SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON LEGAL AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES

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We performed a quantitative analysis using the ISSP (International Social Survey Program) data from 1985, 1990, and 1996. Our focus is two fold. First we focused on the argument between the natural law and the positive law. According to the concept of natural law, the legitimacy of law is not subject to geographical or historical contexts. Thus, the natural law holds that the legality represents the universal truth, and that legality and ethics are identical. In contrast, the concept of positive law holds that legality and ethics are separate. In an extreme case, it leads to a kind of ethical relativism. In our analysis, we compared the respondents' who are religious and non-religious. The results of logistic regression analysis reveal that religious respondents have a relatively higher degree of legal conformance. This finding indicates that the religious morality is not opposed to the legal morality. On the contrary, the religious morality is complementary to the legal morality.Our second focus is the hypothesis claimed by the social contract theory. This theory holds that the fundamental reason why people obey the law is their expectation of public services from the government. According to this theory, there is an implicit social contract between the government and the individuals. We constructed a variable as Likert's scale that represents respondents' expectation of public services. The regression coefficient of this variable demonstrates that the aforementioned hypothesis holds in the United States for both the samples and the population set. For other countries, however, the signs and the statistical significance of the coefficient are mixed, and they do not show a uniform tendency.