Daily Inspiration Quote by Frederick Pollock

Pollock’s line is a lawyer’s version of pulling the floorboards up: if you won’t grant even a thin layer of shared moral ground, then “ethics” collapses into mere preference and law becomes raw procedure. He’s not pleading for lofty virtue; he’s staking out the minimum needed for a legal order to feel like more than organized force. The phrasing matters. “Men who try to behave reasonably” quietly narrows the audience to participants in a civic project. Ethics, for Pollock, isn’t built from saints or from metaphysical certainty. It’s built from the ordinary person’s aspiration to be fair-minded, consistent, and intelligible to others.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the skeptic and the relativist: deny common principles and you don’t just win an argument in a seminar; you sabotage the possibility of justification. Courts constantly translate moral intuitions into rules - promises should bind, harm should count, bias should be checked. Pollock is saying that without broadly “admitted” starting points, law can still exist, but it can’t explain itself as law in the normative sense. It can only command.

Contextually, Pollock writes from a late-19th/early-20th century British legal world wrestling with modernity: industrial capitalism, expanding state power, and debates between legal positivism (law as what’s enacted) and older natural-law impulses (law as answerable to reason). His intent is to keep the bridge intact. He concedes disagreement, even cultural variation, but insists there must be some shared rational commitments - not a full moral code, just enough common currency to make rights, duties, and judgment more than well-dressed coercion.