To test the concrete practicability of a horizontal social system (and to answer the last objection mentioned in the previous chapter), one needs to reflect upon the consequences of the failure to respect rules.

Can a society which does not accept any kind of violation of fundamental personal rights (not even when it is committed by institutions to ‘restore law and order’) really guarantee respect for rules? What other measures could be adopted to prevent offences? How can the exercise of everyone's fundamental rights be protected without betraying the basic principle of the horizontal society – inclusion – which is incompatible with separation, exclusion, and elimination; that is, with the measures generally taken to neutralise those who infringe rights?

In a vertical society, where rights and duties, responsibilities and opportunities are unequally distributed, it is difficult to prevent those who have a heavy burden of duties and yet enjoy only limited rights, from committing offences. Thus one resorts to sanctions to contain noncompliance following the rather simple paradigm: if you violate a rule, I will inflict pain on you; this will deter not just you from violating the rule, but also those who see the pain inflicted upon you.

When the protecting of the excess of goods enjoyed by the top sectors of a society, big landowners for instance, is regarded as more important than ensuring that its base has an adequate means of livelihood (according to the estimates of the World Bank, in 2001, 1.2 billion people were living below the poverty line), it is very hard to keep ‘the poor’ from committing thefts, dealing in small quantities of illegal drugs, or resorting to prostitution or petty corruption, save by setting out and applying a penalty which intimidates – incarceration namely.

Respect for law (legality) is therefore guaranteed by means of threats and, in case of transgression, by inflicting punishment. In order to be effective this punishment has to represent for potential offenders a penalty worse than what they would face if they did not break the rule. The sanction must therefore consist of an evil, and the evil should in turn, at least in principle, follow a hierarchical scale so that its intensity matches the seriousness of the offence.