ABSTRACT
For the most part, criminal codes forbid behaviours that are considered undesirable by societies because they are a threat to the physical, material or social interests of others. These codes forbid us to violate the physical integrity of other people, i.e. to kill or injure them, to steal or damage their property or to damage their good name and reputation. These prohibitions seem simple enough but, because there are numerous ways in which these kinds of harms can be committed, criminal codes are usually long and complicated. But the essence of a criminal code is quite simple and its reasoning obvious: if everyone engaged in harming others we would end up with Hobbes’ ‘war of every one against every one’. If only for practical reasons, therefore, a society needs some sort of a covenant. In animal societies we find these types of covenants in the form of behavioural repertoires that restrict exploitative behaviour among members of a species, either innate and phylogenetically developed through natural selection (Ardrey1970), or ontogenetically acquired through the psychological mechanism of mutual reinforcement learning (Crombag1983a). Although it must be obvious to everyone that it would be counterproductive if everyone freely engaged in criminal offences, in a situation where almost everyone abides by the rule of law it can become advantageous to be the exception to the rule. This being the case, it might be said that criminal codes elicit criminal behaviour in some instead of suppressing it, and will continue to do so as long as the majority are effectively kept within the bounds of the law by whatever means.
