65. Every individual in a society has a responsibility to obey just laws and to disobey and resist unjust laws. Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.
For centuries, political and legal theorists have pondered whether each person is under a general obligation of obedience to the legal norms of the society wherein he or she lives. Since the ancient times, societies have defined laws, which come from the intelligence of our ancestors, and pass from generation to generation, adjusting with the vicissitude of the times. Nevertheless, similar to the development of every aspect of societies, laws have aroused various problems all the time, due to different understanding of them—the welfare of the people is the ultimate law, as Cicero said, different from Einstein’s judgment: laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population. First off, there’s no denying that some of the laws are devised for denomination, rather than definition, such as adolescence, adults, and so forth. In this case, a misunderstanding would be exposed were someone determined to judge crimes according to these laws, resulting in efforts in vain. While some may contend that these sorts of laws could be minority, there still exists ambiguity deciding whether a law is just or not. Because laws are invented not only merely for judging crimes, but for regulating people’s behaviors, making them suitable for the sake of the stability of the whole society as well, laws could never be grasped so narrowly as ruling out other aspects other than justice. Moreover, there’s no absolute justice in laws, owing to its objectivity as well as validness appearing to constrain behaviors—not possibly judged with the criteria of goodness or badness by the multitude because of a lack of subjectivity—so as to maintain the feelings of justice in majority of people. After all, there’s no standard concerning the term “justice”, since a variety of understanding comes out of different people’s subjective opinions. For example, someone may find it cruel to sentence someone to death, while others may consider it benign to allow the justice to be performed. Nonetheless, laws could be out of phase when compared with the pace of progress of societies today, many laws—especially ancient ones—might be witnessed their ends as the time passing by. For instance, the ruthless penalties of death as cutting one’s flesh piece by piece while he’s alive are too radical for anybody with a common sense of sympathy to bear. Thus laws should be flexible enough for people challenge their authority, but not in an avenue of determining their effectiveness by one’s own knowledge and power. It will only cause turbulence even chaos unless people tend to change the laws in a mild and legal way, such as appealing to the governments and talk sense into them. It’s predictable that any democratic government would have been willing in the ability of acceptance had the multitude been reasonable sufficiently to provide it with worthy advices. In retrospect, this issue is partial from the outset, due to a lack of ability to distinguish just and unjust laws both for governments and populaces. While laws ought to be altered along with the wills of the multitude, governments should reflect about the balance between regulating its citizens’ behavior and guaranteeing their justice. It’s a Herculean task for all societies to accomplish, but the crux lies in the interaction of trying to understand each other between governments and their people, only then could we settle this problem without casually acting as one like.作者: jz20000cn 时间: 2011-9-29 22:22
awesome~作者: 大剑Jade 时间: 2011-9-30 08:21
这篇自我感觉例子不够challenge，不知道有没有更好点的例子？作者: monalisa0421 时间: 2011-11-26 19:08
写得太好了。。我是完全没思路啊。。。