I began this blog a little more than a year ago with a photograph
I had taken of a sign warning visitors not to
get too close to the cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland.
I then asked some questions about
rules and authority. I said:
Does the fact that so many folks are blithely
disobeying the sign say something about our general attitude towards rules and
authority? We are so surrounded by commands and dictates and warnings and
advice and cautionary words. Coffee cups tell us the startling news that
the beverage we are about to enjoy may actually be hot. If you look at
the signs in some of the city parks in Vancouver the list of prohibitions is so
long that you sometimes wonder whether there is really anything permitted at
all? And so are we just tuning it all out? ...
A year later, I
thought it would be fun to post a photograph of another sign. This picture was taken in at a city
park in Sydney, Australia in late November.
Unlike the sign
at the cliffs of Moher, this sign has not been defaced. I am not going to suggest that this
bespeaks some profound difference between the Irish and Australians. After all, many Australians are
descended from Irish immigrants.
Some of whom were sent to Australia, well, involuntarily! And having spent three weeks there I
can tell you that Australia is a country that loves to warn people about all of
its many dangers. No, I just like
the fact that this sign actually welcomes people to the Sydney Botanical Garden
and encourages people to do the things they typically want to do in a park:
walk on the grass, smell the roses, eat picnics, and relax. There are prohibitions, of course, but they are placed at
the bottom of the sign, where they belong.
That’s where I
think most rules belong. At the
end of our consideration of rights and responsibilities, a sort of last resort,
if you will, rather than a first recourse.
I suppose this
attitude makes me something of a libertarian. But not so much because of my belief in our freedom, as
because of my view about the importance of our responsibilities. Because I think that when we choose to
regulate something by a rule, we change the way we look at it. Instead of responding primarily to the
issue that caused us to think about making a rule, we think instead about the
rule itself.
To take the
best example (and I know I have said this before, but it bears repeating), the
question we usually ask ourselves when driving is not whether we are driving
safely, but whether we are driving at or under the speed limit. Our primary consideration is the rule,
not safety. We have in a very
real, deliberate, but largely unconscious way, delegated that question of
safety to someone else - the person who set the speed limit. And in fact, for most drivers, the
issue is really what speed we can get away with driving without getting a
ticket. So it’s not about safety
at all, it’s just about getting caught breaking a rule.
The whole
reason for speed limits, of course, is safety. But to a considerable extent the effect of legislating speed
limits is to replace our moral responsibility to drive in a manner that does
not create an unacceptable risk of harm to others with a quite different concern
about rule compliance.
That’s what
rules do.
On the island where my family has
had a summer cottage for over half a century, we are part of a community of
families that shares the use of a small beach. The beach is so small that on summer afternoons, especially
if the tide is coming in, there is not enough room for everyone. In particular, there is not enough room
for large dogs and small children at the same time.
Everyone in our little community
agrees. Most everyone also agrees
that the best way to keep the beach safe for little kids is for the dogs to
stay home. There are lots of hours
in the day - early in the morning, or late in the evening - when the beach is
not busy, and dogs are welcome.
But just for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon, it’s safer if
the dogs are kept away.
Even though everyone agrees with
all of this, sometimes dogs are brought to the beach on weekend afternoons.
So the question is: what should
we do about this?
There’s a pretty good chance that
your answer to this question is: make a rule prohibiting dogs on the beach on
weekend afternoons.
We haven’t done this yet. In fact our little community has very
few rules. We have guidelines and
expectations, but not that many actual rules. We know that once we start making rules to regulate our
behaviour, people will start disagreeing with each about what the rule says and
how it ought to be applied. And we
will need to create sanctions and penalties and a process for enforcement, and
a rule enforcement committee, and then we will have to decide how to choose the
members of the rule enforcement committee. And so on. When
what we really want is to keep our beach safe for little children. And all we really need is the fortitude
and the diligence to remind the person who has brought his dog to the beach
that we all agreed it was not safe for dogs to come to the beach on busy
afternoons.
Clearly what works for a
small community where everyone knows each other doesn’t necessarily work in a
large city where we are mostly strangers to each other. I’m not for a moment saying we don’t
need rules. But sometimes I think
we need to remind ourselves that law-making is not a panacea, and often is a poor,
second-order substitute for individual or collective moral responsibility. We could do worse than to spend less
time making and enforcing rules, and more time just working out how actually to
get along with each other. Rules if necessary, yes, but not
necessarily rules.
