> The social contract holds because an individual makes a choice to choose peace.
No, that's not all. The crucial missing ingredient here is the individual being able to assume others will make a peaceful choice too. The law offers incentives and disincentives that very strongly promote making peaceful choices - and it's because of that everyone gets to hold the belief that almost everyone else will be mostly peaceful.
(By "everyone" I of course mean "strangers" - laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else. It's the scaling up that made formal governance necessary.)
> That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence.
Yes. The "consequence" part comes from the law being backed by a system of enforcement that wields overwhelming force.
> The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard.
It can't stop anyone who's bent on it, but it is an effective deterrent, and this is why, in fact, it does significantly reduce occurrence of such events in the population.
> Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.
Individual responsibility is a measure of how good you are at following incentive structures in your environment for longer-term benefit. It neither creates nor maintains those incentive structures.
> laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else.
Crimes like rape and sexual assault still happen in cases where everyone knows one another (90% of cases). Even when everyone involved is family! The law and government are still needed to give strength and redress to these victims. What recourse would they otherwise have?
People are mostly peaceful, but emphasis on the mostly. The mostly doesn’t go away when then community size decreases - people will still mostly be peaceful, but others sometimes won’t. And when they won’t, that’s what law and government are for.
No, that's not all. The crucial missing ingredient here is the individual being able to assume others will make a peaceful choice too. The law offers incentives and disincentives that very strongly promote making peaceful choices - and it's because of that everyone gets to hold the belief that almost everyone else will be mostly peaceful.
(By "everyone" I of course mean "strangers" - laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else. It's the scaling up that made formal governance necessary.)
> That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence.
Yes. The "consequence" part comes from the law being backed by a system of enforcement that wields overwhelming force.
> The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard.
It can't stop anyone who's bent on it, but it is an effective deterrent, and this is why, in fact, it does significantly reduce occurrence of such events in the population.
> Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.
Individual responsibility is a measure of how good you are at following incentive structures in your environment for longer-term benefit. It neither creates nor maintains those incentive structures.