Vice Dean Keith Bybee appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC Radio) program Future Tense, speaking about his book “How Civility Works.” The program examines how society functions in an increasingly uncivil world.
Bybee says “When we think about law as something that is authoritatively determined according to a specified process, so we know something is a law for people in the community to obey not because I just said it or you just said it but because duly elected officials have followed the process for passing that law and has been promulgated and enforced according to preestablished rules, we have institutions in place called courts of law that tell us what to do when there is a dispute over what a law means.
We lack all that, typically, in the case of civility. That lack of governing and regulating institutions in the case of good manners has led people on occasion to make civility more like law and determine codes of conduct that can be enforced by authoritative institutions.”
Vice Dean’s segment starts at 2:34.