WHY OUGHT WE TO OBEY THE LAW? PLATO'S STARTLING ANSWER

The Duty to Obey the Law

Under what conditions, if any, do those the law addresses have a moral duty or obligation to obey it simply because it is the law? Political and legal theorists since Plato have developed a wide range of answers to this question, as well as numerous objections to those answers. This essay aims primarily to provide the newcomer with a point of entry into the debate over the existence and grounds...

There ought to be a law?

Why People Obey the Law: Experimental Evidence from the Provision of Public Goods

According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The results show that severe sanctions almost perfectly deter free-riding. However, people also obey law ba...

Finite-state Markov Chains Obey Benford's Law

A sequence ofreal numbers (xn) is Benford if the significands, i.e., the fraction parts in the floating-point representation of (x ), are distributed logarithmically. Similarly, a discrete-time irreducible and aperiodic fi­ n nite-state Markov chain with transition probability matrix P and limiting matrix P' is Benford if every com­ ponent of both sequences of matrices (pn P') and (pn+1 pn) is ...

Solving the Mystery of Dengue in Iran; Are We Close to an Answer?

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne infection which is endemic in Southeast Asia. Although it has not been distributed in Iran, locating near other countries where the Dengue has been revealed is a threat for Iran because different connection between countries may increase the rate of infection.