ABSTRACT
Law is concerned with a very wide range of social transactions. The reciprocity arguments support a general disposition to obey the law. These three aspects of reciprocity, returning good for good, making restitution, and resistance to evil, have consequences for the moral theory of punishment. Obedience to law is often a burden, but that in itself is no ground for concluding, from the reciprocity arguments, that we ought not to obey. There are, however, people whose disobedience to law can dispose us, out of reciprocity, to disobey the law ourselves. Isolated injustice can be dealt with case by case, and insofar as various segments of the legal system are isolable, the injustice of whole segments can be addressed one by one. In modern, developed legal systems, criminal law is part of public law, in the sense that in most cases the state controls the initiative for, and the state exacts the sanctions for its own purposes.
