Culture, Law and obedience to the Law.
By Daniel Beltré Acosta
The personality of men and women living in a society is constructed by their culture.
Culture determines every human behavior. From childhood, a framework of time and space forges an identity in the individual, and that identity is composed of certain values that, from language to a sense of justice, internalize a multitude of behavioral parameters in citizens.
These behavioral parameters transmitted by culture transform human beings into social beings; thus, there comes a time when their behavior is determined by the culture in which they have been forged. Citizens will then henceforth accept the rules their society has transmitted to them as valid and will behave according to the standards established by the social code that is their culture.
Ethical mandates are often more powerful than those of the law emanating from the State, which is why it is necessary to inspire legal norms with the moral values defended by society and thus avoid negative reactions to the mandates of the legal system.
Each culture is distinct, and consequently, many of the values that give content to a cultural system are absent in some, enhanced in others, and diminished in some. Distinct historical episodes, different ideological influences, attitudes toward life that vary from place to place, explanations of human existence that organize opposing responses from one culture to another—these are all opposing points of view that ultimately endow societies with equally distinct moral systems.
There is always a legal culture in society that has directly or indirectly taught citizens the rules that guarantee community order and peaceful coexistence. However, each society has a different conception of what law should be. Let us say, then, that between moral rules and legal rules, society has become aware of the necessity of such rules and has identified legitimate authorities from whom it accepts mandates and to whom it pays obedience, since it understands that such commitment is the only thing that guarantees social peace.
However, citizens also often discover the limits of their obedience to the law. Legal rules can encounter significant obstacles when they attempt to ignore patterns of social behavior or when they exceed the limits of what society considers possible.
In this sense, they will choose from all the options the one they consider most fair, according to the values internalized by their culture.
DÍEZ-PICAZO states that "The decision of a legal problem has probably always been made—and is still made today—within and in accordance with a set of beliefs, convictions, feelings and prejudices in which the normative material is inscribed. It is therefore the task of the science of law, eminently sociological, to verify which are these coordinates, valid for the whole of society, which serve as a support and, ultimately, give validity to the norms, as well as to determine to what extent they change or have changed."
Society understands that laws are necessary for the preservation of the community, but assimilates them when their precepts remain within practical rationality. If its cultural values are violated, it reacts by rejecting the law and disobeying it or transforming it to adapt it to the framework of rationality defined by its legal culture .
FINNIS understands that a norm will be validated by the community to the extent that it is explained by the practical rationality of society, while a rule will be binding whenever the community considers it a good reason to obey. A norm cannot be limited to imposing a mandate based on the letter and imagination, nor based on schemes foreign to the receiving society; obedience to the law is guaranteed by the norm's correspondence with the cultural mentality of the nation and its political and economic structures.