Hacker News Reader

Comment by Defletter | Hacker News Reader

I guess that's an interesting distinction: what's the difference between a law and a rule. I think there are two main differences:

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?

View on HN

I think probably the distinction we're making here is just one of scale and acceptance. I don't see your distinctions as fundamental:

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.

> 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?

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.

"When you break the law, say murder, the ultimate victim is 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.

> This wasn't the case until relatively recently (the 1700s or so, depending on where you live)

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 "state" didn't exist for the laws in the article, being a much later concept and some of the oldest systems of law we have good records for are religious laws like those of the old testament. The victim in that case isn't even in society, but rather a diety outside it. In case that seems like a stretched usage of the word "law", there are instances in the prophetic books where God brings lawsuits against the israelites.

A simple definition used by anthropologists is a system of codes enforced by external parties.

> what's the difference between a law and a rule

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.

> what's the difference between a law and a rule.

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.

> When you break the law, say murder, the ultimate victim is the state.

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.

It depends on the legal system. Since the victim can't be made whole (especially in cases like murder), a lawyer could argue that representing the victim is moot. However, the state —and sometimes the victim's estate— can still represent the victim's interests and seek justice or compensation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com