Should we obey the law?

Here are the reasons that come to mind for why we do obey the law:

(1) We believe what the law is promoting: The law, at least in democracies, is based around the social consensus of what is worth protecting. So, most people recognize right to the security of the person, so assault and battery are criminalized; people tend to think property rights are valuable, so theft and robbery are criminalized. Laws, therefore, are not arbitrary but based on society’s beliefs. Thus, most individuals in society respect the principles on which the law is built. Presumably then, even if the law did not state that murder was wrong, we would still not murder. We desist from breaking the law because the behavior it prohibits, when adopted, compromises our own sense of morality.

(2) The law promotes peace and order: By having a legal institution that deters destructive behavior and promotes constructive behavior we create a society which is ordered and in which we can live in peace. We will sacrifice our immediate desires because, ultimately, more of our desires will be satisfied we if preserve the peace by honoring the law.

(3) Fear of retribution: The law has the authority to inflict punishment – such as, fines, jail, deportation (for non-citizens), corporal punishment (whipping, or amputation of hands in Sharia law) etc. – and naturally we will avoid action that may result in such penalties. When this is the motive for obedience, is likely that the law will only be followed if there is likelihood that it will be discovered by authorities.

(4) Habit: To some extent we are conditioned for certain behavior which is generally beneficial to our person. Whilst the reasons given thus far are all conscious, following the law by course of habit is subconscious.

For example, when I am crossing the road at the lights often I will begin walking before the man has gone green if it is clear that by doing so I will not put myself in danger or cause inconvenience to any drivers. Yet, oftentimes will pedestrians choose to wait for the man to go green despite (a) a lack of danger, (b) no fear of retribution, and (c) no moral quandary with jaywalking. One could make the argument that it promotes order (Point 2), but I think a more common explanation is that is simply does not occur to the pedestrian that they have the agency to disobey the law; waiting for the green man is simply a matter of habit.

(5) Religious imperatives: This is probably the reason that I come across least often, but it’s certainly out there and pretty central to some people.

The Bible says, “Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right” (1 Peter 2:13-14, also Romans 13:1, Titus 3:1). If we isolate this command from the reasons for which it was given, then it seems Christians are compelled to follow the law (except where it is in conflict with God’s law, see Acts 5:29). I have friends who oppose violation of the law as they see the Bible giving inherent value to the law.

Personally, I reject this interpretation. I think the Bible consistently promotes following the spirit of the law rather than legalistically following the details of the law. Take, for example, Matthew 12:1-7:

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, "Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath." He answered, "Haven't you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven't you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent? I tell you that one greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the innocent.

Or take Mark 10:2-9:

Some Pharisees came and tested Jesus by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
"What did Moses command you?" he replied.
They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."
"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

In the first case he endorses what, technically, is illegal and in the second he criticizes behavior that is technically legal but contradicts the spirit of the law.

The other night my friend and I were offered a lift home by a P1 driver. I accepted the offer, knowing that doing so was breaking a state law that was recently brought in, limiting P1 drivers to one passenger between the ages of 16 and 21. In the end we didn’t end up breaking the law because another friend had an ethical dilemma with it. I, on the other hand, did not.

The restrictions placed on P1 drivers are, to me, entirely reasonable. Many accidents occur as a result of P drivers carrying multiple peers who distract them or urge them on to reckless acts, thereby creating danger and disorder. This graph of when casualty crashes occur shows why such laws are important.

But, in the five minute trip home, I could predict that this would not occur, knowing myself and knowing the driver. I felt as though the law, in its spirit, did not apply to our case and therefore could be disobeyed. I could see nothing immoral about the situation as we would not be causing any undue risk to ourselves or others. Being a new law I was certainly not in the habit of adjusting my behavior to account for such a law. Since it was a short trip and we wouldn’t be driving recklessly there was also almost no chance that we would be caught. And I don’t think our intended action would have discouraged a peaceful society by legitimizing contravention of the law.

It seems I am quite happy to disregard details of the law, if the intentions of the law are being honored.

Intellectual Property

I realise my blog has received very little use for some time, not sure whether I think less during holidays or just am less motivated to write my thoughts. In either case, uni is back, so also is the blogging.

Just a warning, this one is rather long because I didn't have the motivation or ability to condense it.

I recently took part in a very interesting conversation on the topic of music piracy. A friend was adamant that illegally sharing music is immoral as it is a form of stealing. However another friend raised the validity of ideas of intellectual property on which copyright laws are based and which had been an assumption for the first friend.

The conversation got me thinking about what value I place on intellectual rights.

I am no economist, but I can see the rationality in intellectual property laws. If there are high monetary incentives for creativity in a society then people will continue to strive for new ideas, inventions, marketing methods etc. which leads to more efficient methods of production. If everyone was permitted to download music, books, research papers for free, then the musicians, authors, and researchers would have lower incentives to produce.[1]

So I may concede that it is rational for intellectual property to be defended by law. But is there any moral basis for it? I struggle to see knowledge as property, largely because it is a public good, not a private good. A public good is something that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Knowledge is former because the use of knowledge does not preclude its use by others. For example, if I discover that lemon juice is the cure to cancer (which, incidentally, it is not) and you used this knowledge to cure yourself of cancer, then your neighbour would be no less capable of using this knowledge as a cure because it has been used once. However, the neighbour would be less capable of accessing lemon juice because there is a limited supply of lemons in the world and you had just used some of them up in curing yourself from cancer. The more lemons you used, the less access others would have to lemons, however the you can use the information all you like and it is no less abundant because of your use.

Knowledge is also non-excludable.[2] Once I tell you the cure for cancer is lemon juice there is no possible way I can take that information back from you; I can't prevent you from accessing it. However, I could steal your lemon juice to prevent you from accessing it. Ergo, knowledge is a public good, lemons are a private good. It makes no sense to claim ownership of a public good because this ownership is not naturally exclusive. It follows that you also can't steal knowledge, because no-one owns it.

Whilst someone can not own a public good, they can be credited with making it a public good. Knowledge can be discovered, air can be made clean by not polluting, safety can be maximised by punishing crime - but no-one can own knowledge, clean air or safety. You can't steal any of these public goods, but you can steal credit for them. The government could claim that increasing air quality is due to the new wind farm when instead it may be the result of favourable winds, or the judges can claim their 'zero tolerance' policy caused a reduction in crime which actually resulted from decreasing poverty, or I can claim that I, and not Pascal, discovered at a2 + b2 = c2. However, I would see this act of taking credit more as lying than stealing. But I would say it is immoral to wilfully take credit for another person's idea, not because the idea belongs to them, but because of dishonesty in such a claim.

In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke uses an analogy of a fountain of water, which is abundant to the degree that we can call it a public good - you can take a pitcher of water from the fountain and it will not be noticeably affected, so that by taking out a pitcher of water your neighbour is no less capable of taking out a pitcher of water for themselves. So you can't claim ownership of the water in the fountain. However, you can claim ownership of the water in the pitcher because your "labour hath taken it out of the hands of Nature where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath appropriated it to [yourself]". For a while I was tempted to think the same of knowledge: a person who laboured to discover the fact that lemon juice cures cancer had taken what was common and made a claim to own it by their labour. If your pitcher of water was stolen, you could no longer take it to the market to sell it to me. If my knowledge that lemon juice cures cancer was stolen, I could no longer take it to the market to sell it. But they are not the same. In one case you have lost your pitcher of water, in the other you have only lost your ability to sell the knowledge, not the knowledge itself. Rather than having a private good stolen, this situation is analogous to the market closing down, or the price for pitchers of water falling to zero, so they could no longer be sold for profit. So it is with music/video piracy. The musician has not actually had anything taken from them when their song is illegally downloaded, rather they have lost the opportunity to sell that song to the offender.

But perhaps you think they have lost the fruits of their labour, to which they are entitled? I would also dispute an argument such as this. I don't feel as though people have a right to be paid for their ideas or their labour. Say there are two people, Bill and Ben. Bill is a very hard working farmer. With his work his produces wheat, which people like to buy, so Bill's labour earns him money. Ben is also very hard working. He spend all day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year looking for and collecting rocks that are spherical. Through his work he has amassed an impressive collection of spherical rocks. However, no-one likes to pay money for his rocks, so his labour doesn't earn him money. My point is that labour can be used to gain wages, but there is nothing fundamental about it which established that all who labour should be paid for labour. If a person desires money it is rational to look for work which society is willing to pay for. Now, if a person professionally comes up with bright ideas or writes songs and is able to get money from that, all good and well. But just because they did the labour to come up with that idea or song doesn't entitle them to wages for it.

I am still debating with myself the extent to which artists/thinkers/inventors are responsible for what they produce. As a researcher, for example, I can't make lemon juice the cure for cancer, it is simply an apparent fact (or in this case a fiction). Inventions, songs and novels, on the other hand, are not apparent facts, but the degree to which they are original creations is debatable. If I write a song (those who know me will know just how farfetched this hypothetical scenario is), I am taking things from the world around me - singular musical notes and singular words, as well as series of notes and series of words which, through language, can be deciphered to form ideas - and arranged them using my creativity and knowledge of what combinations of notes sound good and what words invoke thought and feeling. It would be a part-whole fallacy to say that just because each of the components of a song (words and notes) are unoriginal, the song itself is too, but still the extent of originality is vague. In examining this question let us take the example of Yesterday by The Beatles. The song was by The Beatles, credited to "Lennon /McCartney" but written and performed solely by Paul McCartney (with string quartet accompaniment). I had a read of Wikipedia and it appears that the song purportedly shows similarities in lyrics to a Nat 'King' Cole song, Answer Me and musical similarities to Georgia on My Mind. However, the rather lengthy description of how it came to be written shows that it was original, although McCartney himself suspected he had subconsciously plagiarised saying, "For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no-one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it."

How much has to be plagiarised before a song would be considered unoriginal? Only two lines bear any resemblance to the lyrics of Answer Me and that caused an accusation. Ian Hammond has written a quite detailed piece on the similarities with Georgia on My Mind yet considers these purely innocent, saying "Every Beatles' song is constructed largely out of style components, and thus borrows from other songs, as all songs must". This isn't simply a matter of part-whole, because obviously much less than whole - just a 5 or 10 second snippet - would be considered the artist's creation. I wonder how the copyright laws deal with the vagueness of all this.

Even seeing the extent to which songs are creations, I would say that the issue of plagiarism in music is one of dishonesty rather than stealing. But what of the question of illegally sharing music? I am not all that cluey on copyright laws, but I have been informed that you are permitted to make a singly hard copy and unlimited soft copies of a piece of music that you buy [3]. It is also legal to share these copies. However it becomes illegal when the same product is being used multiple times simultaneously. For example, I can put my Beatles album onto iTunes, and I can also lend that CD to a friend. But it would be illegal for me to listen to the album on iTunes whilst my friend is playing in the CD in their house.

Personally, I have always thought of sharing as a good thing, and I think the sole reason the law opposes this is because it destroys the economic incentives for artists because they will sell less if their music is freely shared. Thus, the law is perhaps rational, but not just. I believe the role of the law is to enforce what is just, and not to determine what is just, so I think it is fair to disagree with the law.


[1] Result specific to the music industry would include a greater emphasis on live performances (an experience that can't be downloaded), albums being promoted for bonus material rather than songs, and poorer musicians. A positive effect would be that, with the easier access to a wide range of music, there should be a greater appreciation for music in society as a whole, and so less people would be listening to bad pop. Thus, pop artists would be earning far less, be getting less attention and the media would finally be free from reporting the riveting Britney Spears saga.
[2] Perhaps the existence of copyright laws suggests that knowledge can be made excludable, but it is not naturally so, and laws that make public good excludable are notoriously difficult to enforce (as it exemplified by the prevalence of music/video piracy).
[3] When you purchase a CD you are buying both the physical CD and the material on it. You don't buy ownership of the material but only the use of it, if that makes sense.


NB: It was not my intention from this argument to gain a license to ignore the law, because I acknowledge that following the law is of value in itself.