By “principled reasons,” I mean that you think that obeying the law is a positive good in itself, regardless of your feelings about the morality of a given act
By “pragmatic reasons,” I mean that you obey the law simply because you don’t want to go to jail, pay a fine, or otherwise be exposed to the consequences of being caught breaking the law, but you don’t think obedience to the law is a good thing in itself.
Poll in about 28 seconds.
I dunno. I obey the laws I like because I think they’re good laws and clearly everyone should be following them. I obey the laws I don’t like because obeying an onerous law rankles less than paying money or sitting in prison.
Eh, I’m a rule-follower, by nature.
Although, IMHO, there are advantages in some areas to being a rule-not-follower, I don’t see it as a practical philosophy overall.
So, a little of both?
It depends what you mean by “because it’s the law.” I don’t, say, kill people, because I believe murder is wrong. I would still think murder wrong even if it was legalized. I don’t think an act is immoral simply because there’s a law against it - the law is a fluid, ever-changing thing. If people thought the law determined ethics, things like the Civil Rights movement would never have happened because hey, if the law allows for segregation, it can’t be* that* horrible.
So I’m going for a mix - I obey some laws for principled reasons, while others I might not think are right but it’s no huge injustice and not that big a deal to obey.
I voted for principle. I wouldn’t want to do harm to anyone by robbing from them, attacking them, killing etc. Same thing with an employer. I wouldn’t steal from them either and betray the trust they had in me.
No doubt, the legal ramifications are important too. I have no desire to get arrested. But, I’d follow the law even if I lived in a remote area where there wasn’t any police.
Mixture. We all break some laws some of the time, like speeding, rolling through stop signs in remote locations, and a bunch of other victimless crimes.
In general, neither. I do what I believe is right, regardless of whether it is legal or not. Overwhelmingly, what I think is right is legal or at least not illegal. In cases where it isn’t a matter of morals or ethics, I result to pragmatism, but that’s surprisingly rare.
By this, I mean, I don’t not kill and steal because it’s illegal, I don’t do it because I believe it is fundamentally wrong. Similarly, I don’t do drugs, but not because I’m afraid of the legal consequences, but I have no interest in doing them. Quite frankly, I find the idea that people are only stopped from doing hugely immoral acts such as murder or robbery because of fear of punishment to be a scary sign that we’re not actually as civilized as I hope we are.
Even in seemingly trivial situations, there’s usually at least some moral or ethical drive to my decisions. For instance, when choosing my speed when driving, it’s primarily a concern of safety under typical conditions, and sometimes that means going over the speed limit. For instance, I would argue that if the speed limit is 50, but all the traffic around me is going 60, that following the speed limit would be more dangerous because of the disruption in traffic flow, maybe impatient drivers will make riskier moves to keep the flow going, etc. As such, I will speed in that situation.
This is my answer as well. And most laws are not a problem to obey because they conform to what I would want to do anyway.
Mostly, I obey laws in order to contribute to civil order. Society works better if everybody is behaving pretty much at the same level. Traffic laws for example. I drive on the right side of the road for obvious reasons, which have nothing to with either conviction that keepping right is morally superior, or fear of being prosecuted.
Having a Catholic conscious makes it really hard to decide. :::: Grump ::::
While it is partly a mixture, I answered that I obey on principle, because that’s about 80% of my motivation. I believe that a certain set of standards or morals can supersede the law, so the law isn’t the end-all, be-all of my activities. However, if two outcomes are more or less equal in morality, the presence of a law is a tie-breaker and if there’s a way to do a moral thing in a legal way, that’s how I do it. Even if it’s a little inconvenient or more expense, being right is its own reward.
As examples:When I’m looking at a law like 55 mph speed limits, I say “Maybe I like this limit and maybe I don’t, but we’ll have complete chaos if we all do whatever we want. So I’ll go 55.” But if I’m rushing to the hospital while someone bleeds all over my back seat, saving their life has trumped social order for a little while.
One of the great things about the SDMB is that I can nearly always find someone who has already posted “my” viewpoint.
So: dittoes to dracoi. 80% principle, 20% pragmatism.
Or maybe higher.
Driving at night, on a lonely country road, where I can see ten miles in all directions – I will still come to a full stop at a stop sign. Zero pragmatism there, 100% principle.
I’m a pragmatism guy myself, but I’ll stop there too from habit. I’d have to consciously override my long-acclimated always-stop-at-stop-signs-because-it’s-safer-for-me (and now for the wife & kids), and I don’t want to weaken the conditioning. So that’s pragmatic (but really selfish) on my part
But if t’s a stop LIGHT, and nobody else is around, I probably won’t wait for the green.
I think I may have hit the wrong button. I was going to say mixture but I think I clicked pragmatism. In reality it’s at least 95% principle and no more than 5% pragmatic.
I’m inherently lazy, so it’s a mixture. I obey the laws because I agree with them on principle, but also because it’s just freakin’ easier. Who needs to deal with all the court stuff? I’ve done enough of that with the husband!
It’s a mix, kind of.
I guess technically I obey a bunch of laws because I believe in the principle, but it’s really more that my actions are guided by the principle. It’s just a happy coincidence that laws are being obeyed. I pay for things because I can afford them and think stealing is shitty. Doesn’t really have anything to do with what laws are on the books.
A bunch of laws get obeyed for pragmatic reasons. Sometimes, not often, a dude could really use a punch in the mouth. I don’t want to deal with the fallout from that, so no mouth-punches are given.
Other laws, like some speed limits, I don’t care about because they’re stupid and I’ll just pay the ticket.
As I understand the question, it isn’t a mixture for me. At no point do I ever obey the law because I think following the law is inherently good. That said, I don’t really follow the law for purely pragmatic reasons, either. I follow the law when it agrees with me on what is morally right. I decide whether to follow laws I disagree with using pragmatic reasoning.
The first one, to me, would mean that “just following orders” was a valid excuse, and there’s not a single bit of that in my philosophy. So I can’t vote for a mixture, even if not everything I do is pragmatic.
I mean, I don’t kill people because killing is wrong and causes harm. That’s not pragmatic. But at least some of what I do is pragmatic.
There’s an important practical reason you left out, and it happens to be a big part of why we have written laws in the first place: by putting the rules in writing, and by having all the parties involved all agree to follow those rules (and all follow them), we avoid a lot of discussion, argument, work and the occasional fistfight.
Many of my home leases were written along the lines of “person A, owner of home 1, rents it to person B for the amount of N payable monthly to account 123456780134567890, following current Rental Law”. That’s a lot shorter to write than the other ones which go into. Every. Single. Freaking. Detail. Of who is responsible for what, who can do what, etc etc. The two parties go over the law together checking if there is any details they’d like to change in the contract (my current contract states “verbal communication” where it’s normally in writing, because the owner aka my grandma prefers it that way), but again, having a document you can read beforehand makes the negotiations shorter by allowing people to focus on those parts they’d like to clarify or change.
I suppose, when I think about it, that I do think, on balance (and all else being equal, which it rarely is), that it is a good thing in itself to obey, but this is not something I feel very strongly, even setting aside all those qualifications, so I do not think it plays a significant role in motivating me.
Surely that is a reason (amongst others) why it is good for a society to have (written) laws, it not a reason why individuals should obey them.