When the exercise of one right becomes the limit of another — reflections on morality, empathy and the mechanisms we invented to supply what ethics alone could not guarantee.

April 2026 · Contemplative reading

There is something deeply uncomfortable in the realisation that the mechanisms we created to protect human coexistence — rights, laws, norms — exist only because we failed at something more primary and more fundamental: the capacity to put ourselves in someone else’s place. It is a disquiet that resists easy answers, and perhaps should not be resolved at all. Perhaps its role is precisely to remain a question, a continuous exercise in honesty about who we are and the society we have built.

Consider the most banal piece of everyday life. A bike lane is built, carefully traced, separating the space of those who pedal from the space of those who drive. And yet, some still prefer the car lane. Not out of necessity, not because the bike lane is blocked, but perhaps out of convenience, out of habit or — and here lies the most delicate point — out of the tacit awareness that the driver, by law and by physical consequence, cannot run them over. There is in that choice a kind of use of one’s right as a shield for a decision that, at bottom, ignores the right of the other.

The same pattern repeats on larger and more complex scales. Priority parking spaces exist because, without them, people with disabilities, the elderly and pregnant women would be systematically ignored in the contest for space. Reserved seats on buses were created because spontaneous courtesy was not enough. And university quotas arose in response to historical inequalities so deep that formal equality — everyone with the same right to sit the entrance exam — was never, in fact, real equality.

If all of us, out of genuine disposition, gave up the seat to those who need it, there would be no need for a sign telling us to do so. The sign, then, is not the solution — it is the certificate that the more beautiful solution has already failed.

The question that arises is not whether these measures are just or unjust — that is a necessary but different discussion. The question proposed here is prior: why do we need them? What does it say about us that respectful coexistence must be legislated?

The prisoners’ lesson

Game theory offers us one of the most powerful metaphors for this reflection. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, formulated by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950 and formalised by Albert Tucker, presents a seemingly simple scenario: two suspects are arrested and interrogated separately. If both cooperate with each other and remain silent, they receive a light sentence. If one betrays the other, the traitor walks free and the betrayed gets the maximum sentence. If both betray, both receive intermediate sentences.

What is fascinating — and disturbing — is that individual rational logic leads both to betrayal. Each prisoner, thinking exclusively of himself, realises that betraying is always the best option regardless of what the other does. The result? Both betray, and both lose more than they would have lost had they cooperated. Individual rationality produces a collectively worse outcome.

Point for reflection: The Prisoner’s Dilemma is not merely a mathematical exercise. It mirrors everyday situations: the cyclist who occupies the car lane because it is individually advantageous, the passenger who does not yield the seat because it is individually comfortable, the company that pollutes because it is individually profitable. In each case, individual calculation sabotages the collective good.

Robert Axelrod, studying iterated versions of this dilemma in the 1980s, discovered something that illuminates the issue. When the game repeats — when players know they will meet again — cooperative strategies tend to win in the long run. The most successful strategy in his tournaments was “Tit for Tat”: begin by cooperating, then mirror the other’s behaviour. It was simple, “nice” and retributive. The conclusion is provocative: cooperation need not be born of pure altruism. It can arise from enlightened self-interest, from the realisation that coexisting well with others is also a form of caring for oneself.

But the original dilemma remains as a warning. In one-off interactions, with no shared history and no shared future, the tendency towards selfishness prevails. Perhaps this is why we need laws: to simulate, artificially, the conditions that would make spontaneous cooperation more likely. Law, in this sense, is a kind of “forced collective memory” — it tells every player that there will be consequences, that the game repeats, that betrayal is not free.

The tragedy of what belongs to everyone

Garrett Hardin, in his famous 1968 essay published in Science, extended this logic to shared resources through the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. The metaphor is elegant: imagine a pasture open to all the shepherds of a village. Each shepherd, acting rationally, adds one more cow to the pasture, because the benefit is entirely his while the cost — the degradation of the pasture — is distributed among all. If everyone follows that logic, the pasture is exhausted and everyone loses.

Hardin identified in this dynamic the root of environmental, urban and social problems. Overfishing, deforestation of public forests, traffic congestion, litter on the beach — all follow the same pattern: what belongs to everyone ends up being cared for by no one. Unrestricted freedom in the commons leads to the ruin of all.

But here a fundamental counterpoint enters. The economist Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Prize in 2009, demonstrated that the tragedy is not inevitable. In many communities around the world, people spontaneously developed rules of collective use that preserved common resources for centuries. These communities needed neither privatisation nor state regulation — they created local governance based on mutual trust, reciprocal monitoring and proportional sanctions.

Ostrom’s work suggests that when people know each other, observe each other and share a future, they are capable of building cooperation without an external agent compelling them. The tragedy of the commons would be, rather, the tragedy of anonymity.

— A reflection drawn from Elinor Ostrom’s studies

And here, once again, we return to the question that drives us. In modern societies — large, anonymous, accelerated, where we do not know the faces with whom we share the bus, the street, the university — is spontaneous ethics still something we can rely on? Or does law become a necessary prosthesis for the empathy that anonymity dissolves?

To obey is not to act ethically

If on the one hand the absence of rules can lead to abuse, on the other, blind obedience to rules is likewise no synonym for morality. The experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the 1960s is perhaps the most disturbing demonstration of this truth.

Milgram recruited ordinary volunteers for what was presented as a study on learning. Each participant was to apply electric shocks to another “volunteer” (actually an actor) whenever the latter gave a wrong answer. The shocks were fake, but the participants did not know that. Intensity increased with each error. The actor screamed, begged them to stop, mentioned heart problems. And still, when the researcher — dressed in a lab coat, clothed in authority — said “the experiment requires that you continue,” most participants continued. About 65% reached the maximum voltage.

The result is chilling not because it reveals we are evil, but because it reveals something more subtle: we are profoundly susceptible to authority. We delegate our moral responsibility to whoever wears the lab coat, whoever bears the title, whoever states the rules. And in that process, something essential is lost — moral autonomy, the capacity to judge for ourselves whether what is asked of us is just.

The question that persists: If we obey cruel rules when an authority commands us, what guarantees that we obey just rules out of our own conviction? Do we give up the priority seat because we believe in the dignity of the other, or simply because a sign tells us to? And if the sign were removed?

Kant and the law that dwells within

Immanuel Kant, two centuries before Milgram, had already formulated the essential distinction between acting out of duty and acting in accordance with duty. For Kant, true morality lies not in obeying external rules but in acting according to a law that the rational subject himself recognises as valid. This is what he called the categorical imperative: act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be universalised — that you wish everyone to act the same way.

Autonomy, in Kantian philosophy, is the capacity to legislate for oneself. It is not doing whatever one wants — that is mere caprice. It is submitting one’s own will to a principle one recognises as just, independently of reward or punishment. A truly moral person, in this sense, would yield the seat not because a law says so, but because she rationally recognises that this is the action she would wish to see universalised.

But Kant also acknowledged — and perhaps here lies his greatest lucidity — that the human will is imperfect. We are rational beings, yes, but also sensitive, inclined to comfort, to immediate pleasure, to self-interest. Precisely for this reason the imperative is categorical: it commands, it obliges, because it knows that reason alone does not always prevail over inclination. Moral law is necessary precisely because we are not angels.

Rights as limit and as confession

We arrive, then, at a paradox that perhaps has no resolution — and perhaps does not need one. Rights exist to protect freedom, but in doing so, they limit other freedoms. The priority parking space protects the dignity of those who need it but restricts the freedom of those who do not. The university quota seeks to equalise opportunities but reorganises rules of access. The bike lane protects the cyclist but delimits the space of everyone.

Each of these mechanisms is, at the same time, a civilisational achievement and a confession of failure. Achievement, because it recognises that certain rights need to be actively protected. Failure, because it admits that we were not able to protect them spontaneously, by mere ethical disposition.

If we had, as a society, empathy as the genuine foundation of our relations — if every driver saw in the cyclist an equal, if every healthy young person felt in their body the fatigue of the elderly, if every privileged person recognised in inequality something that also diminishes them — perhaps many of these laws would be unnecessary. But they are necessary. And to admit this may itself be an exercise in humility.

A final provocation: Law, when it works well, does not replace ethics — it creates the conditions under which ethics becomes possible. It establishes a minimum floor of coexistence while we wait — and perhaps wait eternally — for each person’s inner morality to suffice. Not to eliminate the need for law, but so that it may, one day, become merely decorative.

Perhaps the true maturity of a civilisation is measured not by the number of laws it has, but by the number of laws it does not need.

This text does not intend to offer answers. It only intends to organise questions perhaps worth carrying. Questions about what moves us when no one is watching, about what would happen if all the signs were taken down, about whether goodness is stronger when it is born from within or when it is imposed from without. They are ancient questions — Aristotle, Kant, the game theorists, the experimental psychologists, all, in some way, circled the same centre without ever exhausting it.

And perhaps that, in itself, says something. The questions that do not exhaust themselves are almost always the ones that matter most.

References and studies mentioned

  • The Prisoner’s Dilemma — Formulated by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher (1950), formalised by Albert W. Tucker. Classic problem of game theory concerning cooperation and betrayal.
  • The Evolution of Cooperation — Robert Axelrod (1984). Study of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and the “Tit for Tat” strategy.
  • The Tragedy of the Commons — Garrett Hardin, published in Science (1968). Essay on the overexploitation of shared resources.
  • Governing the Commons — Elinor Ostrom (1990). Demonstration that local communities can self-govern common resources. Nobel Prize in Economics, 2009.
  • Obedience to Authority Experiment — Stanley Milgram, Yale University (1961–1963). Published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals — Immanuel Kant (1785). Work presenting the categorical imperative and autonomy of the will as foundations of morality.