ISSUE 65: 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.
Once appearing in human society, debating about the fairness of law by authorities as well as ordinary people never suspend for even one day. For purpose of law, as is known to all, is to maintain and promote stability and harmony of society. Admittedly, to unjust law, we should not obey it unconditionally. However, there is no doubt that “absolute” law has not appeared up to now and it will not appear in the future. Shall we, you may wonder, obey only just law and resist unjust law?
To begin with, everyone have the right to resist irrational things including the law. Given an example, the history that black people are not allowed to sit dress circle of the bus ended up with Martin Luther King’s calling black people for striking for equal human rights with white ones. Likewise, law of slaughtering Jews, enacted by Nazi in the Second World War, ended up with peaceful people revolting for their own human rights. In short, people should resist unjust law and fight for their proper rights.
Nevertheless, fairness of a law depends on one’s personal interest as well as position. Consider, for example, an environmental law which regulates toxic effluent a certain factory can emit into a nearby river, is designed chiefly to protect public health. But complying with the law will be costly for the company and accordingly, profit of the factory will decline and lead it to lay off employees or even shut down. On the contrary, if the factory doesn’t comply with it, its profit goes up while the public health is faced with menace. To sum up, the fairness of law is subjective, depending to great extent how one’s interest is affected by it.
In the second place, disobeying unjust laws often has opposite effect of what was intended for or hoped for. For instance, our income taxation system is unfair in one respect or another. Yet the end of widespread disobedience, in this case tax evasion, is to perpetuate the system. As is known to all, law, which serves as the weapon of the society, is mandatory. Accordingly, any action try to avoid this weapon will counterproductive strengthen this weapon.
In the final analysis, we are supposed to obey just law while resist unjust law under rational precondition. Even though law cannot be just for everyone in the society, the law which can fit interest of majority of people will be an adequate law. As a result, law should be revised when time, position and condition change.
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发表于 2013-3-3 10:45:56
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