How can you best describe how your society needs people to behave? There are some aspects that seem very obvious, but if you consider any detail, there are bound to be complications. For example, it seems wrong to kill people, but how to you respond to questions about why it’s right to kill people that you’re at war with? How do states justify death penalties for certain crimes? I really does seem that for every answer there’s another question. But nations need laws that control the behaviour of individuals and organisations, otherwise the descent to anarchy and chaos seems inevitable. Again, we need administrators to police the populace and we need punishments to deter malpractice.
We do need to take into account a spectrum of views concerning Law and Order – and fairness. After all, the law exists to protect ideals of fairness, doesn’t it?
Of course, and as I’ve said elsewhere, life isn’t fair. But to what extent can we alter the balance in our favour? One could break laws; there seem to be plenty who are prepared to worsen the lives of others to enrich their own. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to man’s ingenuity when it comes to taking this route. But is there really a ‘victimless crime’? I can’t think of any. Taking advantage of weakness, in whatever form, seems to me to result in some form of harm – insurance fraud increases the premiums everyone has to pay, for example.
In one place where I worked, the expenses policy was very straightforward. ‘Reasonable expenses will be reimbursed on approval by managers’. But note that this includes a subjective term – ‘reasonable’. In one person’s view it was reasonable to pay for a cat-sitter when they were away on business and (probably naturally) the claim was rejected. The end result though, was a long and complex description of that was ‘reasonable’; and this required continuous attention to keep it fair. To my mind, the former description was preferable, maybe with a description of how rejected claims should be arbitrated – a group definition of how ‘reasonable’ was to be interpreted. After all, we all have a view, and mostly our values are shared. But I digress – the point here was to highlight how fairness can be managed. Thinking about it, this seems probably how the idea of trial by jury came about – judgement from a group of one’s peers, who can assess whether a crime was, or was not, committed.
If one commits a crime, then arguably one deserves to suffer some consequences from being caught doing so. Small crimes seem to merit low consequence, and more severe ones higher consequence. But how should we weigh the weight of seriousness? What about repeat offenders? Is the purpose of setting consequences to deter criminals, to rehabilitate them, or is it to exact some form of societal revenge? Probably the answer is imponderable – the question is arguably too simple for the problem. If someone is starving and they steal food, then should they suffer the same fate as someone who steals food in order to sell it? Oh dear, this is proving a thorny problem, so maybe we need someone wise to give us an answer. Well, dear reader, we do this. As with so many other issues, we elect or appoint representatives to roles for just this type of problem. And we hope that society benefits as a whole from the framework that we establish to create laws, to police them, and to assess and punish law-breakers.
A very common counter to the death penalty, or to other draconian forms of punishment centres around the idea of miscarriages of justice. After all, you can’t resurrect someone if they turn out after all to have been innocent, can you? But is this thinking enough? Can’t we have a system based on achieving the greater good for the large majority of people?