He expects you to do what he says. And you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t.
This gangster is a bad guy. You should resent his authority.
He has no right to tell you what to do. But the government also demands regular cuts of your earnings,
in the form of taxes.
Its laws tell you what you can and can’t sell.
And if you disobey, the police can arrest you and even put you in jail.
While we may sometimes resent the government authority,
most of us think that there is a fundamental difference between the government and a gangster.
Ofcourse it's in your self-interest to obey both.
But don’t you also have a duty to obey the law?
A gangster who can’t hurt you can be ignored with a clear conscience.
But even if you can get away with breaking the law,
most of us would still think you’d be doing something wrong.
Anarchists disagree.
They deny there’s a fundamental difference between the gangster and the government.
Of course we're are taught to respect the state’s authority. But, anarchists claim, this respect isn’t deserved.
The state’s authority rests entirely upon its power to punish your disobedience.
The anarchist’s challenge to the state’s authority requires us to consider why we have a duty to respect the law.
Another way of asking this is, what makes the state’s authority legitimate?
Of course, many laws of the state reflect the rules of morality.
Your duty to obey the law against murder Is nothing more than the immorality of killing people.
But laws governing taxation, traffic, commerce, contracts, health care, education, and so on usually aren’t like this.
What obliges you to obey the law beyond your personal moral code?
Well, you might respond, don’t we need the state?
Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher from the 1700s, argued that our lives would be immeasurably worse without a state.
He asked us to imagine living in what he called the state of nature
a condition without government or laws at all.
It’s natural to put our own needs -- for food, shelter, security, and companionship
before those of other people, especially strangers.
We do this in order to survive. That takes resources. But, Hobbes thought,
resources would be scarce in the state of nature. Food and shelter would be hard to come by,
and there would only be so much to go around.
Fierce competition for these scarce resources would inevitably arise.
We would constantly be struggling to acquire what we needed
and living in fear that others would rob us of what we already had.
Such a life would be bleak, even nightmarish:
“In such a condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain.
And consequently no Culture of the Earth ... no Knowledge of the face of the Earth;
no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society;
and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death;
And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
Without the benefits of society, Hobbes argued,
the scarcity and competition in the state of nature would inevitably lead to a state of war.
Now Hobbes was pretty pessimistic. But his argument is compelling even if you’re an optimist.
Even if people want to cooperate for the greater good, it’s impossible for them to do so without trusting others.
And a constant fear of starvation, suffering, and death
would make even the most well-meaning person distrust their neighbors.
Without trust, cooperation is impossible.
Since cooperative endeavours are essential to agriculture, science, industry, and literary culture,
the state of nature would lack all these things.
No farms, no laboratories, no factories, no books.
The only remedy, Hobbes, thought, was a sovereign with absolute power.
They could establish and enforce a common set of rules that would lay the foundation for social trust.
The Chinese philosopher Mozi anticipated Hobbes’s argument by more than a millennium.
Before the state, the world was “as chaotic as though it were inhabited by birds and beasts alone.”
He thought this was because of people’s natural disagreements:
“Each man believed that his own views were correct and disapproved of those of others,
so that people spent their time condemning one another.…
Those with strength to spare refused to help out others,
those with surplus wealth would let it rot before they would share it,
and those with beneficial doctrines to teach would keep them secret.”
Like Hobbes, Mozi thought the only way to avoid this chaos was by establishing an
absolute authority with the power to “unify the standards of judgment throughout the world”
and enforce their standards through punishment.
Once people were no longer free to act according to their own ideas, they could live peaceably with each other, and society could flourish.
Today, most people think the state’s power should be much more limited.
But we generally agree that we need a state to protect our interests and enforce the law.
We need only look to countries that have been torn apart by civil war to see what happens when the state’s authority breaks down.
Yet even if the state does serve the common good, that still doesn’t mean we are obligated to respect its authority,
After all, your neighborhood might be an even more dangerous place without the gangster’s authority.
So why do we have a duty to the state, but not to the gangster?
We haven’t yet answered the anarchist’s challenge to the state.
What if you can serve your own interests better by breaking the law?
Do you really have a duty to obey, or to accept the consequences of disobedience? And if so, why?
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