Why do you obey the law?

Note: Café Philo is a way of meeting interesting, inquiring people who enjoy talking about life's big issues and conundrums in a convivial atmosphere, rather than a heavy-duty philosophy seminar. Read more about our approach here.

Why do you obey the law?
First, what laws are we talking about? Societal, religious, the ‘laws of cricket’? Would it be permissible to take a rather laissez faire approach to the laws of cricket, even though it would at least irritate 23 or 24 other people? What if someone argues that they don’t need car insurance because, although they will be driving on the public highway, they are certain they won’t have an accident.

Second, whose laws are we talking about? What laws do we feel obliged to abide by? Societal, religious, courtesy, the social rules of games, and so on? Many people argue that the laws laid down by their religions are sacrosanct and, thus take precedence over civil legislation. Yet if a religion does not have the power of enforcement, how does this work?

Is there any situation in which we might choose to disobey a law even though we‘know’ we should theoretically obey it? What precisely are the attributes of the situation which make us believe we can justify breaking the law? What if the legal system disagrees? What is it about us that puts us above the people who drafted the law? Should all laws have exceptions drafted into them? Should juries be able to acquit defendants where they feel the moral case overrides the legal facts (‘perverse verdicts’)?

Plato, in the Republic, uses the myth of the ring of Gyges, which conferred invisibility on the person who wore it. Being invisible, the wearer would have the chance to commit offences unseen. If you could break the law with impunity, would you rape, steal and murder? The core question Plato poses is, do people act morally simply for instrumental reasons (to avoid the consequences of not doing so), or because they value justice and morality in their own right?

Penn Jillette, an illusionist, said, ‘The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.’

The point here is that Jillette’s interlocutors clearly think laws which (they believe) emanate supernaturally (but arguably only have force in the earthly realm because people put them there), have at least as much weight as laws developed by elected representatives of the society that will have to abide by them, because the latter are arbitrary and subject to changes in cultural mood and circumstance, whereas the former are fundamental and unchanging.

Of course, murder and rape are serious. But there are plenty of examples of factitious laws which people follow, for no better reason than, like Everest, they are there: eating fish on Fridays being one.
Is it acceptable to act against the law of the land in the promotion of some religious doctrine or indeed from non-religious moral conviction?
Is it alright to do bad things which aren’t (yet) proscribed? For example, how do legal acts like lying or betrayal compare to breaking the law for a cause like women’s suffrage?

Are some people above the law? The divine right of kings held that monarchs were not accountable to earthly authority because their right to rule derived from God. US presidents Nixon and Trump have both claimed that if the president does it, that means it is not illegal. Are these cases equivalent, and if not, what makes them different?

Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges
The Ring of Gyges: Morality and Hypocrisy: video, 11 mins – watch from 11:39 to 22:27
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/so-sue-me/201501/why-do-we-obey-the-law
(on common law v Napoleonic code) https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/magazines/2020/january-february/common-law-vs-napoleonic-code