Doing what's right

On Monday, the IDS published its usual report of Little 500 judicial infractions. The numbers are always stunning: a few dozen arrests, a couple hundred drinking tickets, etc. But I bet if you asked all those minors who got caught with booze what precisely it was they did wrong, they would answer in unison: “getting caught.”\nNo one really believes in the immorality of underage drinking anymore, least of all the bartenders and alcohol vendors who are put in the awkward situation of having to enforce a law that limits their profit. Worse, the number of bars in town makes it a game-theory nightmare. Every bar owner knows that even if he or she does everything possible to keep underage kids out, they’ll simply get accepted somewhere less scrupulous. So it’s no use to keep them out at all. Most bouncers looking over your ID on a slow night make a show of seeming deadly serious, but you know that you could have just as easily given them a coupon for a free sandwich. They’d still study it like they were calculating the square root of candy before eventually letting you in. \nUnderage drinking laws put a terrible strain on our relationship with local authority, but moreover, they ultimately harm our view of what’s wrong or right. When our laws stop converging with what we believe in, we stop seeing them as valid, and suddenly what’s ethical becomes what you can get away with. \nMost people drink underage. And when they see people get arrested or ticketed for doing so, they don’t pass judgment on the guilty, but rather on the agents of this law. The police are only doing their jobs, but they’ve been asked to enforce an archaic directive, and it’s one that only hurts their ability to be effective. No one wants to cooperate with, call or even see the police if they know they could be fined in their present state. So when people commit crimes while drinking underage, people around them who are also drinking become hesitant to call for help. Because of unrealistic laws, real crimes go unnoticed. \nBut this doesn’t just affect our relationship with the police. Students are constantly being caught for plagiarism, cheating and the like. They see rules as a game, and if you break them, you simply have to avoid punishment for things to turn out all right. Cheating on a test might be against the rules because it is in fact immoral, but when college students exist in the presence of so many other laws that don’t make sense, they see all law as baseless. That’s a terrible shame. \nAnd for all the effort societies expend in telling people what’s illegal, they could just as easily tell them what’s immoral and draft laws that reflect our ethics. Instead, we live in a community of unrealistic speed limits, tobacco bans and rules of underage drinking. Essentially, we’ve stopped expecting of people that they do what’s right, but rather that they follow the laws. Maybe that’s why so many people don’t do either.