Law, in the liberal tradition, is the attempt to bring objectivity to social relations, to construct unity from competing private desires, to combine freedom and order, and enable rational, objective decisions. But the rule of law is morally suspect in that it removes responsibility for important decisions from the individual and gets her to do things outside the range of decisions she is allowed to make. This makes her into an Rautomatic mover,S a person of debilitated moral agency. Laws seek to connect people by an abstract system of obligations and not through any basis in love or community. The opportunity to live in a world where one can act out of rational feeling, not out of some prior obligation, is important to satisfying the human moral instinct.
Law becomes unstable as individuals seek to realize their true selves and exercise agency.
The moral necessity of subjective sovereignty and the inauthenticity of objective authority combine to disqualify law as a producer of real community. I suggest also that we look into the social behavior of creatures similar to ourselves. I am no respecter of distinctions between the social sciences and the natural sciences. The chief lesson drawn from such work is that primates regularly make up after they have fought. Chimpanzee females knowingly act to mediate male-male conflicts and bring adversaries together.