Rule of law replaces the code of honour, so that if you ask a lawyer or a legal scholar whether legal disputes are about discovering the moral course of action, she’ll likely laugh and dismiss the question. Morality is the ideological waste over which mere philosophers squabble, whereas those in the legal profession are charged to solve real-world problems of how power is distributed. Thus, when the legal system is shown to be rigged, as when O. J. Simpson could afford a team of super-lawyers to get away with murder, the question of whether the unsettling outcome is immoral is irrelevant to those operating within the system. As long as no law is broken, all actions are permitted in a liberal society, which is the society ruled by law rather than by, say, a dictator’s whim. The law is part of the social contract in which we forfeit our primitive inclinations to do whatever we want, in exchange for equal protection by the government. The law is supposed to be impartial in that it maximizes liberty and thus the freedom to sin, while preventing a collapse into the anarchic state of nature. We’re equal under the law because we’re each sovereign in our liberal society, and so (theoretically) the law has no favourites, but merely averts chaos like any other social convention such as a rule about which side of the road to drive on. The moral issue of what people ought to be is thus left to each free individual to figure out, and the more complex the society, the more an explicit, not to mention Kafkaesque legal framework is needed to replace the unsystematic code of honour.