Rules are encapsulated judgments. They are the prescriptive form of judgments and decisions people have made about right and wrong behavior. They replace the need to think about what to do when faced with behavioral decisions others have faced before or, at least, have already thought about.
In this respect, rules are similar to computer code. How they are written matters. The quality of the judgments they contain matters. (It is ironic that I use the concept of computer code to explain rules, given that codes of law and codes of ethics precede the invention of programmable computers by thousands of years.)
It is tempting to think of morality as a matter of rules, in part, because rules–even bad rules–provide clear directions on what to do and what not. They cut through ambiguity and relieve rule followers of the need to think or to take responsibility for their actions. “I did what the rule prescribed. I am blameless.” Some students in college ethics courses seek answers of the rule variety and resist being told that morality cannot be reduced to a set of rules.
But rules are not handed down from on high. Mount Sinai is a metaphor, not reality. No tablets inscribed by a divine hand ever existed.
Rather, rules are the product of human thought and negotiation. When the Great Conversation is working well, we work out the rules we need and want. At other times (throughout much of human history), rules have been and still are dictated by the rich and powerful for their benefit, often to the detriment of everyone else. They then become expressions of privilege (literally, private law). As Anatole France famously wrote, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Which is to say that rules are not inherently moral* and can, as in the case of the Jim Crow South or Nazi Germany, become instruments of evil.
But even when rules are morally defensible or even admirable, they are still created by humans. And because they are the product, not the source, of moral thought, we should resist the temptation to give them a special status apart from the respect they deserve as a statement of social consensus.
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*The phrase “not inherently moral” is a gloss on centuries of debate that has consumed barrels of ink and kept thousands of printers employed. Whether the law is or must be moral will be addressed on this website. By saying that rules are not inherently moral, I indicate the tendency of my views on the subject.