The rules of the road

I'm a cyclist at the moment and have been paying attention to the "rules" of the road... or not as the case may be and it gives plenty of opportunity to re-investigate the issues of "law" that I examined last year.

Can a traffic light be wrong? This question perfectly separates the two types of people that I identified in a previous blog.

Red means stop. Green means Go. You are wrong if you disobey these: is the simple answer. Because it is simple the law uses this rule otherwise legal cases would be far too complicated.

But we are not the legal system. In reality we all know the traffic light systems have been introduced to manage traffic flow so that ultimately we don't hit each other and hit pedestrians. If the world changed so that collisions were no longer a problem then the traffic light system would lose its utility. The actual LAW is the physics of collisions - that deserves the name Law because it can't be changed. The human impositions to manage this Law are technically Rules because we can design them how we want (summary of big analysis last year).

If we come to an empty junction and the traffic light is Red then actually it is wrong because actually we can go. This is where round-abouts are so ingenious. If you are clear to the right you can go. Trains use the same system: if the track ahead is clear you can pass a Red light but with caution.

Now if an accident happens and you have gone through a Red light then you must accept that you are in the wrong - here the traffic light is useful to resolve the argument about responsibility. But we can easily envisage a situation where the person going through green was wrong and the person going through red was right.

Suppose you advance cautiously through a red and get hit by someone driving carelessly going through the green. They are lucky the law will smile on them. But if you were a child running into the road then while the law will smile on them the Law will not. No matter how "correct" you are, the laws of physics mean that the child will be seriously hurt. Now the "fascist" will maintain that they are "right" and dismiss all other aspects of the situation. But this situation is "out of the box". If they had been driving more carefully then they could have reacted better - it is a fact. The law defines a very rigid box into which all situations must fir. Reality only fits into boxes when it is forced and it takes the mentality of a fascist (as defined earlier in the blog) to do this. To illustrate: this is how some people could think it correct to exterminate Jews: they simply avoided reality and stayed in the rules of the Nazi box.

The simplicity and practicalities of a legal system in essence miss this point. A cautious driver going through a red is actually a better person to have on the road than someone who drives carelessly and without regard for other people - it is simply practicality not some essence that stops the law from measuring this fundamental point.

So in a better world we would be able to rely upon all people to be careful and responsible drivers and to then obviously allow them to ignore automated (fascist) traffic signal when the don't apply. But we can't assume all people will be careful drivers so the law has to create artificial goal posts to attempt to catchout offenders. The logic is that "bad" drivers are more likely to disobey the rules of the road. But it means the rest of us have to obey the rules, not for any utility, but simply to enact the image that we are "good" drivers. Since it is just an image - bad drivers can learn to enact it also - like slowing down just for the cameras!

A worse effect of the law is that it can sanction irresponsible driving! If the light is green then "I" can Go regardless what other people are doing. When it is green, I can be fascist, I have the law behind me, I don't need to think about other people!

Being in the "right" is a great feeling because it means we can act with total disregard for those people in the "wrong". Sometimes those people in the wrong deserve some kind of admonition. But equally likely they are blameless. A recent example is my mother who is the most responsible and cautious driver, yet has been penalised for speeding at a new road layout where the speed limit now changes suddenly from 40 to 30. Someone with a tom-tom that could tell them the speed cameras could then drive with complete disregard for human life and go undetected.

We can't improve the pratctical weaknesses of the legal system, but we can realise the difference between Rules and Laws. Sadly there remain two types of people in the world. Those that use Rules like Laws (I imagine it is psychological because it gives them a sense of concrete power) and those who realise the utility of rules. This is no trivial matter. The holocaust during the second world war was carried out by the former. The human rights abuses by American soldiers during the Iraq war by the former. These types of people are a great danger to humanity - yet they are the ones who gravitate toward positions of authority and I realise now that my argument is not so much with the transparent impartial system of Rules of the country, but with that type of person who thinks the Rules are more important than their utility.

Now that undermines some of the quoted great achievements of UK law - especially the Magna Carta at Runnemead which places the law above all people! As with everything we have a double edged sword here... something to think more about on my bicycle... ok lunch now.