It's in the rules
Rule-following may be ingrained in our legalistic society, but it's always insufficient to determine a person's action.
Everyone loves games. Like Monopoly. Monopoly is a game most people know exists but few have ever played to completion because it is long, tedious, and filled with rules, much like the life we seek to escape.
Games may be thought of as a subset of play, generally. Many different kinds of beings engage in play, from the simulated aggression of puppies and kittens to the more intricate games of strategy played by humans and advanced robots, like chess.
A basic definition of playing a game could be the voluntary acceptance of a rule which makes achieving a given objective more difficult. For example, kids and adults alike will play a game when walking down the sidewalk of avoiding stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. This interesting diversion from the humdrum task of ambulation has no actual victory condition; winning the game brings nothing more than a sense of pride in having accomplished a task one intentionally made more difficult by the ad hoc adoption of a rule with no real purpose (the sanctity of your mother’s back notwithstanding). So why do we do it? Because it’s part of play, and play is fun.
Naturally, then, we develop a childlike attachment to the idea of rules. Watch a group of kids play and the second some enterprising little sociopath finds a way to bend the rules of the game to her advantage, the other children will cry “foul!” and “that’s not fair!” A meta-rule we all seem to want to follow is one of fairness; everyone in the game must agree to play by the rules or it stops being fun.
Society, like all games, has its own set of rules. Very often, these are explicitly codified into “laws” which, if broken, have some sort of forfeit attached. This has led certain legal philosophers to assume that the nature of a law is one which, if broken, the overseer of the game will punish the rulebreaker for (this is called “legal positivism”). Taking this as our minimum basis for what a law is, we need to ask a question about the fairness meta-rule. Is “rule-following” sufficient to satisfy the meta-rule?
I answer no: rule-following is well and good, but it is perfectly possible to play within the letter of the rules and still have an unjust outcome. You can see this in society when someone says “there ought to be a law!” The imposition of an additional rule, a la Calvinball, is meant to address a purported “blind spot” in the existing rules, which allowed a player to “get away” with something that was unjust but not otherwise a violation. The in medias re imposition of a new rule does nothing to address or curb the existing injustice, but that would require the adoption of both a new rule and a second-order rule about reciprocal action. Very quickly, the entire system bogs down in trying to contain spontaneous action with post-hoc adoption of rules regulating that action.
As an example, consider the response to the acrimony exposed at the recent Presidential debate. Many devotees of order expressed a desire that candidates have to respect the time limits and not interrupt or talk over the other. That was, after all, a rule both agreed to. And theoretically the moderator should impose order, but the moderator in this case was without the ability to truly sanction either candidate for overstepping the boundaries. And by imbuing the moderator with such powers, as many have called for, all we do is abstract the same problem up to another level. Now we have empowered a “supersovereign” who may hand out punishments and boons based on… what? More rules? Well, who rules on the rules of the new rulemaker?
The recursion problem can be addressed somewhat in jurisprudential means by the adoption of either a positivistic second-order set of rules (like a constitution or other organic law) or by an appeal to a non-legal source of rules (natural law), but in either case, it requires a recognition on the part of the players that the supra-regular second-order ruleset exists and is valid. The nihilist will simply deny that she is bound by such rules and act accordingly.
So, then, does all rule-following come down to nothing more than our tacit agreement that the rules are good and we should follow them? It mostly does! And that is why appeals to rule-following will always be insufficient; adopt all the rules you want, it won’t make bad people suddenly turn into rule-followers.
The question of how you make people follow rules when they do not want to is a central question any legal system must answer, and thus far, “we’ll injure you if you don’t!” is the best system anyone has come up with since Hammurabi.