Why Do We Need Rules? 為什麼需要規則？

🔊Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, two years after the English had beheaded their king, and his account is the darkest. He starts from three facts. People are roughly equal, in that the weakest can kill the strongest by stealth or in company. They want many of the same scarce things. And none can be sure of the others’ intentions. It follows that each has reason to strike first, even if he wishes only to be safe, and each knows that the others have the same reason. “During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.” War in his sense need not be fighting. It is the known readiness to fight, as bad weather is a tendency to rain. In that condition there is no farming, trade, building, or learning, since no one can count on keeping what he makes.

霍布斯在 1651 年出版了《利維坦》，那是英國人把自己的國王斬首之後兩年；而他的說明是最陰暗的。他從三個事實出發。人大致上是平等的，因為最弱的人靠著偷襲或結夥，也殺得了最強的人。他們想要許多同樣稀少的東西。而誰也無法確定別人的意圖。由此推出：每個人都有理由先下手，即使他只是想求安全；而每個人也都知道，別人有同樣的理由。「在人們沒有一個共同的權力使大家都有所畏懼的時候，他們就處在那種稱為戰爭的狀況裡；而這種戰爭，是每一個人對每一個人的戰爭。」他所說的戰爭，不一定是在打仗。它是「眾所周知的隨時準備打」，就像壞天氣是一種「會下雨的傾向」。在那種狀況下，沒有農耕、貿易、建築或學問，因為誰也無法指望保得住自己做出來的東西。

🔊The way out is an agreement. Each person gives up his right to do whatever he judges necessary, on condition that the others do the same. But an agreement of that kind is worth nothing if anyone can break it when it suits him. “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” So the parties must also set up a power strong enough to punish any of them, a sovereign whom Hobbes calls the Leviathan and “that Mortall God.” His conclusion is that almost any government is better than none, and that to resist the sovereign is to risk the return of the war.

出路是一個約定。每個人都放棄「凡是自己判斷為必要的事都可以去做」的權利，條件是別人也這樣做。然而，如果任何人只要覺得划算就可以背約，那樣的約定就一文不值。「沒有劍的信約，不過是空話，根本沒有力量保障一個人。」所以，立約的各方還必須設立一個強大到足以懲罰他們當中任何一個人的權力：一位主權者；霍布斯稱之為利維坦，稱之為「那位會死的神」。他的結論是：幾乎任何政府都比沒有政府好；而反抗主權者，就是冒著讓那場戰爭回來的風險。

🔊John Locke, writing forty years later, thought Hobbes had described the state of nature at its worst and called it the whole. Even without government, he argued, people are bound by a moral law that reason can discover. The state of nature is “a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence.” No one may destroy another’s life, health, liberty, or possessions, and most people know it. What is missing is a way of settling disputes. Each person must be judge in his own case, and people are partial to themselves and carried too far by anger when they punish. “Want of a common judge with authority, puts all men in a state of nature.” Government is set up to supply the judge. Its purpose is to protect rights that people already had, and Locke draws the consequence that Hobbes refused. A government that attacks the rights it was made to protect has broken the agreement, and the people may replace it.

四十年後寫作的洛克認為，霍布斯描述的是自然狀態最糟的樣子，卻把它說成了全部。他論證：即使沒有政府，人也受到一條理性可以發現的道德法則約束。自然狀態「是一種自由的狀態，卻不是一種放縱的狀態」。誰也不可以毀壞別人的生命、健康、自由或財產；而多數人知道這一點。缺少的，是一種解決爭端的辦法。每個人都得在自己的案子裡當裁判；而人對自己是偏私的，懲罰別人時又會被怒氣帶得太遠。「沒有一位具有權威的共同裁判，就使所有人處於自然狀態。」設立政府，是為了提供那位裁判。它的目的，是保護人們本來就有的權利；而洛克引出了霍布斯所拒絕的那個後果。一個攻擊「它被設立來保護的那些權利」的政府，已經破壞了約定；人民可以把它換掉。

🔊Chinese philosophers reasoned about the origin of order in the same way nearly two thousand years earlier. Xunzi asks where ritual and rules come from, and answers in a sentence that could be Hobbes’s: “People are born with desires. When they desire and do not get, they cannot but seek. When they seek without measure or limit, they cannot but contend. Contention brings disorder, and disorder brings exhaustion. The former kings hated this disorder, and so they established ritual and rightness to make divisions.” His account of what rules achieve is more generous than Hobbes’s. Rules exist, he says, to nourish desires and to see that goods and wants keep pace with each other. He also explains what rules make possible. A human being is weaker than an ox and slower than a horse, and yet oxen and horses work for us. “Why? Because people can form groups and they cannot.” Groups are possible because of divisions, and divisions because of a shared sense of what is right.

中國的哲學家，早了將近兩千年就用同樣的方式推論秩序的起源。荀子問：禮與規則是從哪裡來的？他用一句可以出自霍布斯之口的話回答：「人生而有欲，欲而不得，則不能無求。求而無度量分界，則不能不爭；爭則亂，亂則窮。先王惡其亂也，故制禮義以分之。」他對「規則成就了什麼」的說明，比霍布斯的更寬厚。他說，規則的存在，是為了「養人之欲」，並且使物與欲「兩者相持而長」。他還說明了規則使什麼成為可能。人的力氣不如牛，跑得不如馬，而牛馬卻為我們所用。「何也？曰：人能群，彼不能群也。」人之所以能群，靠的是「分」；而「分」之所以行得通，靠的是共有的「義」。

🔊Mozi locates the trouble somewhere else. In the beginning, before there were rulers, he says, “each person had his own view of what is right. One person, one view. Two people, two views. Ten people, ten views.” Each approved his own and condemned the others’, families broke apart, and the world was in chaos like that of birds and beasts. The cause of disorder, on his account, is that people sincerely disagree about what ought to be done and have no way of settling it. His remedy is a ruler chosen for his worth, whose judgment unifies the standards of all. Locke’s missing judge is here already, and so is the danger that Mozi did not see, that the one who unifies the standards may be wrong.

墨子把毛病放在另一個地方。他說，起初還沒有統治者的時候，「人異義。是以一人則一義，二人則二義，十人則十義」。每個人都肯定自己的、否定別人的；家人離散，天下大亂，「若禽獸然」。照他的說法，禍亂的原因是：人們真心地對「該怎麼做」意見分歧，卻沒有辦法解決它。他的對治，是一位因賢能而被選出的統治者，由他的判斷來統一所有人的標準（尚同）。洛克那位缺席的裁判，在這裡已經出現了；墨子沒有看到的那個危險也已經在了：那位統一標準的人，可能是錯的。

🔊In the twentieth century the argument was given a precise form. Two suspects are questioned separately. If both stay silent, each serves one year. If one informs and the other does not, the informer goes free and the other serves ten. If both inform, each serves five. Whatever the other does, each does better by informing, and so both inform and serve five years when they could have served one. This is the prisoner’s dilemma. Its lesson is that people who each choose sensibly can arrive together at a result that none of them wants. Herdsmen who each add one more animal to a shared pasture destroy it. Nations that each catch a few more fish empty the sea. The ecologist Garrett Hardin called this the tragedy of the commons and wrote, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

到了二十世紀，這個論證得到了一個精確的形式。兩名嫌犯被分開審訊。如果兩人都保持沉默，各關一年。如果一人告密、另一人不告，告密的獲釋，另一個關十年。如果兩人都告密，各關五年。不管對方怎麼做，每個人自己告密都比較划算；於是兩人都告了密，各關五年，而他們本來可以各關一年。這就是「囚徒困境」。它的教訓是：每個人各自作出合理的選擇，卻可能一起走到一個誰也不想要的結果。在共用的牧場上，每一位牧人各自多放一頭牲口，牧場就毀了。每一個國家各自多捕幾條魚，海就空了。生態學家哈丁把這稱為「公地悲劇」，並且寫道：「公地上的自由，給所有人帶來毀滅。」

🔊This is why Hobbes insisted on the sword. A rule that everyone would benefit from will still be broken if each person gains by breaking it while the others comply. Rules need enforcement, and the game below lets you watch that happen.

這就是為什麼霍布斯堅持要有那把劍。一條人人都會從中受益的規則，如果每個人在別人遵守的時候自己違反能得到好處，它仍然會被打破。規則需要執行；下面的遊戲讓你親眼看著這件事發生。

🔊Hobbes concluded that only a single overwhelming power can end the trap, and here the evidence has gone against him. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying communities that share a resource: Swiss villages with common alpine meadows, Japanese mountain forests, Spanish irrigation canals, lobster fisheries in Maine. Many of them have managed without ruin for centuries, and they have done it with rules that the users made themselves, watched over by one another, with small penalties that grow for repeated offenses. She received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. Experiments tell the same story. In laboratory games, cooperation among strangers decays when free riding goes unpunished and recovers as soon as players are allowed to fine one another, which many will do even at a cost to themselves.

霍布斯的結論是：只有單一而壓倒性的權力，才能終結那個陷阱；而在這一點上，證據對他不利。政治學家歐斯壯窮畢生之力，研究共用某項資源的社群：擁有共同高山草場的瑞士村莊、日本的山林、西班牙的灌溉水渠、緬因州的龍蝦漁場。其中許多已經管理了好幾個世紀而沒有毀掉；它們靠的是使用者自己訂的規則，彼此監督，罰則輕微，而屢犯者加重。她在 2009 年獲得了諾貝爾經濟學獎。實驗說的是同一個故事。在實驗室的遊戲裡，當搭便車的人不受懲罰時，陌生人之間的合作就衰退；而一旦允許玩家彼此罰款，合作就恢復了。許多人即使自己要付出代價，也願意去罰。

🔊So the old question has a more exact answer than it had. We need rules because sincere and reasonable people, left to themselves, fall into contests and disagreements that leave all of them worse off. We need the rules to be enforced, because a good rule can be undone by a few who ignore it. And we have some choice about who does the enforcing, which is where the next three lessons begin. A philosopher of the Legalist school, Han Fei, drew the harshest conclusion from the same facts. “The people submit to power, and few can be moved by rightness,” he wrote, and he advised rulers to rely on rewards and punishments alone. The state that followed his advice unified China and lasted fifteen years.

所以，那個老問題有了一個比從前更精確的答案。我們需要規則，是因為真誠而講理的人，放任不管，會落入使所有人都更糟的爭奪與分歧。我們需要規則被「執行」，因為一條好規則可以被少數無視它的人毀掉。而由誰來執行，我們是有某些選擇的；接下來的三課就從這裡開始。法家的哲學家韓非，從同樣的事實引出了最嚴酷的結論。他寫道：「民者固服於勢，寡能懷於義」；他建議統治者只倚靠賞與罰。聽從了他的建議的那個國家統一了中國，維持了十五年。