I have, for the past couple of days, held before my mind a constant conundrum that I cannot adequately answer for myself. I pose it here to see if anyone can elucidate the issue more than I can.
If one is the voluntary citizen of a country (or a club or whatever) they agree to follow the rules of that country (or club or whatever). That is, they are responsible for abiding by the laws and in a sense agree to be punished should they “break the law.” But an implicit assumption is this agreement is that it is possible to know and follow all laws. If a body of law is unknowable–if one person is simply not capable of learning every law–is the citizen still responsible if he breaks that law?
The two solutions that I’ve thought of is:
1) Yes, of course he is responsible. Simply failing to learn a law cannot be held as an excuse for failing to follow it anymore than not taking driving classes excuses one from running into other cars. In this tact I believe we see law as not words written on a piece of paper but as a visceralization of “nature rights.” We already know that murder and rape and stealing are bad…they are violations of property rights that (the vast majority of) people inherently acknowledge.
2) No, get with the real world. The amount of laws on the books are entirely too much for anyone, let alone the average citizen, to come to know and comprehend. Admiralty, agricultural, aviation, banking, bankruptcy, civil rights, constitutional, consumer, corporate, criminal, education, elder law, employment, entertainment, environmental, estate, family, general practice, immigration, intellectual property, labor, liability (of all sorts), malpractice (of all sorts), media (of all sorts), military, municipal, personal injury, real estate, securities, taxation, trusts, wills…not mention all the ones I cannot think of and all the subspecialties (FDA, EPA, IEEE, etc..) that many people simply cannot think of. And these are just the laws on the books, these are the vast pieces of legislation that get passed everyday throughout the country: federal, state, county, city, district, neighborhood. There is just simply too many laws for any one person to know, thus, you cannot “fairly” be said to be responsible for every single one.
1′s Response) That’s just tough shit. Just because something’s hard doesn’t mean you get a free pass. If you don’t like it, leave.
2′s Response) Once again, get back in the real world: there’s no place for me to go. Should everything just be “tough shit” simply because a bunch of people have conspired to screw my life over?
I do not know which side I should come down on. Thus is life.
Thoughts?
