I’m supposed to believe these were the first guys to make laws? Put 10 guys in a small room for a few hours and I guarantee some rules will develop. There are thousands of years we’re missing records for!
1. In your example, the group of buddies all created the rules and consented to them. This is not true for laws which instead invent concepts like the social contract to justify itself.
2. When you break the law, say murder, the ultimate victim is the state. The person you murdered is just evidence in the state's case against you. This is why there are Victims Right's movements. This is not really true with such buddie rules: breaking them may hurt your friends' feelings, but there wont really be an equivalent to it harming the social fabric.
3. Laws imply law enforcement, which implies use of force. Are you and your buddies willing to enforce your rules on each other with lethal force?
A simple definition used by anthropologists is a system of codes enforced by external parties.
1. If 9 of the ten friends consent and one doesn't they can still be forced to follow the rule the nine friends decided on.
2. Although it's a smaller scale, there absolutely is a 'social fabric' that can be harmed in a group of ten friends.
3. I don't think laws necessitate the use of lethal force, but yes, groups of people e.g. in sports or school do sometimes use violence to enforce group decisions on their members.
In some early societies, there was a basic assumption that broadly speaking the head of a household should have the right to manage their affairs as they wished. Laws were there to mediate between households (rather than individuals) and the big benefit they give to justify the loss of freedom is the control and management of blood feuds, which otherwise can be devastatingly destructive.
A law is a rule within a system. A rule, however, may exist outside of a system. Thus all laws are rules, but not all rules are laws.
There is no real difference, though. Just silly semantics.
In ancient Greek, I'm not sure there is one. νόμος covers a lot of ground that English divides into laws, rules, and customs. There are, of course, other terms for each category: νόμοι for laws; κανώνες for rules, both in the sense of laws that straighten crooked behavior and straightedges for drawing straight lines; and καθεστῶτα for institutions or customs; but νόμοι generally does duty for all of them, especially in, say, Herodotus, who means all three with the word.
The victim of murder is the victim of the murder; in ancient Athens, anyone who wanted (ὁ βουλόμενος, an important concept in early democracy) could bring a charge against you, but there was no prosecutor for the state. That's why anyone who wanted could bring the charge. The idea that the state is the victim is a very new phenomenon. There also wasn't much in the way of public law enforcement in Athens, at least not in terms of a standing police force, which doesn't really come around until the eighteenth century.
In the example, assuming they were locked in a bare room, maybe they will come up with some situation specific rule like "that corner is for pissing". I think it's plausible they would enforce that physically. Or at least what I heard about prison makes me think that.
But there are also some immemorial rules/laws that they wouldn't need to come up with it because everyone already knows them, like the ban on unjustified violence, theft and rape. I think 10 normal guys would be willing to physically enforce those rules on each other with lethal force.
> 2. When you break the law, say murder, the ultimate victim is the state. The person you murdered is just evidence in the state's case against you. This is why there are Victims Right's movements. This is not really true with such buddie rules: breaking them may hurt your friends' feelings, but there wont really be an equivalent to it harming the social fabric.
I think that's a bit of a modern perspective. There are still countries that allow private criminal prosecution. And for that matter most of civil law does not directly involve the state I imagine.
Umm... aren't they just representing the victim because the victim is dead? If you steal, it is the victim who brings forward the crime (reporting it). When you perform other crimes, again, the victim may be society itself and society needs to be represented -- not the state.
This wasn't the case until relatively recently (the 1700s or so, depending on where you live), and still isn't case in places that use, say, traditional Islamic law (Iran).
Before modernity, people were considered parts of their family/household, and if someone was raped or murdered, the ultimate victim was the family/household, represented by whoever was its head, paterfamilias etc. And the punishment was often a form of blood money (weregild, qisas), to compensate the familial unit for injury or loss of a person.
Current reader will likely find this appaling, but, for example, rape of a young girl was considered harmful against the future value of the bride, thus the father got a bag of money as a compensation.
The past is truly a different country.
While that's true, that comes from the secularisation of law and the emergence of the concept of the nation distinct from the King. Prior to this, to break the law was to insult the King. This dynamic was at the forefront of the trial of King Charles I, who argued that he could not have committed treason since treason was to act against the King - the King was the nation.
That said, I do take your point that different places in the world have/had different approaches to law. I talk more about Anglosphere-law because that's ultimately what's won out, particularly with the system of the sovereign nation states.
The prototype for all social organization is the family, as the family is the origin of all human beings and the context in which human beings are raised. The parents, especially the father, is the prototype for the ruler or lawgiver or king. The family is the primordial society that serves as the basic pattern for everything else. When there is disdorder in the family, there is disorder in society in general.
But contrary to tyrannical legal positivism, which posits that all it takes for a law to be a law is that is is “willed into existence”, the classical legal tradition makes a distinction between lex and ius, and ius itself is divided into the ius gentium and ius naturale. The last, the natural law, is morality, so the remainder of the law is a matter of determination of broad moral principles to concrete circumstances. The “law” in this article is therefore “lex.
Like idk maybe we find neandrathal records being like "grug ate meat first even though the children are supposed to eat first, so we punched him in the shoulder and said 'bro! Not cool' and now hes good"
- Buying goods and services from societies that don't observe human rights.
- Factory farming.
- Entire mechanisms in the stock market.
- Layoffs and cost cutting without cutting leadership.
- Pay gaps within an enterprise where it's possible for there to be an order of magnitude difference in pay (executive pay).
- Multi-hour/multi-day/multi-month/multi-year labor work, in general.
- Arms proliferation that's not just nuclear.
- Housing as an investment vehicle.
- No equity given to labor in most industries.
- Genocide would truly be illegal.
- Invasion would truly be illegal.
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That's the backlog.
But living in a highly legislated society, is not advancing anything for individuals - people will be far less free. Lots of legislation is the wrong direction for those who value quality of life.
One has to wonder whether the 'side effects' of legislation were actually the intended effects, and that the main target the legislation was intended to solve was merely an excuse.
Edited for clarity.
Legislation against polluting, for example, gives you the freedom to swim lakes and rivers and eat their fish without getting poisoned. Or to breathe the air without it destroying your lungs. Regulations can give the freedom to not have financial industries 'fee' you to death. Laws can be to used ensure that you have the freedom to push back against the many other encroachments that powerful companies and corporations will always be grabbing for. In fact its our only defense.
You look at laws as restricting individuals, and while that is sometimes the case, their real power is restricting and holding back the worst behaviors of tech companies, factories, banks, insurance companies, tele-service providers, mega-retail chains, property owners, health service providers and all the other key components that make our society run. If they have free reign to do whatever whenever, they will inevitably consolidate, monopolize, and then use that power to squeeze every last bit of an individual's freedom. Not just because they could set any arbitrary pricing (see drug companies), but also dictate behaviors through TOS. All of this will be for their benefit only, at the expense of your freedom.
We need all of these industries to make everything work, but without laws and regulations, things can pretty dystopian for the freedom of the average individual. The heads of these industries will be doing great though, so there's that.
You don't need legislation to swim or eat fish. In a real way, the legislation sanctions a certain level of poisoning to be acceptable. How much fluoride in water, zinc or metals in food, can we 'fortify' food with iron filings and chalk (calcium).
The problem you seem to miss, is that the legislation is already written in favour of the corporations and government in the first place. It is not about the citizens, it just has to appear that way for people to buy into it.
Corporations already have free reign to act as they like - mobile phones are essentially government id at this point - the governance system is delighted that they have access to your private information. There is no concern with protecting people from the worst corporate actions. Corporations are already monopolies, and this is fine.
The legislation is already corporate and merely pays lip service to citizens/consumers - it's there to to provides cover for corporates, as well as providing other benefits, such as creating huge barriers to entry via licensing, etc.
Society does get more progressive and ethical, but it's only one coat of paint. America had a real fresh coat of paint after the Civil War, Civil Rights, and progressive reform movements of the early 20th century. The things you are mentioning is the in between periods between new coats of paint. We're sort of due for one. And, yes, that coat of paint will start to look yellow and chipped too, where you'll notice all the failed promises.
The UN doesn't make laws, it just brings countries together to talk things through and maybe make treaties together. But in the end its always individual countries making the laws†.
† im skipping over the unsc's power to make binding rulings under international law because i dont think that is the type of law you mean. Groups that are part of the UN like the ICJ and ILC have a role in determining intl law, but they more eludicate it, they dont make it.
- aiui sanctions tend to not be super effective at forcing improvements, so again why?
- as opposed to what?
- sounds silly, details plz?
- this is foolish and would not have the effects that proponents seem to think it would
- this is a demand that some job functions be contracted out, and that companies handling cheap roles be small. Both of which are silly.
- what?
- citizen disarmament hasn't had the best results for the disarmed citizenry
- can't be made illegal, but not limiting housing supply would make it impractical
- it's generally considered bad investment advice to own too much stock in your employer
- it already is
- is already is
Also, for police to function, each person cannot be sovereign over their home, they are under the authority of the state whose police force is allowed to break into their home. Same applies to nations: if there's a global peacekeeping corp, and it's allowed to go wherever with the full support of world governments, no government is sovereign over that corp. This may start out fine, but even then there's a danger of it quickly becoming a case of "who watches the watchers?"
“Who watches the watchmen?”, the ultimate is answer is God. There isn’t much humanity can do if the fear of God is not there, as humans will violate all natural and artificial law. Everything before that point is just our human experience of collective compromise and compassion.
That's basically as illegal as anything possibly could be.
153 countries have signed the genocide convention. This treaty requires countries make domestic laws punishing not just genocide but also inciting it. Even just being the supervisor of someone who commits genocide is a crime if you don't try to stop & punish your subordinate.
Its also considered part of customary intl law, which means that even if a country doesnt sign the agreement, its still binding on them.
In addition to all that it is an international crime, so can be punished by the ICC or other international tribunals.
This isn't just theoretical, people have gone to jail for genocide.
I dont know what more you want here. Its literally the most illegal thing on earth.
That also means, out of all nuclear powers and all permanent members of the UN security council, only France and the UK are in the ICC.
The great thing about the ICC is that if the perpetrator isn't a member they still have juridsiction if the victim country is (talking somewhat informally since the ICC prosecutes people not countries)
If all else fails, the UNSC is allowed to "refer" situations (basically add juridsiction) to the ICC. They can also set up ad-hoc tribunials, like they did for Yugoslavia (which did send Ratko Mladić to jail for genocide). Some countries (e.g. Germany) also practise universal juridsiction for genocide. They have indeed sent people to jail for genocide even though it took place in a foreign country (e.g. Taha al-Jumailly). In fact, the ICC has only ever accused one person (Omar al-bashir) of genocide, and that person hasn't been tried because he is already in jail for other things. All succesful genocide prosecutions have been through other bodies, not the ICC.
My main point though is i think genocide is the most illegal thing in the world. The ICC is part of the reason, but only part. There is of course always challenges enforcing stuff in failed states and war-torn regions, but I would challenge people to come up with something more criminalized than genocide.
> I would challenge people to come up with something more criminalized than genocide.
IDK about "more", but murder and tax evasion seem like they'd be high on the list for a state to continue functioning no matter what is actually written as an explicit law?
In fairness though, 2 of those three are situations where the ICC has juridsiction, which kind of proves the usefulness of ICC even when countries aren't members (The ICC has issued warrants for lesser crimes in both of those situations but stopped short of (publicly) charging anyone with genocide.)