- 最后登录
- 2008-4-13
- 在线时间
- 0 小时
- 寄托币
- 201
- 声望
- 0
- 注册时间
- 2007-12-22
- 阅读权限
- 15
- 帖子
- 0
- 精华
- 0
- 积分
- 132
- UID
- 2441571

- 声望
- 0
- 寄托币
- 201
- 注册时间
- 2007-12-22
- 精华
- 0
- 帖子
- 0
|
TOPIC: 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."
WORDS: 635 TIME: 00:45:00 DATE: 2008-2-17 20:40:09
As The Rule of Law mentions--"Laws are applied to every individual”. The establishment of laws is just inclined to connect every individual to form a harmonious society. However, when the fairness of laws is suspected by the multitude and laws have gone away from public populations' social values, the existence of disobedience of unjust laws is reasonable. Moreover, this kind of disobedience requires the recognition of the public, otherwise the society would turn out to be a state of chaos. And meantime, there exist some other solutions to the conflicts between the unjust laws and public general.
To begin with, laws are formulated by the numerical or powerful majority and intense to form a well-ordered citizenship and therefore promote the development of society, which is the pedestal why people should obey laws. However, if laws are abused as an avenue to construct a totalitarian government, the citizens should have the rights and responsibilities to disobey or even overflow them, which has already been put into practice in history. If public populations in Germany had all compromised to Adolf Hitler's government and his cruel laws, highly possibly the result of the Second World War would have to be changed to an opposite one. This kind of disobedience does not mean overlooking the laws, but a process of pursing the rights which every individual should own--liberty and equality. Just as Martin Luther King has mentioned, "I submit the individual who breaks the law which the conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly to accept the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over the injustice is really expressing the highest respect for the law".
However, this disobedience of the unjust laws needs the recognition of the whole society, on other words, only when the laws have turn backs to general public's society value, this kind of disobedience or resist could be considered correct. And if it goes to the opposite, our society would become chaotic. For illustration, both of two companies claim that they possess the patent of the same product. No doubt they would resort to the court which has the right to decide which one is the true owner of the patent. No matter anyone of the two companies has won at last, the other one would contribute its failure to the "unjust" law. In that case, it might disobey the law and continuously produce commodities with this patent. At that time, the sequence of business will be disturbed and therefore our society will turn into a state of chaos. Therefore, people surely could and should disobey the unjust laws, but the premise that recognition of whole society has been achieved must be settled.
Moreover, as long as the disobedience of unjust laws has its disadvantages, are there other solutions for general people when facing with the unjust laws? The answer, of course, is "Yes". We could resort to the congress which has the right of legislation and advise them to remedy or reconstruct the improper laws. What is more, we could harness the right of selection to choose the government leaders who will direct the congress to formulate more proper laws. Or even we could turn to mass media with the right of free-speech to express our concern on the unjust laws. Compared with all the above avenues, the disobedience or resist to the unjust laws would entirely possibly cost much higher and turns out to be an unnecessary manner.
To sum up, the author's assertion that individuals should disobey and resist unjust laws has some reasonable foundation. But at the same time, he or she has over emphasized the importance of disobedience, which may be proper in the era of war, but could not be wholly applied to modern well-ordered society when we could strike the humanist rights of liberty and equality through more peaceful, more compatible and more acceptable avenues.
|
|