「经济学人」Fewer Rules, Better People

A philosopher takes a surprising stance

Fewer Rules, Better People. By Barry Lam. W.W. Norton; 176 pages; $24 and £17.99

THIEVES should be punished—but always and maximally? In Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”, Inspector Javert relentlessly pursues Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread to feed his starving family. Valjean, a lawbreaker, is the novel’s hero, and Javert, who pitilessly enforces the law, its antagonist.

In a slim, thoughtful book, Barry Lam, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Riverside, warns that liberalism’s tendency towards legalism—coming up with impartial rules to govern all conceivable outcomes—is creating a society of Javerts. He has a point: well-intentioned rule-making can inadvertently strangle productivity and occlude moral judgment.

As a general principle, people should prefer enforcers as attuned to the law’s spirit as its letter. He approvingly tells the story of a police officer who persuaded a shopkeeper not to press charges against a young man caught stealing food for his starving brother. But some of the same readers who would support this display of compassion no doubt cheered a measure passed in San Francisco last year to curtail police discretion by barring them from stopping drivers with a missing number plate or broken tail-light. The measure’s proponents say it will reduce racial bias (police stop black and Latino drivers, they argue, more often than white ones). However, many police stop cars because they suspect the drivers of more serious crimes; now their hands are tied.

Discretion is as neutral a value as obedience: people like it when they like the outcome. Mr Lam often ignores that distinction, along with the motivation for rule-making. He complains that getting a second shot for his daughter’s vaccine was difficult because no record existed of the first. But a health system that enforces no rules (such as requiring records) would soon find itself sued.

His opposition to legalism, too, runs to extremes. A bureaucrat at a round-table event where Mr Lam was speaking refused to approve a coffee purchase at 9.30am, when it was due to begin, because the preferred vendor started work 30 minutes later. The “by-the-book bureaucrat”, aMr Lam thunders, is “no less to be feared” than the tyrant. In fact, Josef Stalin is far more fearsome than the functionary who requires a short wait for coffee.

It is never quite clear which way the book’s title, “Fewer Rules, Better People”, runs. Will less reliance on rules create better people (unlikely), or should societies have fewer rules enforced by better people (great, though fantastical)? Either way, this book is as enjoyable and irritating as a university philosophy seminar.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “By the book”(Feb 13th 2025)

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