I am exploring the hypothesis that laws do not prevent people from doing horrible things. Fear of the punishments do.
From there, I started exploring the notion that laws do not exist to prevent people from doing bad things. Laws exist so that we as a society come to a somewhat-mutual agreement on how we may punish people, and the circumstances necessary to invoke that state.
As a sidenote, I applied this same hypothesis to all the little “rules” that people have in their personal relationship, and found that the hypothesis still seemed to be in effect.
So that’s society for you.