Are There Too Many Laws?

The Roman philosopher, Cicero.
In his book, De Legibus, he suggests laws should be dawn from ‘the profoundest philosophy’.

Posted by Keith Tidman

Laws tend to accrete, one upon another. Yet, doesn’t this buildup of laws paradoxically undermine the ‘rule of law’? Wasn’t Montesquieu right to say that ‘useless laws weaken the necessary laws’, and by extension today enfeeble the rule of law?

 

The rule of law holds that every person and institution is equally accountable to the law. It is society’s safeguard against disorder. This presupposes that laws, in promoting the individual good, also promote the common good. The elixir to cure the ailments of society is often seen as dwelling in zealous lawmaking and rulemaking, which ironically may create even worse fissures within the rule of law itself and within the resulting social order. However mistaken such belief in the tonic may be, this regularly seems to be the guiding ideal and aspiration.

 

Yet, aspirations aside, the reality is that the proliferation of laws and regulations leads to redundancy, confusion, contradiction, and irrelevance among the laws that accrue over time. These factors fog up the lens through which people view laws as either just or unjust. In turn, citizens typically remain unaware of their actual liability to these amassed laws, and as a practical matter enjoy little understanding of how laws might be enforced.

Compounding the byzantine body of laws and regulations is the politicisation of their application. Governments of different political ideological leanings may well shift, especially as regimes shift, affecting the interpretation of laws. Laws being, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan, ‘not counsel, but command’. Governments might make arbitrary decisions as to how to enforce the laws and regulations, and against whom. Political partisanship and the hazard of overcriminalisation can be the not-uncommon consequence.

When Winston Churchill warned, ‘If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law’, to some people the cautionary note may have seemed an exaggeration, offered for effect. Now, many countries creak under an evermore bloated number of complex, cumbersome laws and regulations, with rule-of-law significances.

 

A core supposition of law is that citizens freely choose from among alternative behaviours in the daily conduct of their lives. Whether people really do have such uninhibited decision-making and choice, laws make sense, from the practical standpoint of society holding individuals accountable, only if the operative supposition of government and the community is that people deliberate and act through self-direction.

Laws and regulations ought to mirror society’s shared values, norms, conventions, practices, and customs, in order for justice to emerge. However, despite the influence of social values on laws, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ are not necessarily equivalent to ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’; principles of legality and morality may be only obliquely correlated. 

Meanwhile, it’s precisely because of the influence of social values that laws ought to remain malleable going into the future, as core needs of the community become reimagined and reframed with time. The inevitability of novel circumstances in the future requires pliability in human thinking, and thus in law.

 

If laws and regulations are allowed to calcify, they shed relevance in longer-term service of the community. They no longer foster the welfare of the people, which along with social order is foundational to laws’ existence. ‘The welfare of the people is the ultimate law’, Cicero presciently observed. Outdated laws and regulations ought to be purged, barring new laws from heaping upon the crustaceous remnants of old laws. Preserving the best about rule-of-law principles requires housecleaning.

 

Everyday citizens often perceive the law as an impenetrably dense mass, understood and plied by a priesthood of specialists who accommodate select interests. Laws’ unfortunate opaqueness propagates ‘ignorance of the law’, despite this go-to plea not being a legally valid excuse.

 

The risk is that society tilts increasingly toward unequal justice, much to the disadvantage of the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and other alienated, underrepresented subgroups less equipped to self-endorse, or to accrue and deploy power and influence to their advantage. Vulnerability and punishment and discretion are frequently proportional to financial means, in plutocratic fashion. And the rule of law, meanwhile, loses its glint. 

 

And so, in advising that ‘A state is better governed with few laws, and those laws strictly observed’, in light of his time in history René Descartes seems commonsensical. Yet, ever since, many countries have jettisoned this simple prescription.

The profusion of laws compacting outdated and useless laws cannot continue indefinitely, without risking an irreparable stress point for jurisprudence’s workability and integrity. A moratorium on disgorging new laws, however, is insufficient alone. It is vital to clear the overgrown brush that threatens to choke the consistency, intelligibility, reasonableness, and applicability of what we want to restore by way of the rule of law and sensible jurisprudence. 

 

That’s an achievable undertaking. The prospect of our returning to first principles regarding the rule of law as a credible and viable doctrine, beyond a muffled slogan, makes the enterprise of clearing the thicket of laws worthwhile if we want a just society.

 

Is There a Rational Basis For Human Compassion?

By Thomas Scarborough

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy was ‘utterly without grace’. It was a fierce condemnation of Kant.

Kant  favoured autonomy—which is defined as the capacity of an agent to act in accordance with objective morality rather than under the influence of desires. Today this is a view which, by and large, drives all of our ethical thinking. The problem, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, was that it lacked compassion. This is true. We place great emphasis on civil rights, the rule of law, social norms, and so on, while compassion is not comfortably accommodated in the scheme. How may it be possible to bridge the gap—rationally? This is the subject of this post.

Ethics is a very human thing. Regardless of the intellectual debate, or the final framing of our ethics private or public, it always originates in the human person. It is, above all, a person's formation of a certain outlook on the world. Aristotle thought of ethics as ‘the golden mean’—the balanced life—where the ‘mean’ is defined as a quality or action which is equally removed from two opposite extremes. Thus ethics represents the achievement of a balance in the human person—between economic and social goals, individual and communal goals, unity and diversity, novelty and tradition, thought and feeling, and so much more. This is our starting point in this post—that it is about balance—of which further discussion would unfortunately deny us room to develop the theme in the available space.

In order to develop the ‘golden mean’, then, it stands to reason that we should weigh a great number of opposites in our minds, not to speak of variations, one against the other. The scope of this is important here: as we do so, we typically have as our goal to balance the world around us, no more and no less. I should say, I have as my goal to balance the world around me—in my own individual mind—so as to develop (I should hope) a balanced outlook on my world. This is true—but it is simplistic. It is a more nuanced view of the process which should help us to open up our ethical thinking to human compassion.

I live in a world of others—tens, thousands, millions, in fact billions of others. As soon as I take these others into account, not merely as numbers, entities, or abstractions, I open up some important considerations. Each of these others carries in their own mind an evaluation of the world—without which my own evaluation of the world cannot be complete. It matters a great deal, not merely that others exist in my world, but that they each arrange the world in their own particular way. Therefore in a sense. we now have uncountable worlds within a world. It is easy to overlook this. These others perceive things, assess things, plan things, and act upon things which are of critical importance to that ‘golden mean’ which Aristotle spoke about. Perhaps this much goes without saying.

However this now introduces a quantum leap of complexity to my task of arranging my world, since now I must combine their world with mine—tens, thousands, even millions of worlds in other people’s minds. Then, too, this all has to do with semiotic codes, which are the means through which others reveal their own arrangement of the world—codes that are all too often all but inscrutable. A smile, a jig, a nod of the head—candles on the table, or a hush in the hallway—President Kennedy's visit to West Berlin, the Bomb under Mururoa, the public appearances or Her Majesty the Queen, and a host of so-called ‘interpretative devices’. In order to have some command of such things, I need to have an intimate ‘feel’ for others.

The existence of others in my world—further, the existence of their worlds within my world, and the ways in which they communicate their worlds with me—means that ethics may often come down to something all too human. I now need to be sensitive to the expressions, gestures, and postures of others, and a great variety of semiotic codes besides—not to speak of the sufferings, desires, and hopes which lie behind them. I need to understand—to borrow a term from the polymath Thomas Browne—‘the motto of our souls’. This represents a rapport which rests to a very large extent on a careful, sensitive reading of the many others involved in my world, whether this involvement is direct or indirectl. Thus we incorporate personal rapport in a rational ethics—which is human compassion.

Seeking Reformers

Torture by Kevin (DJ) Ahzee

Posted by Sifiso Mkhonto

Unity has a mixed reputation, in South Africa.  It was under apartheid that the motto ‘unity is strength’ became the tool of exclusion.  Yet even under our new constitutional democracy, with the motto ‘Working together we can do more’, unity became an illusion.

Today we find ourselves with different kinds of unity: political party unity, religious unity, and cultural unity. Yet rather than uniting us, these ‘unities’ exist in menacing tension, and instead of being united, we seem isolated. Furthermore, as the contours of these ‘unities’ have become more apparent, they have revealed parallel power structures in our society:

•  Political party unity has promoted ‘party first’, and cadre deployment.
•  Religious unity has served religious leaders, who have consorted with political power, and
•  Cultural unity has divided society through tribalism.

Over time, each of these unities has polarised us into captives and captors, and united us in bondage. Our ‘unities’ have become what I shall call ‘civilised oppression’. The dynamic is simple, on the surface of it. The major tool which is used to secure our captivity is patronage. Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organisation or individual bestows on another. It indicates the power to grant favours – but also, importantly, the need to seek them.

Underlying this dynamic, at both extremes, is the cancer we call greed. This greed then becomes institutionalised, and oppression, in the words of Iris Marion Young, becomes ‘embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules’. Chains and prison cells are a mere shadow of the chains and prison cells of mental oppression such as this. ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor,’ wrote the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, ‘is the mind of the oppressed.’

Since greed is embedded in each of us, and this greed has become institutionalised, we cannot eliminate the attendant oppression by getting rid of rulers or by promulgating new laws – because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. To make matters worse, in the words of the American social psychologist Morton Deutsch, ‘while specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression’. They, and we, are blind.

Contrast this now with the fact that we do, in fact, live in a constitutional democracy, with a bill of rights and the rule of law. People have lost the will and the desire to insist on law because they are cowed through the dynamics of patronage. Despondency has increased – or rather, our leaders have increased our despondency – as the dynamics of greed have gained the upper hand. Iris Marion Young describes our oppression ‘as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions that are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms’.

The cancer is within most of us. Now where do we look for restoration? Our greatest need is for Reformers who will press for merit systems, insist that lawmakers respect the law and find strategies to eliminate patronage. They will seek unity under one constitution, one bill of rights, one law. However, this cannot be done by Reformers who do not have the cure for the cancer. I believe that freedom will flourish, citizens will emancipate themselves from mental oppression, and patronage won’t be the big elephant in the room, as soon as we implement this cure.

It is time to turn our house into a home. Find a cure for the cancer. Seek knowledgeable and principled Reformers who won’t give society the cold shoulder when symptoms of the cancer are identified even in them. Now is the time to act on the diagnosis of the cancer, and take the medication that will cure us. Those who are controlled by the disease need to repent and find their way, instead of being sidetracked by patronage.

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Also by Sifiso Mkhonto: Breaking the Myth of Equality.