THE INBORN HUMAN TENDENCY TO OBSERVE LEGAL RULES
DANIEL ŠMIHULA
doc. JUDr. MUDr., PhD. Dr.iur., University of Central Europe in Skalica
Man has an inborn tendency to respect legal norms, because he has an inborn tendency to respect rules as such. This results from the fact that he is a collective being and only in a group of other individuals can he survive and reproduce himself. Any collective requires rules to enable it to exist. Collective life has prevailed because it secures significant advantages to individuals and their reproduction. Since we know that in the case of our remote ancestors collective life established itself a long time before they became humans, when cultural evolution was still in the shadow of biological evolution and before those ancestors became intelligent, it is obvious that the formation of proto-human societies was not the product of a rational decision. These proto-human groups were results of a collective evolutionary selection. Those with a collective instinct had an evolutionary advantage over those which lived alone. To prevent the disintegration of such a group, a collective instinct must have been linked to a tendency (instinct) to observe rules. As collective life and the associated necessity to observe some rules emerged among man's ancestors (at the level of primitive primates), this tendency to respect norms could not have had the form of a learned behavior obtained by a cultural transfer as a part of a cultural superstructure, but rather must have been an inborn instinct that had arisen by biological evolution.
