SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON LEGAL AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES

我们使用ISSP（国际社会调查计划）1985年、1990年和1996年的数据进行了定量分析。我们的重点有两方面。首先我们关注自然法和实在法之间的争论。根据自然法的概念，法律的合法性不受地理或历史背景的限制。因此，自然法认为合法性代表普遍真理，合法性与伦理是同一的。相反，成文法的概念认为合法性和伦理是分开的。在极端的情况下，它会导致一种道德相对主义。在我们的分析中，我们比较了信教和不信教的受访者。逻辑回归分析结果显示，宗教信仰受访者的法律遵从程度相对较高。这一发现表明宗教道德与法律道德并不对立。相反，宗教道德与法律道德是相辅相成的。我们的第二个重点是社会契约理论提出的假设。该理论认为，人们遵守法律的根本原因是他们对政府提供公共服务的期望。根据这一理论，政府和个人之间存在一种隐性的社会契约。我们构建了一个变量作为李克特量表，代表受访者对公共服务的期望。该变量的回归系数表明，上述假设在美国对样本和总体集都成立。而在其他国家，该系数的标志和统计显著性是混合的，它们并没有表现出统一的趋势。

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.