Dr Elystan Griffith and Prof Martin Wagner (University of Calgary) consider obedience to law after former PM Boris Johnson appeared at Covid Inquiry.
When musing during the parliamentary Covid-19 inquiry about the public health measures to be taken in a future pandemic, Boris Johnson gave voice to what has become an arguably rather common sentiment: rules are necessary because people will commit to good behaviour only if they know that everyone around them will be also forced to behave well.
In a response to his fellow libertarians’ calls for reduced regulation for future pandemics, Johnson said “why you need regulation is because ultimately people want to see everybody being obliged to obey the same set of rules and they want their neighbours to do what they are doing.”
Obedience to the public health measures came for most people willingly, unproblematically— but the reasons for it were different from those we are most accustomed to.
In his famous experiments of the 1960s, which have been replicated many times since, Stanley Milgram studied obedience as respect to authority. Milgram followed perhaps one of the oldest lines of thinking about obedience—according to which all our obedience rests in God’s supreme authority.
Yet people’s compliance during the pandemic did not originate from a particular respect or submissiveness to authority, unless we think of the Nation Health Service (NHS)—sometimes conceived of as Britain’s national religion—as adopting the place of God.
