Chapter 10: Traffic Rules and Moral Rules

We may illustrate and reinforce the comparison in the last chapter between ethics and law by taking what may seem at first glance a trivial example -- the necessity of framing, enforcing, and adhering to traffic rules.

A closer look will show, I think, that the illustration is not trivial. In present-day America, and even in Europe, it represents the citizen's most frequent contact with the law. It calls for the strictest daily, hourly, and even moment-to-moment observance of prescribed rules, impartially enforced on all.

It is instructive to notice that Hume, insisting even in the middle of the eighteenth century on "the necessity of rules wherever men have any intercourse with each other," went on to point out: "They cannot even pass each other on the road without rules. Wagoners, coachmen, and postilions have principles by which they give the way; and these are chiefly founded on mutual ease and convenience." (1)

Now the first thing to be observed about traffic rules is that they illustrate with special force John Locke's principle that "The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. (2) They do not exist in order to reduce or to slow up traffic, but to accelerate and maximize it to the greatest extent consistent with mutual safety. Red lights are not put up so that people will be compelled to stop in front of them. The lights and rules do not exist for their own sakes. They exist to provide the freest and smoothest flow of traffic, and to reduce conflicts, accidents, and disputes to a minimum.

True, the traffic rules rest in part on decisions that are arbitrary (though these "arbitrary" decisions usually grow out of immemorial custom). It may be originally a matter of indifference whether we decide that cars should pass each other on the right, as in the United States and most other countries, or on the left, as in England. But once the rule is fixed, once it is certain and known, it is of the utmost importance that everyone conform to it. In traffic-rule enforcement, as in much wider areas of law and morals, we cannot allow the right of private judgment. We cannot allow every individual to decide for himself, for example, whether it is better to drive on the right or on the left side of the road. Here is an example of a rule that must be obeyed simply because it has already been established, simply because it is the accepted rule.

And this principle has the widest bearings. We do and should obey rules, in law, manners and morals, simply because they are the established rules. This is their utility. We cooperate better in helping to achieve each other's ends by acting on rules on which others can count. We cooperate by being able to rely on each other, by being able to anticipate with confidence what the other fellow is going to do. And we can have this essential mutual confidence and reliance only if both of us act in accordance with the established rule and each knows that the other is going to act in accordance with the established rule. When two drivers are coming straight towards each other, each driving at a mile a minute near the middle of a narrow country road, each must know that the other, soon enough before the moment of passage, is going to bear toward and pass on the right (or in England on the left) as the established rule prescribes.

In short, in ethics as in law, the traditional and accepted rule is to be followed unless there are clear and strong reasons against it. The burden of proof is never on the established rule, but on breaking or changing the rule. And even if the rule is defective it may be unwise for the individual to ignore it or defy it unless he can hope to get it generally changed.

Each moral rule must be judged, of course, in accordance with its utility. But some moral rules have this utility simply because they are already accepted. In any case, this established acceptance adds to the utility of rules that have utility on other grounds.

It is the task of the moral philosopher, and even of the rule-utilitist, not so much to frame the appropriate moral rule governing a particular situation as to find the appropriate moral rule. In this he is similar to a judge finding and interpreting the relevant law. The fallacy of too many moral philosophers, ancient and modern, has been the assumption that we can begin ab initio, tear up all the existing ethical rules by the roots, or ignore them and start fresh. This would be obviously silly and impossible when dealing, for example, with language. It is no less silly, and far more dangerous, to try to do the same with established moral codes which, like languages, are the product of immemorial social evolution. The improvement or perfection of moral codes, like the improvement or perfection of languages, is to be achieved by piecemeal reforms.

It has been observed again and again how the morality of savage tribes decays and disintegrates when they are confronted by the utterly alien moral code of their "civilized" conquerors. They lose respect for their old moral code before they acquire respect for the new one. They acquire only the vices of civilization. The moral philosophers who have preached root-and-branch substitution, in accordance with some "new" ill-digested and oversimplified principle, have had the effect of undermining existing morality, of creating skepticism and indifference, and of making the rules by which the individual acts "a matter of personal taste."

The traffic-rule illustration throws light also on the philosophy of utilitarianism. Naive hedonism or crude utilitarianism would tell you to do whatever gave you most pleasure at the moment. If you could get to your destination fastest in a particular case by passing red lights without accident and without getting caught, that is what you should do. But a truly enlightened utilitism would insist that it is only by everyone's adhering strictly to general traffic rules that the smoothest and fullest traffic flow, the fewest disputes and accidents, and the maximum satisfaction of drivers, can be achieved in the long run.

We have a still further lesson to learn from the analogy of traffic rules. In general, as with moral rules, we must adhere inflexibly to them. True, expediency and even long-run utility require that there must sometimes be exceptions. But even the exceptions must be governed by rules. For example, fire engines, police cars, and ambulances are allowed to go through traffic lights. But only under certain specified conditions. The fire-engine must be going to a fire, not coming from it. The police car must be in hot pursuit of criminals or responding to an emergency call for help. The ambulance must also be responding to an emergency call. And even the exceptions we allow, it must be recognized, are not without their dangers -- to pedestrians, to cross-street traffic, to the fire-engine, police-car, or ambulance occupants themselves.

None of these exceptions, moreover, means that anybody is free to pass a red light because he is a public official, or a Very Important Person, or considers stopping inconvenient. In the same way, and for the same reason, no one is free to flout the moral law because he considers himself a superman. If a driver were asked, "Why did you pass that red light?" and he replied, "Because I am a genius," the humor and effrontery would not be more than that of the Nietzsches and Oscar Wildes and whole droves of self-styled "Non-Conformists" with their claims to be beyond morality. If rules are not universally and inflexibly obeyed, they lose their utility. To quote Locke once more, "Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law." (3)

Still one more lesson is to be learned from the analogy of traffic rules -- or perhaps it is merely the restatement of previous lessons in another form. One of the purposes of traffic rules, like one of the purposes of all law and all morals, is to learn how to keep out of each other's way. In traffic each of us may have a different destination, as in life each may have a different goal. That is one reason why we must all adhere to a set of general rules which not only avert head-on collisions, but enable each other to get to our destinations sooner. Traffic rules, like legal and moral rules in general, are not adopted for their own sakes. They are not adopted primarily to restrain but to liberate.

They are adopted to minimize frustration and suppression in the long run, and to maximize the satisfactions of all and therefore of each.

The traffic rules are, in sum, a legal system and a moral system in microcosm. Their specific purpose is to maximize traffic and to maximize safety, to enable each to reach his destination with the least interference from others. Whenever paths cross or conflict, somebody must yield the right of way to somebody else. I must sometimes give way to you, and you must sometimes give way to me. These times must be unambiguously and unmistakably determined by some general rule or set of general rules. (In traffic rules, traffic from the side streets must give precedence to traffic on the main avenues, or the car on the left must yield to the car on the right.) But who has the right of way is determined not by who you are, or who the other fellow is, but by the objective situation, or by a situation that can be objectively defined.

And so the traffic laws embody and illustrate one of the broadest principles of law and morals. As one writer on law puts it: "The problem consists in allowing such an exercise of each personal will as is compatible with the exercise of other wills.... [A law] is a limitation of one's freedom of action for the sake of avoiding collision with others .... In social life, as we know, men have not only to avoid collisions, but to arrange co-operation in all sorts of ways, and the one common feature of all these forms of co-operation is the limitation of individual wills in order to achieve a common purpose." (4)

And as Dean Pound, summarizing the view of Kant, writes: "The problem of the law is to keep conscious free-willing beings from interference with each other. It is so to order them that each shall exercise his freedom in a way consistent with the freedom of all others, since all others are to be regarded equally as ends in themselves." (5)

Notes

1. David Hume, Inquiry. Concerning the Principles of Morals (1752), Sec. IV (Library of Liberal Arts), p. 40.

2. Second Treatise of Civil Government, Sec. 57.

3. Loc. cit.

4. Paul Vinogradoff, Common-Sense in Law (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), pp. 46-47.

5. Roscoe Pound, Law and Morals, p. 97.

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