What would you do if there were no consequences?

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I thought this (from a general autism discussion) was an interesting obsession, so I started this thread.

I don't think I would do anything differently. I act out of my internal ethical/moral system, not because of fear of punishment.

I suppose we might all need more defenses, because a world with no criminal justice system would encourage violent people to act... While I would not go off and murder irritating neighbors just because I could get away with it, I am not confident that the reverse would not happen, so maybe a fortified house, kevlar outerwear, some sidearms and long guns, and a lot of motion detectors and night vision equipment would be required.

Perhaps a neighborhood association could be formed to pool these resources. We might have organized patrols and...

reinvent local government and a criminal justice system.

If this was a world in which there were no consequences, I would be working with likeminded people to transform it into a world where there are consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIz_BeE1RWg

Couldn't help it.

If we just let everybody run amok, our species would die off quickly.

Even many animals species have moral codes (formulated mostly by Instinct) which they MUST follow--otherwise, there are consequences, including executions.

I don't know, depends on what options are available to me and if I see a point in doing certain things. My ethics and morals can be a bit fickle at times , especially when dealing with immoral people, but that was molded into be by such people in the first place.

I'm not swayed that much by group opinion, so crowd psychology doesn't work as much. I consider myself to be an independent thinker and so wouldn't do something immoral just because other people are doing it.

Our species got along for hundreds of thousands of years without formal laws.

Everyone did not kill their neighbor. Instead we formed a society.

There are many who doubt this and think people are naturally violent, etc.
and are unable to function rationally.

I don't agree, although the tendencies in face of adversity are evident. I feel this is
essentially the same as experiments on overcrowded rats. The same can be found
to be true in other fear/survival scenarios as well.

I agree with all of this, except that I think many pre-literate, prehistorical societies had formal laws and transmitted these orally.

But we can look to more remote ancestors like homo erectus and consider their millions of years of successful spread throughout the old world--and nonhuman cousins like chimps--and see ample evidence of some kind of cooperation and some sense of fairness, consequence and organized group behavior.

Thanks for the song, Livnah!