This statement’s playing with three evergreen ideas:
- That if a state is made of a majority of moral people then they won’t need precise governing.
- That if a state is made of a majority of amoral people then they’ll need ever more precise governing.
- And that if a state, as an entity itself, becomes too precise in its governing, it will beget more amoral than moral peoples for it’s covered the entire floor with laws and has thus made it impossible to walk without stepping on one.
The statement’s saying that someone’s actions are a simple means of surmising their underlying morality or lack of it, that an organized community isn’t exempt from judgement because it’s also someone, and that someone that acts with the belief that people are inherently lacking in morality is themselves lacking in morality for holding such a belief.
Imagine yourself as kind parent. Imagine walking into your kitchen to find that the plate of cookies you baked for the entire family to enjoy has been emptied. The only other people at home at the moment are your kids so you call them into the kitchen and ask them if they ate the whole plate of cookies. They, not seeing this as in any way wrong, plainly answer yes, yes – they ate the whole plate of cookies (they seem almost proud about it). You can’t really justify being mad at them since you haven’t told them that eating a whole plate of cookies is wrong so you let them go on with their day, but not before letting them know that eating a whole plate of cookies is bad.
The next day you walk into your kitchen to find that the new batch of cookies you baked have all been eaten, except for one. And long story short, one of your kids tells you that they ate it and that they didn’t really do anything wrong since they didn’t eat the whole batch of cookies (see, they left one). You get that they’re just being disobedient now but technically they’re in the clear, so you tell them leaving one is wrong as well.
The next day you find only two cookies left, and so on, and so on, and eventually you find yourself saying something along the lines of, “Eating all or a large portion of the cookies off a plate is not allowed, even when they fell on the floor and you had no choice but to eat them for fear of them being quickly spoilt, even when they were all somehow cracked and you just had to eat them for fear of them failing to be aesthetically pleasing to the family, even when &c., &c..”
Things continue to escalate quickly until you find both of your kids writing three page essays on why they absolutely need to eat a cookie, three days before they want to eat a cookie, just so they can get the privilege of having the right to eat a cookie. The neighbours start calling you a horrible parent and you are.