Everyone should obey the law. Respect for the law protects peace, public order and health. Alongside his rejection of consent-based political commitments, Hume developed an alternative vision based on social benefit. His reasoning is common sense. Government is necessary for the good of society and should therefore be followed as long as it promotes this goal. When it ceases to be useful, it loses its raison d`être and also its authority. However, since it is so costly to change government, this is only justified when governments become extremely tyrannical (Treatise on Human Nature, III, ii: 9). In key respects, Hume`s conclusions are similar to Locke`s. But Hume believes he can establish them without the fictions of a primordial state of nature, individual consent, and social contracts. 10. R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (3rd edition 1998), at 9Google Scholar. Although Wolff appears to be the modern source of the standard view, his influence came from the work of Joseph Raz, who explicitly accepts Wolff`s view of obeying the law as “essentially sound.” See Raz, The Authority of Law (1979), p.
11, and his introduction to the collection of essays in Authority (Raz, Joseph ed., 1990), pp. 1-19Google Scholar. See also Regan, Donald, Reasons, Authority, and the Meaning of `Obey`: Further Thoughts on Raz and Obedience to Law, 3 Can. J. L. & Juris. 3 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It was the federal RFRA, not the exercise clause, that granted employers the right to deny contraception insurance to their workers in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Although contraceptive use is a constitutional right, and although the government has attempted to adopt universal health care coverage in the Affordable Care Act, meaning health care that would cover everyone, the religious exemption of the RFRA has given many employers the right to flout the Health Care Act and set their own standard for non-contraception. President Donald Trump extended the exemption to allow even more employers to deny insurance coverage to their employees. Employers are no longer required to report their rejections to the government or insurance company.
Trump also threatened to shut down all state health assistance for California because there is a law that requires insurance companies to cover constitutionally protected abortions. The example of traffic lights described at the beginning of this article is a favorite of legal philosophers. Traffic lights help us coordinate our behaviour on the roads in such a way as to cause as few accidents as possible. The problem of coordinating our driving does not exist at 3 a.m. because there is no one to collide with. There are also no police officers to catch and punish us, or anyone who sees the violation of the law and decides that he also wants to stop obeying the law. In short, running a red light at 3 a.m. won`t hurt anyone and certainly won`t start a revolution. This shows how difficult it is to find a general moral obligation to obey the law, because so many people would not consider this behavior immoral when we know that the law exists to protect everyone, but no one is there to be hurt. We think beyond the law about why it exists and decide that at 3 a.m.
we can make a better decision about whether ignoring traffic lights puts someone at risk. However, if the fact that a law exists makes no difference, if other moral or practical reasons for acting in one way or another do not exist, can we really say that there is a moral obligation to obey the law, even if it is taken literally? On the other hand, is it dangerous to say, wrongly or unjustly, that we are not morally obligated to abide by the law just because it is the law? This is a matter that everyone must decide for themselves, and whatever we wanted to think, we would say that our true opinion is best shown at 3 a.m. at an empty intersection. (1) John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (Cambridge University Press, 1995) (2) Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2nd edition) (3) Bix, Jurisprudence: Theory and Context (Sweet and Maxwell, 2009, 5th edition) (4) Ibid. The educational analogy is at the origin of Plato (5) Raz, ibid. (6) Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2nd edition) (7) Raz, ibid. (8) This is a summary of the discussion in chapters 12 and 13 of The Authority of Law, ibid. (9) See Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (ibid.) in Chapter 11.
This view is anticipated in both Hobbes and Locke. but its most influential contemporary version is due to Joseph Raz (1977; 1990, 35-84). It argues that the obligations are categorical grounds for action, which are also protected by exclusionary grounds of non-action for some of the competing reasons. Commitments exclude some contrary reasons – usually at least for reasons of expediency and ordinary preference – but they generally do not exclude all of them: a reason for exclusion is not necessarily a conclusive reason. The severity of an obligation therefore does not derive from its weight or practical characteristics, but from the fact that it supports the necessary action by specific normative means and isolates it from the general competition of grounds. Or at least that`s what obligations do when they make the claim, that is, when they are binding. The theory does not assume that all legal obligations are actually morally binding, but it does assume that the legal system formulates them as if they were – a consequence that some have doubted. (Hart, 1982, p.
263-67; Himma 2001, 284-97) And while this narrative is invulnerable to objections to theories based on punishment and practice, it must make amends for the general idea of a “reason for exclusion,” and some philosophers have also expressed doubts about this (Perry 1989, Regan 1987): Is it ever reasonable to completely exclude an otherwise valid reason from examination? However, the narrative has been adopted by legal philosophers with otherwise highly contradictory views on the nature of law. (See, for example, Finnis 1979, 231-59 and Marmor 2001). Theorists have tried to preserve the theory of consent in a variety of ways. Some theorists have attempted to identify generalized actions that constitute tacit consent. One possibility is to vote. If Jones votes in an election, it could be argued that he has agreed to be governed by the winners, thus obeying the law (Plamenatz 1968: 168-71). Other similar acts could be suggested, such as taking the oath of allegiance or taking the appropriate oath when enlisting in the armed forces. But if we look at the conditions necessary for an act of consent to create a moral obligation to obey the law, we can see that these and similar actions are insufficient. 3. From the seventeenth century onwards, legal philosophers established these links because they conceived of law according to the model of sovereign command. See Postema, Gerald J., Law as Command: The Model of Command in Modern Jurisprudence, 11 phil. Issues 470 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
While the dominant model of law has largely been abandoned, the conceptual link between authority and the requirement of obedience remains orthodoxy. The locus classicus of the modern view is Joseph Raz, Authority, Law, and Morality, in Ethics in the Public Domain 212-216 (1994). 337, 340 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Perry, Stephen, Political Authority and Political Obligation, in 2 Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law 1 (2013)Google Scholar. What is the relationship between them? Some argue that obligation comes first: “[T]he obligation is not a sufficient condition for coercion, it is close to a necessary condition. A State may, in certain special circumstances, have good reason to force those who are not obliged to obey.