America—A Lawless Nation of Laws

Some nations make the vainglorious claim that they are governed by laws rather than men. This claim is strange, since laws are written by men. The distinction, I opine, is between nations governed by laws written by elected officials rather than by oligarchies or dictators. Yet there is much empirical evidence that laws, no matter who enacts them, are not effective ways of constraining human behavior.

For instance, many believe that God provided Moses with the Decalogue—ten laws meant to constrain human activity. But not even the Israelites who formed a covenant with that God to live by them obeyed them for long. And if human beings can be so easily enticed to disobey laws they believe were promulgated by God Himself, what hope have we that mankind will obey laws promulgated by men, whether elected or not?

History contains numerous examples of nations that were populated by people who were to a great extent lawful and others that were populated by people who were mostly lawless. The only valid conclusion that can be drawn from these historical examples is that laws, by themselves, are insufficient; they may be a necessary condition for the development of mostly lawful societies, but not a sufficient condition. Something else must be going on in the societies that are mostly lawful that is absent from the societies that are mostly unlawful or vice versa.

At the moment, it is difficult to discern what that thing or those things are; yet many often claim that they already have that knowledge. In our nation today, many claim that having removed religion, i.e., God, from our governmental practices has led to the current decline in American moral behavior even though it can be demonstrated that less religious societies do exist whose citizens are much more moral and lawful than we American’s ever were.

So the needed knowledge doesn’t exist, but a sociologist willing to engage in a comparative study of societies should not have a too difficult time identifying it or them. Given sufficient detailed information about mostly lawful and mostly unlawful societies, the mere application of Mill’s methods should yield tangible results.

Yet it a mystery to me why such a study has not been done, given the harmful consequences of lawless behavior on the human race. Is it because sociologists have not been schooled in the logic of Mill’s methods? Is it because they have been led to believe that statistical studies are the only “scientific” way of investigating problems?

There are many ways to investigate things; one only needs a wide logical vocabulary. Different logical methods have been and continue to be developed to investigate different kinds of things. Four such methods that have a long and honorable history are neglected by today’s thinkers—the informal fallacies developed by the Greeks in the Classical era, Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Mill’s methods, and argument by analogy. Induction from empirical data and deduction from known principles are not the only methods available to a thinking person, and by neglecting other methods of thought, thinkers fail to recognize easy solutions to problems that are within our grasps.

  So I would encourage some aspiring sociologist to investigate the problem of lawlessness by applying Mill’s methods to a comparative study of societies. Not only would such a person become famous, s/he would gain the lasting gratitude of humankind.

© 2006 John Kozy, Jr.