TENDENCIA DODRŽIAVAŤ PRÁVNE NORMY AKO VRODENÁ VLASTNOSŤ ČLOVEKA

• Authors: Daniel Šmihula

Title variants

EN

Tendency toward observance of legal norms as an innate quality of a man

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

A man has an innate tendency toward observance of legal norms, because he or she has an innate tendency in his or her behaviour to observe norms in general. It is caused by the fact that a man is a collective being and can only survive in a group of other men. In order to be functional, such group needs to follow certain rules – norms. Life in a community had been expanded because it brings significant advantages to an individual in terms of his survival, quality of life and his own reproduction. As this collective life became spread among ancestors of men long before the origin of a man − at the time when the cultural evolution had not a large importance and, unlike the present, was shadowed by the biological evolution − and long before the ancestors of men became high-intelligent beings, the formation of proto-human communities was not a result of a rational choice; it must have to be a result of evolutional selection. The ones in which the associative instinct developed had an evolutionary advantage over those who lived isolated. For such community not to immediately disintegrate, this associative instinct could not exist in isolation. Moreover, it could successfully work and provide a selective advantage from the very beginning only in association with the tendency toward observance of certain norms. As the collective life and the need to observe certain rules arose among ancestors of men literally at the level of simple primates, this tendency to observe norms must have the form of innate instinct created by biological evolution, rather than the form of a learnt behaviour transmitted by cultural transfer as part of cultural superstructure.

Keywords

EN

LAW; NORMATIVE SYSTEMS; GENETIC EVOLUTION; CULTURAL EVOLUTION; JUSTICE; MAN

• Publisher: Institute of State and Law of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Právny obzor. Teoretický časopis pre otázky štátu a práva (Juridical Review. Theoretical journal for the questions of state and law)
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 96
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 386 – 403

Contributors

author

Daniel Šmihula

• Stredoeurópska vysoká škola v Skalici, Skalica, Slovak Republic