- 最后登录
- 2010-8-14
- 在线时间
- 0 小时
- 寄托币
- 69
- 声望
- 1
- 注册时间
- 2004-4-23
- 阅读权限
- 15
- 帖子
- 1
- 精华
- 0
- 积分
- 82
- UID
- 162464

- 声望
- 1
- 寄托币
- 69
- 注册时间
- 2004-4-23
- 精华
- 0
- 帖子
- 1
|
Some Quick Comments
Issue17
There are two types of laws: just and unjust. Every individual in a society has a responsibility to obey just laws and, even more importantly, to disobey and resist unjust laws.
Laws, body of official rules and regulations, found in constitutions, legislations, judicial opinions, and the like, are used to govern a society and control the behavior of its members. Concerning laws, the author asserts that since laws are categorized as just ones and unjust ones, every individual in a society is incumbent to obey just laws and to disobey unjust laws. This view, in my eyes, is fundamentally irrational in ignoring the significance of certain constancy in legal system. To better present my viewpoint let me illustrate it in details.
Comment: This thoughtful beginning demonstrates the writer's solid foundation in humanities, and a nice facilitiy of adroit rephrasing in grasping the core of the issue from the very start. One reservation, though, may be the delayed placement of his/her own stance, which can be contrary to Western conventions on this type of essays. An up-front approach, especially in test situations, may be more desirable.
To begin with, whether a law is just or not is more of a subjective issue that differs according to personal interests, social class, as well as one's personal value system. Consider, for example, the controversial issue abortion. For people of certain religious belief, laws indulge abortion are unjust since they believe mothers do not have the freedom to deprive infants of their rights of life, while for people of other religions, right of life comes into being after birth, which render abortion not an infringement of human right and should be at the pregnant woman's will. Besides diverges generated due to personal value system, different, or even opposite, personal interests may also result in divarication. For instance, certain laws may prohibit factories from emitting toxic effluents into rivers for the well-being of local residents. In the eye of common populace, doubtlessly, this law is just and considerate to ensure public interests, however, as for the manager of a factory, this law, which causes it to curtail employees, increase manufacturing costs, and adopt related costly processing procedures, may be regarded as unjust. Consequently, it is arbitrary to lineate an explicit line between these two kinds of laws, to which type a law belongs should be determined on a case-by-case basis varying with changing social conditions.
Comment: Despite a few phrasal inaccuracies and misspellings, the writer shows an incisive perception of the complexities in differentiating just and unjust laws. Throughout the paragraph, its dialectic reasoning progresses quite smoothly and coherently, and its instantiations are highly relevant and revealing.
Nevertheless, in most occasions, whether a law is justified or not is definite with just ones more often than not fall into a line with interests of the majority, and hence every individual should faithfully abide by just laws. For example, highway codes in most countries require drivers to drive automobiles on the right side of the street, the goal of which is to ensure smooth transportation and to avoid unnecessary traffic accidents, and the disobey of them would inevitably result in chaos that threaten human lives. Similarly, various criminal laws, civil laws and administrative laws, on which every democratic society is based, are enacted for the security and order of the society. Without people's compliance, anarchy would reign supreme, not to mention insurance of basic human rights.
Comment: This paragraph naturally develops from the previous one, and organically extends the analysis into some essential dimensions of the issue, namely, laws, just or bad, are subject to arbitration by some higher interests and necessities. A good angle of analysis, though its depth can be more exhaustive, and some conceptual inconsistencies should be cautiously avoided. For example, up to now, the concept of "just" and "unjust" laws remains elusive, it may appear somewhat presumptuous to write that "hence every individual should faithfully abide by just laws."--it's not the time for that judgment yet. In this sense, this paragraph may be better off if placed after the next paragraph.
In terms of unjust laws, often resulted from ill-awareness of legislators or changing social conditions, some people, the author included, suggest that since they are not likely to be dismissed or disappear automatically, every individual should be incumbent to take up responsibility to overthrow them to build up a more harmonious, democratic and human-oriented society. Ostensibly, this assertion is appealing, however, an in-depth review would reveal its naivety and vulnerability. As a matter of fact, more often than not, by justifying a violation of one sort of law we find ourselves on a slippery slope toward sanctioning all types of illegal behavior, for the same reason that there may not be definite division between justness and unjustness. Consider the abortion example again. A person opposing freedom of abortion would overthrow the law by way of blocking roads to the abortion clinic, which, in his/her visual angle, is justifiable because he is just showing his opposition to unjust laws. However, it is a precariously short leap from this sort of civil disobedience to physical confrontations with clinic workers, then to the infliction of property damage, then to the bombing of the clinic and potential murder! Evidently, every sort of action threatening public security could find a well established excuse if every individual is allowed to disobey and resist unjust laws in their discretion.
Comment: Here the discussion about how "unjust laws" are instituted is rather arbitrary, or even simplistic, for "sober-minded" legislators can equally propose "unjust laws" just as their less capable colleagues often do. Still, the rest of the paragraph exhibits the writer's strong analytic abilities, and his firm control of complex phenomena and logic threads.
In summary, from all the discussions above, we can safely draw the conclusion that the author's assertion is essentially unreasonable in that it naively divides just laws with unjust laws and neglects the importance of constancy of legal system to ensure a democratic and harmonious society. However, with social conditions changing at a breathtaking speed and considering the limitation of human insights of the future, laws should be flexible to keep pace with changing reality insofar as this proposition is not overextended.
Comment: So far, the writer weaves an impressive investigation into a complicated social phenomenon--the relations between law and human. Linguistically, s/he has a fluent and analytical writing style, though minor phrasing problems do occur at times. Structurally, this piece has a sound and straightforward deployment for such type of argumentative writing. Overall, the writer has a very strong research potential, and is well on the way toward coping with North American academic writing and research rigor. |
|