A question (mostly) for AC'ers, about the rule of law.

[VarlosZ]

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Perhaps I'm confused, but it seemed to me from the OP that laws weren't being randomly disregarded.

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By "whim," I didn't mean that the laws might be disregarded randomly or cavalierly, but rather that they might be disregarded unilaterally, in reference only to one's own beliefs and preferences.

Perhaps it was a poor choice of words.

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I thought that some individuals who were part of the State were sometimes acting in accordance with justice rather than with the letter of the law. This might pose some problems if we're saying that they are instead acting according to what they think is just (and, since they uphold the State, we might assume that they're generally wrong about what constitutes justice ), but if they're actually being just then I don't see how this could be bad, since they aren't acting out of sheer whim but rather in accordance with virtue.

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The reason it's bad is described in the OP: we don't always know what is just, and certainly government officials don't always know. If we give our blessing to disregard the law when we think it is just, then we will find that the law is sometimes disregarded when we think it is unjust. Perhaps more significantly, we would make it too easy for officials to break the law when they are acting whimsically, or corruptly.

What virtues the state does have stem from living under the rule of law rather than the rule of man, so it's worth occasionally sacrificing some immediate utility (or some abstract notion of justice) in order to honor our preference for the former over the latter. That represents a competing (and, I think, compelling) practical and moral interest.