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James Madison once said that if people were angels we would have no use for law uh my work in legal philosophy and moral
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philosophy shows that James Madison wasn't right about this uh of course we need law in government to address a
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variety of human moral failings uh but even morally very good people would need uh law and government to get along well
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together my program has two sides one side of my research program is concerned with specific legal institutions uh that
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facilitate or hinder citizens having good moral relationships with each other uh this includes some work on democratic
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theory as well as some work on Healthcare Justice uh the other side of my program which I'd like to say a
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little bit more about concerns the relationship between law and law enforcement um if you believe as Madison
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did that the only point to law is addressing human misbehavior then you'll probably think that law has no point
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unless there are sanctions attached to legal prohibitions on this view there's
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no point to telling people to do something uh or the government telling people to do something unless the order
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is backed up with the threat to law Breakers to put them in prison to find them to compel payment of Damages or
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something of that nature I argue that law can serve morally important purposes even when it's unenforced or under
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enforced law can be morally binding on us quite apart from the effect that any sanctions have here's an example
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consider an income tax law that's uh either entirely unenforced or under enforced of course under enforcement is
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the situation they're that we're in because there are some forms of income
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that aren't subject to third party withholding or reporting uh and the IRS estimates that in 2006 I believe it's
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54% of uh people who owe uh taxon amounts that are not subject to third party reporting or withholding uh do uh
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misrepresent the amount that they're owing that's a lot of people cheating on
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their taxes but it's also a lot of people who are paying their taxes honestly even though there isn't a
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reliable enforcement mechanism to uh sanction them if they don't um so I focus on the ethical question here if
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you're in this situation you have under uh income that you could conceal from
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the IRS or another tax Authority and if you know that roughly half of your fellow citizens are shirking the tax and
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roughly half are paying it honestly what's your moral obligation well uh tax laws serve a
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morally important purpose they attempt to organize um uh support for morally important public goods such as public
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safety and to do it in a fair way of course if some people aren't paying their assigned share that's unfair but
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you would be compounding the unfairness or the Injustice if you chose to join their number um it would be unjust free
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writing not to pay your fair share the right thing to do is to report your income honestly and pay the tax um so
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this is an illustration of a general principle often there's a moral obligation to obey laws that are
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unenforced or under enforced and this is important partly because there's sometimes good reasons not to enforce a
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law for example there might be resource limitations on the part of law enforcement or there may be on uh
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privacy considerations it might be impossible to enforce a law effectively without an undue
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intrusion two key points first um for Citizens and residents there can be a moral obligation to follow laws that are
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unenforced or under enforced just because you could get away with breaking the law doesn't mean you're entitled to
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morally um this is going to apply when there's no enforcement on the books at
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all when there's uh there are sanctions on on the books but they're rarely
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applied it'll also apply when there are sanctions on the books that are applied
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but there're too slight to affect Behavior by themselves the other major takeaways for
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legislators sometimes legislators uh have reason to believe that a law that's
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being proposed couldn't be enforced both efficiently and fairly um that alone
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shouldn't take a proposal off the table sometimes the right thing for a legislature to do is to enact a new law
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uh demands that citizens take that law seriously but not back that demand up with a threat of
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sanctions this argument is going to be relevant to business people who are facing difficult questions about whether
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to follow an under enforced law when following that law might be might not be narrowly in the firm's interest um
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here's a not so hypothetical example suppose that there is a labor law requiring overtime pay for certain
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categories of workers and let's suppose that this law is under enforced because
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uh the only liability is uh back pay plus interest an employer that is narrowly self-interested might choose simply not
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to pay the overtime because the the the the sanctions on the books aren't enough
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to um effectively deter uh non-payment there may nonetheless be a moral obligation to pay overtime pay uh
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given the importance of this law in a fair scheme of economic cooperation my arguments are going to
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have particular application in the international context uh sometimes an multinational business is doing business
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in a lower middle-income country where law enforcement has resource limitations and prevents them from enforcing all of
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the socially important laws effectively I argue that the moral obligation to follow socially important laws isn't
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limited to the laws of One's Own country one can also have a moral obligation to
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follow socially important laws when one's doing business as a visitor on this side of my research
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program I have uh three directions that I'd like to explore first I'd look like
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to look more closely at the effects if any of comp ition on what obligations businesses have to obey un enforced or
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under enforced laws um are there situations in which a very tightly competitive market makes it genuinely
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infeasible to obey and under enforce law and if so is the moral could the moral obligation to support uh morally
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important legal institutions be fulfilled by participating in some kind of institution building instead that's
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one future direction another is is to look at what uh forms of enforcement are appropriate in a business context uh in
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particular I I plan to look at General moral principles that apply to the use of force and see what they have to say
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about when imprisonment is an appropriate penalty for white collar crimes or for non-violent property
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crimes more General um last I'd like to look more closely at the international context and
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in particular at the question what should a business due a multinational business due if it has reason to believe
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that some of its business partners uh in a resource poor settings uh are breaking
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the law uh perhaps because the law isn't effectively enforced perhaps because law
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enforcement has resource limitations here's a relevant example in 2013 there
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was a terrible building collapse in Bangladesh um an eight-story building collapsed killing over a thousand people
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and injuring over 2500 more uh and the building collaps because it wasn't up to
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code if they'd followed the local building codes which were under enforced the people wouldn't have died um part of
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that building was being used as a garment Factory that manufactured garments for export so I'd like to look
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at the question what obligations does a multi-national uh fast fashion Corporation have when it has reason to
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believe that its business partners in low and middle- income countries may not be following some important laws
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including safety codes [Music]