Why do citizens obey the law?

Core Note: In 399 B.C., Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher, was falsely accused of blasphemy, corruption, and misleading the youth and sentenced to death by numerous judges in Athens. Before his execution, his friend Crito took the opportunity of a visit to tell him that he could easily escape from prison and that it would be pedantic to comply with such an unjust trial. But Socrates asks rhetorically: is escaping from prison justified? Is it justified for a person who has been unjustly accused and found guilty to escape from the law? Is there an obligation on man to obey any law? QuoteIn 399 B.C., Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher, was falsely accused of blasphemy, corruption, and misleading the youth and sentenced to death by numerous judges in Athens. Before his execution, his friend Cleitus took the opportunity of a visit to tell him that he could easily escape from prison and that it would be pedantic to comply with such an unjust trial. But Socrates asks rhetorically: is escaping from prison justified? Is it justified for a person who has been unjustly accused and found guilty to escape from the law? Is there an obligation to obey any law? Despite Criton's best efforts, Socrates finally submits to the unjust sentence. He chooses to obey for two reasons: First, if everyone refuses to obey the judgment on the grounds that it is unjust, how can the state have a square circle? The justice of a legal judgment is important, but the maintenance of social order is equally important. Secondly, if a person voluntarily lives in a country and enjoys the rights granted by the laws of that country, is this not tantamount to having a contract with the country? In this case, disobedience to the law is breaking the contract and is very immoral. Instead, 14 years later, the Athenians found out that their trial of Socrates was wrong, and the original accusers of Socrates were either sentenced to death or expelled from the country. The Trial of Socrates is a story of citizens bent on obeying the law regardless of what it is. But also in Ancient Greece, there is a story that is diametrically opposed to Socrates' stance, which is the tragedy of Antigone as told in Antigone by Sophocles, the Ancient Greek tragedy writer. Polynices, the brother of Antigone the Theban, was killed in a battle as a traitor to his country, whereupon Creon, the ruler of Theban, proclaimed on behalf of the state that no one should mourn Polynices or bury his body, and that he should be left to be pecked at by ravens and wild beasts. But, according to Antigone's religious beliefs, the decree of the gods demanded that he should not allow his brother to be buried in the field, and it was his duty to bury his brother with certain rites; the decree of King Creon was contrary to a higher decree, namely, the decree of the gods, and he himself should have resisted the decree of the king in order to preserve the decree of the gods. In the end, he resolutely violated Creon's decree and buried Polynices according to the rites of the time. The story of Socrates and Antigone vividly illustrates the dilemma posed by two conflicting loyalties: where does one go from here, given that one side is a judgment or a king's decree in the form of a lawful judgment, and the other side is one's own belief in justice or the decree of a higher god? This raises a question that has long been a source of deep contemplation in Western philosophical circles: when the law goes against the conscience of the citizen or social justice, is there an obligation on the part of the citizen to obey the law? From this, the Western philosophical community has further raised and explored the questions of what are the reasons for citizens to obey the law, whether citizens have the moral obligation to obey the law, and whether there is any justification for citizens to disobey the law. In a word, it is the citizen's reason to obey the law. First, the main doctrine on the reason for citizens to obey the law is an important theoretical proposition of the western philosophical community. In the history of western civilization in various periods, especially since modern times, this issue has always been concerned. Around the citizen's law-abiding reason problem, different schools of legal philosophy respectively put forward different doctrines, of which, the more representative doctrines are mainly the social contract theory, utilitarianism, violence deterrence theory and legal justification theory. (I) Social Contract Theory Social contract theory is a theory of the classical school of natural law on the process of the state and the law, which also contains the explanation of the problem of citizens' law-abiding reasons. According to the logic of social contract theory, citizens have a moral obligation to obey the law because they are all parties to a social contract, and as parties to this contract, they should abide by the content of the contract and by the government and laws to which they have agreed. Social contract theory holds that the legitimacy of government to rule over the members of society comes from the consent of the members of society. "All human beings are by nature free, equal, and independent, and no one can be placed outside of this state and made subject to the political power of another without his consent." In order to escape the state of nature in order to enter the state of society, mankind chose the social contract as a means of uniting to form a ***same subservient ***same body. Rousseau pointed out that the fundamental problem to be solved by the social contract was "to find a form of union which would guard and secure the person and wealth of each of the united persons with the full force of ****sameness, and by which each individual united to the whole would again be but subservient to himself, and would still be as free as ever. " To government and law founded on consent, those who participate in the covenant should submit. In this regard, Hobbes had long ago expressed a similar idea in his second derived law of natural law - "Keep thy agreement, or keep thy word" - -in which similar ideas were expressed. Social contract theory offers a reasonably persuasive explanation for citizens' reasons for law-abidingness. It provides a morally legitimate basis for the rule of law by attributing citizens' reasons for law-abiding to their own agreements and promises. At the same time, social contract theory implicitly implies a limit to citizens' law-abidingness, i.e., citizens are only obligated to obey laws enacted within the limits of their own authority. If the government operates within the authority given to it by the citizen * * *, the citizen is obligated to obey the government and the laws it enacts; otherwise, the citizen has the right to refuse to obey. It is thus a theory of democracy. However, there is also an obvious flaw in the use of the social contract theory to explain citizens' reasons for obeying the law, namely, that it applies only to those who expressly express their consent and obedience to the government and its laws, whereas the ordinary citizen has not made such a commitment publicly, and it is not known whether or not he or she is under an obligation to obey the law. To remedy this shortcoming, Plemants proposed that consent to government be indirect in addition to direct consent. The mere fact that a person has autonomously voted constitutes his indirect consent to government. He said, "Even if you do not agree with the system and wish to change it, by voting you are assuming the obligation to obey the government, because the purpose of elections is to give power to the person who wins the election. If, when you vote, you know what you are doing and no one is forcing you to vote, you are voluntarily participating in the process of giving power to those people." That is, if a citizen voluntarily participates in an election, then he is obligated to obey the law. This addition, while containing a theoretical advance, still leaves a gap. For, according to this logic, if a person does not expressly submit to the government and refuses to vote, then he is free from the obligation to obey the law. This is clearly an unacceptable phenomenon in a democratic society. In our view, social contract theory is a macroscopic theory of the reasons for citizens' compliance with the law, and is not suited to an "empirical" analysis of the law-abiding behavior of particular citizens. Plementz's addition is in fact an attempt to concretize the macro-theory, which will inevitably lead to the error of theoretical inappropriateness. Moreover, the social contract theory is, after all, only an a priori theoretical assumption, and there is no historical empirical material to prove that human beings did establish society and the state in the form of contract at the beginning. It is true, as Main criticized the social contract theory: "In insisting that the 'social contract' is a historical fact, it is easy to give a false sense of factuality and clarity to the theory that 'law' originated as a contract. " (ii) Utilitarianism Theory Utilitarian jurisprudence and related schools of legal philosophy explain human motivation to obey the law from a utilitarian perspective. This theory argues that citizens obey the law when it brings more benefit to the citizen or society or when it provides better protection against risks and therefore reduces possible losses. Citizens' compliance or noncompliance with the law is determined by the results of comparing compliance with noncompliance. The earliest origins of utilitarian thinking can be traced back to ancient Greece. Protagoras, a thinker of the School of the Wise, proposed that man's subjective utilitarian needs are the sole motivation for his behavior. Later, Epicurus further proposed hedonism, which regarded the avoidance of suffering and the pursuit of happiness as the specific motive of human behavior. 18th century British thinker Hume restated Epicurus' idea, and identified the actual content of utilitarianism as the subjective judgment and assessment of human suffering and happiness. 19th century, the philosophy of utilitarianism prevailed in the United Kingdom and spread to the field of legal research. Bentham pioneered utilitarian jurisprudence, which, according to him, is "the principle of deciding in favor of or against each act according to whether it is capable of increasing or decreasing the happiness of the party in whose interest it is committed, and according to the tendency of the act itself to increase or diminish that happiness." "Bianchin argues that even in social contract theory the duty to obey is grounded in the principle of utilitarianism because it is true that the greatest happiness of the greatest number can be realized only if we obey the law." Mill, another English utilitarian jurist, further suggested that merit or happiness is the highest measure of the rightness or wrongness of an act. According to him, "The 'yes' of an act is proportional to the happiness it tends to promote, and the 'no' of an act is proportional to the unhappiness it tends to produce." In addition to utilitarian jurists, a number of other jurists have viewed comparisons of utility or interest as motivating people to obey or break the law. For example, Hobbes, a classical natural law scholar, said, "The following is self-evident: men act out of their wills, and their wills out of their hopes and fears. They are therefore willing to obey the law when it seems to do them more good or less harm to themselves than not to obey it." Contemporary economic analysis of jurisprudence, on the other hand, regards human beings as "economic beings", who always decide whether to choose legal or illegal behavior by comparing the costs and benefits of their actions. According to Posner, "Obedience to the law is more a matter of profit incentives than of reverence and respect." Utilitarianism theory explains citizens' reasons for obeying the law in terms of utilitarianism or interest, which is quite reasonable. When Marx analyzed the unscrupulousness of capitalists to make profits in Capital, he talked about how capitalists, when confronted with the relationship between profiteering and obeying the law, decide to abide by the law or break the law according to the size of the benefits they gain. However, the utilitarian theory uses the results of law-abiding to argue whether people choose law-abiding behavior or not, and this argument will undoubtedly be criticized. The first criticism is that utilitarians misunderstand the full extent of people's intentions in weighing the outcomes of different behaviors. People's intentions in weighing different outcomes are not simply to choose between obedience (law-abiding) and disobedience (illegal). A second criticism is that utilitarian methodology fails to truly capture the full extent of people's responsibility to obey the law. A third criticism is that utilitarianism ignores other factors too much and that simple consequentialist theories of law-abiding are often insufficient to make obedience a moral imperative. (iii) Violence Deterrence Theory The Violence Deterrence Theory attributes citizens' reasons for law-abiding to the deterrent and disciplinary effects of state coercion. This theory suggests that citizens are law-abiding because they fear state violence, and that they act in compliance with the law in order to avoid the violent sanctions or economic losses that would result from violating the law. The theoretical source of the violence deterrence theory is analytical jurisprudence. Austin, the founder of analytic jurisprudence, argued that laws are commands issued by the sovereign, and that commands contain the two essential elements of "duty" and "coercion". He stated: "A command, or duty, is backed by a sanction, and is enforced by the constant possibility of adverse consequences." Kelsen, one of the representatives of contemporary positivist jurisprudence, founded pure jurisprudence on the basis of Austin's doctrine, emphasizing that sanctions are a fundamental and inseparable element of the concept of law. He wrote: "Law is an order which, by means of a specific technique, assigns obligations to each member of the * * * cohort and thus determines his position in the * * * cohort; it prescribes a coercive act which sanctions a member of the * * * cohort who fails to fulfill his obligations, and if we ignore this element, we cannot distinguish the legal order from other social orders. " Contemporary Italian jurist G. Vecchio also argues that coercion and law are two logically and necessarily related concepts, "Where there is no coercion, there is no law." Austin's analytical jurisprudence has some kind of aboriginal relationship with utilitarianism, and a citizen's compliance with the law in order to avoid being sanctioned by the coercive power of the state can also be seen as a manifestation of utilitarianism, since both physical and economic sanctions are a reduction of the citizen's self-interest. However, the difference between the violent deterrence theory of law-abiding and the utilitarian theory of law-abiding is that the former involves only passive law-abiding by citizens, i.e., no reduction of self-interests without violating the law; the latter, while having the meaning of the former, applies to active law-abiding by citizens to increase their self-interests. Analytical jurisprudence is undoubtedly correct in recognizing the role of coercion or sanctions in the implementation of the law, for this is an obvious fact. However, it has been widely and severely criticized, as has the utilitarian theory, for explaining citizens' compliance solely in terms of violent deterrence. First, according to this theory, citizens' law-abiding behavior fails to reflect the justice of the law. As Hobbes puts it, "If a man does all the actions commanded by the law (showing outward obedience), but he does so not for the sake of the law but for the sake of the punishment or honor attached to it, he is still not just." Second, this theory exaggerates the role of sanctions in the enforcement of the law. In fact, citizens do not obey the law merely because they fear its sanctions. According to Ehrlich, "What people do or fail to do in the sense of being a legal obligation is often something entirely different from, and sometimes far more than, what those in authority can compel them to do or not to do. Rules of behavior are often quite different from rules that are obeyed by coercion." The violence deterrence thesis clearly depends on a presupposed empirical premise that punishment can deter people from choosing to violate the law. However, "many scholars have found, upon examination, that there is no simple linear relationship between punishment and the behavior being punished." Empirical research in modern criminology has also shown that the fear of punishment is not enough to completely inhibit an actor's impulse to commit a crime, and that the deterrent effect of punishment is even more limited in the case of actors with antisocial personalities. Thus, the violence deterrence theory has very limited explanatory power for citizens' law-abiding behavior. It completely views citizens' law-abiding behavior as passive, thus annihilating their law-abiding initiative. Therefore, since the 1950s, there has been a trend of weakening the concept of legal coercion in the Western philosophical community. (iv) Legal Justification Theory The legal justification theory tries to answer why citizens obey the law from the perspective of citizens' legal beliefs. According to this theory, citizens obey the law because the law has the elements of legal form and legal content. Laws are enacted by state organs or officials with legitimacy and authority in accordance with legal procedures, and they are consistent with socially accepted values or morals, i.e., the principles of fairness and justice. For such a law, citizens have the obligation to obey it. According to Unger, "The main reason people obey laws is that the members of the collective accept them in their beliefs and are able to embody the values expressed in them in their behavior." The theoretical basis of legal justification is the theory of legitimacy. According to Weber, "any domination attempts to evoke and sustain belief in its 'legitimacy'." The rule of law is no exception; it attempts to use its own legitimacy as the basis for the legitimacy of citizens' obedience to it. Synthesizing the voluminous discourse on the theory of legitimacy by Western scholars, we can categorize it into two paradigms: "One is the ethical or political science interpretive tradition, and the other is the sociological interpretive tradition." The former argues that the legitimacy of the ruling authority lies in the fact that while people agree to this ruling authority by entering into a social contract, it also lies in the fact that the ruling authority contains a number of ethical principles or principles of natural law that are in accordance with natural reason and that orient human life to the highest good. This is analogous to the way social contract theory is argued. The latter, represented by Weber, sees legitimacy as an empirical phenomenon that is not intrinsically linked to truth. A domination, if it is said to be legitimate, must fulfill at least two conditions. "These two conditions are (1) that the normative order must be established positively; and (2) that in the legal * * * consubstantiality one must believe in the legitimacy of the normative order, i.e., one must believe in the correct procedures of the legislative and law-enforcement forms. In this way, the belief in legitimacy retreats into a belief in justification, content to appeal to the due process of making a decision." As can be seen, the two interpretive paradigms have different emphases. Ethical or political science explanations focus on the content of authority, and sociological explanations focus on the form of authority. However, since World War II, the Western philosophical community has been critical of the sociological explanatory paradigm, which focuses only on formal legitimacy, and has attempted to constrain the form of authority by the values it embodies, i.e., its content. "The resulting rise of value jurisprudence has invariably attempted to reestablish the legitimacy of political power on a number of recognized value principles, rather than relying solely on procedural decision-making." In terms of citizens' justification of law-abidingness, it is crucial that citizens identify with the authority of the law, both in terms of its formal legitimacy and its content legitimacy. Legal legitimacy theory attributes citizens' reasons for compliance to the legitimacy (legality) of the law. This view has been proved by the empirical research data, in the 1990s, the American scholar Tom Tyler (Tyler) in the Chicago area on the "why people obey the law" study, the study especially emphasizes the legitimacy of the law on the citizens whether to abide by the law has an independent influence. However, legal legitimacy is only a theory that explains citizens' reasons for obeying the law in general, and it cannot be used to try to explain every citizen's specific law-abiding behavior. This is because laws that are generally recognized by society may not necessarily be recognized by all citizens, and laws that are justified for the general population may not necessarily be justified for some specific people. Especially in modern societies with pluralistic values, the provisions of the law are more likely to conflict with the beliefs of certain citizens or certain groups of people who hold different beliefs. "People may adopt a general attitude of obedience to the law based on moral or other judgments, but the values embodied in the law are not always compatible with the moral sense of every member of society, and thus do not guarantee, nor can they compel, everyone to adopt the same attitude." Such as refusing to serve in the military based on an aversion to war, opposing family planning and even abortion based on a respect for life, etc. It may be possible for a given citizen to choose to obey a law even though he does not share its values, or conversely, to agree with the value of a law but refuse to obey it. The theory of legal justification cannot explain such phenomena. The above four theories are the more representative doctrines put forward by the Western philosophical community on the issue of citizens' justification for law-abiding. Besides, there are many other doctrines in the Western legal philosophy circle, such as the custom theory, the social pressure theory, the fairness and reciprocity theory, the gratitude theory and so on. It should be said that each of these doctrines has a certain degree of explanatory power and contains "particles of truth", but, at the same time, they also have certain limitations. Citizens of law-abiding reasons are diverse, pluralistic, any one of these doctrines are not enough to explain all citizens of all law-abiding behavior. Second, the premise of law-abiding citizens - the spirit of law-abiding, as mentioned earlier, citizens of law-abiding reasons are diverse, involving customary, moral, interests, violence and other factors. For different citizens' law-abiding behavior or the same citizen's different law-abiding behavior, one or more of these factors may play a more important role. However, behind the diverse reasons for law-abiding behavior, there must be some constant factor, some more fundamental force. It constitutes the basis for the effective implementation of the law and the prerequisite for citizens to abide by the law. In modern, democratic society, this force is the spirit of law-abiding citizens. (I) The Meaning of the Spirit of Law-abiding The Japanese jurist Kawashima Takeyoshi made an in-depth study of the spirit of law-abiding citizens. He believes that a well-made law does not necessarily lead to people's obedience to it, and that for modernized laws to be obeyed, citizens must be required to have a corresponding law-abiding spirit. In his book Modernization and Law, he summarizes the law-abiding spirit of citizens in terms of both a sense of subjectivity and a spontaneous motivation to abide by the law based on the legitimation of values. According to Takeyi Kawashima, citizens' consciousness of subjectivity has a fundamental position in citizens' law-abiding spirit. "The most fundamental underlying factor of modern law consciousness is the consciousness of subjectivity. It consists of, first, a person's awareness of his or her own value as a human being, as an existence with independent value, as an independent being who is not subordinate to anyone else; and, second, the fact that this awareness is at the same time 'social' within the context of society. Everyone mutually realizes and respects the subjectivity of others also as such subjects." The former is "the assertion of rights" and the latter is "respect for the rights of others." The correlation between the two lies in the fact that the establishment of one's own rights is mediated by the awareness of recognizing and respecting the rights of others, and the recognition of and respect for the rights of others is mediated by the establishment of one's own inherent rights. The second aspect of the spirit of law-abiding is the spontaneous motivation for law-abiding based on the legitimization of values, which Takeyoshi Kawashima calls "subjective spontaneity". According to him, this subjective spontaneity is a mental construct governed by the motivation of value legitimization. It is expressed in the following way: "Just because something is ordered by a legal norm, it is obeyed by that legal norm." Takeyi Kawashima specifically points out that his emphasis on the subjective spontaneity of the citizen's compliance with the law is only to emphasize the authority and supremacy of the law for the citizen, and in no way to say that the citizen must comply with the law even if it is a bad law. In the case of bad laws, they should be amended through due process. It is simply boring to "recognize 'bad law' on the one hand, and on the other hand, not to make any effort to correct it, but only to ask to abide by it." In short, in Kawashima Takeyoshi's view, the implementation of modern law must be predicated on the spirit of law-abiding citizens. This spirit is the embodiment of the citizen's consciousness of subjectivity, the spontaneous motivation to abide by the law based on the citizen's recognition of the value of the law's legitimization, and the subjective idea of viewing the observance of the law as a moral self-consciousness formed by the consciousness of the law within him or her.