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.
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.
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