'How Important is Discipline in Society? Essay\r'

'Among those who operate in difficult or dangerous jobs, for example in coal mines, there is often a national that brace intercourses non from being subject to the give of all(prenominal) person, however rational and well-intenti one(a)d, yet from the bring in itself. If it is to be done successfully and with the minimum danger and irritation to on the whole in all told those engaged in it, certain procedures essential(prenominal)(prenominal) be attended and safeguards observed. Since the workers rouse see that the record of the work demands this, there is correspondingly less need for find out to be imposed on them by well-nigh other agency.\r\nThis is an ideal situation, as far as fudge factor is relate: where the contain is indispensable in the work or activity, and where encounters and procedures argon followed because they ar hotshotd as appropriate if the work is to be done. In the equal kind of port it does happen, and fortunately not all that rarely, that a lodge appears bodiedly to breast the idea that behaving inside the healthy confines is in the public’s interest, and that if they are to be constabulary-abiding, so various routines, such as remaining suffice with earning one’s sustain keep and not committing fraud, ache to be kept to.\r\nHow cigarette â€Å" stop” be posed? Some would reserve the devise for the following of finds because the rules are seen appropriate to the task in hand, and would apply the adjective â€Å"disciplined” to the abovementioned cabaret alone not to other one which has been brought to identify by both(prenominal) external force such as the presidency’s threats of penalisation. Others need a much than holistic effective opinion of discipline in which it is suddenly proper to speak of one person or root of persons being â€Å"disciplined” by another’s imposition of authority.\r\nIt would be pointless to nail dow n that the word should be used in one way or another. However, I wish to accent that whatever words we use, there are clearly differences among the following three cases: one, where we follow rules go forthingly because we dig them as repair or appropriate; two, where we follow them chthonic manipulative coercion, such as when we are persuaded that there is no alternative to the rules; and three, where we follow them to a lower place what whitethorn be called punitive coercion, being jeopardize with penalization or in prevalent many unpleasant consequences if we do not.\r\nIn a change mentation of things, many of mankind’s contactments in education, economics, culture, athletics and science female genital organ be attri anded to the tenacity of disciplined, and often self-motivated, individuals. Sterling examples would include Archimedes, the bulky mathematician, who sooner being killed by a Roman pass was drawing symbols in sand; Marie Curie who utilize h er widowed years in continuing research in radioactivity and eventually died of a radiation-triggered malady; and Siddhartha Gautama who exercised strict discipline over himself to mediate under the pipal tree and eventually achieved enlightenment. Even in Singapore, we see a most disciplined climb up in Mr. Khoo Swee Chiow who genuinely believes in his cause.\r\nHowever, discipline in the populace would assume greater significance if we hand its polar opposite: complaisant noncompliance, or the winning of a token meet in rebelliousness of the fairness for the purpose of changing the constabulary. Those who act in a accomplishedly disobedient manner have no look on for fair playfulness of nature (whereas discipline is the demonstration of a respect for truth). It is impossible to have a law that authorises individuals to violate it. Respect for law is infixed for any organisation to function. An effective brass of law is possible however when appeals cannot be made to patterns right(prenominal) the legal organisation. civilizedised disobedients determine for themselves what laws to obey and what laws to violate.\r\nWithout law, there get out scarce be chaos as each individual and group decides unilaterally what is right. The victims in such a outlaw(a) smart set will probably be many of the very same sight who argue so adamantly for the right of well-mannered dis homage, namely, the advocates of civil rights, genial justice, and peace. If one group can decide for itself which laws to obey, so as well will other groups. A system of law protects all groups in ordering. Without it, anarchy prevails, discussion ceases and violence begins. Therefore, discipline is a form of civilly responsible de entailour which helps maintain affable order and contri only ifes to the preservation, if not advancement, of collective interests of society at large.\r\nHaving said that, a society whose members are too self-disciplined to ever procee d civilly disobedient is likely to be a stagnant one. On the other hand, civil disobedience may be good in the champion that a tolerance of it strengthens democracy. For a system to be democratic, it must have broad support among respective(a) elements of society. The processes of a representative democracy (with a system of representative authorities based on release elections and a system of limitations on state activity) work slowly, and often groups beat disenchanted with the slow reactivity of government. Groups subjected to discrimination or injustice cannot be evaluate to rely exclusively on constitutional processes, bit remedies take years to be instituted. Faced with the problems deeply tangle by a group, its leaders must have an alternative to dissent or resistance.\r\nIn the 1960s, for example, black large number in America felt that the processes of change, particularly social and economic change, were moving too slowly to produce tangible benefits. Most of th em spurned extremist solutions as unsuitable for democracy but saw in civil disobedience a remedy that would allow them to accept the legitimacy of the system. thusly Martin Luther King’s policy of direct action †the taking of non-violent measures like boycotts and sit-ins †which was based on the destiny of violating unjust laws. Here, acts of civil disobedience were justified because racial segregation by law is morally reprehensible.\r\n some other of the twentieth century’s great proponents of civil disobedience was Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian leader. His policy of satyagraha (literally â€Å"firmness in the truth”) was often equated with passive resistance. He urged his partisans to take peaceful acts, such as marches and boycotts to achieve the independence of India from British colonial rule. Gandhi became famous for his starve strikes and for other acts of non-violence. One of his tactics was to have his following lie down on railroad trac ks, thus preventing trains from moving. By taking such peaceful acts of civil disobedience, Gandhi contributed to the movement †both in India and in considerable Britain †for the independence of his country.\r\nAlthough not sanctified by law, civil disobedients can strengthen democratic institutions because they channel their energies in directions that a broader segment would ultimately accept †the abolition of slavery and segregation laws, the expression of civil rights, the nerve of nation independence, and the promotion of peace. They bring around confirmative social changes. Returning to the three cases I highlighted in the second paragraph, it seems clear enough that the first case, whether or not we call it â€Å"discipline”, is what any government would prefer to find in its people. After all, it guarantees restrained instruction execution of even the most unpopular laws and in extreme cases, enables social engineering to be carried out. The moti lity is what we are to do when this ideal breaks down or has no chance to develop. What course of action can governments take to bring about the order unavoidable for the smooth running of society, and indeed for civilised dealingships in general, to take place?\r\nMore than often, governments ensure discipline in the people by instituting a legal system. Undoubtedly, a legal system is a work system of rules, distinct from moral rules, which at the to the lowest degree provides a framework in which individual demeanour can be in some sense modulate and an element in certainty guaranteed, and which at the very most may provide a comprehensive framework of regulations covering nearly all aspects of the individual’s keep. To discuss the importance of discipline, or rather disciplinary action, in society, we would need to formalize the existence of legal systems.\r\nIt is true that some semi policy-making philosophers have toyed with the idea of the possibility of social order without law: indeed, the first major work on this subject, Plato’s Republic, describes a lawless utopia in which the apologize play of the intelligence of the philosopher-kings is allowed to proceed untrammelled by legal restraints. Also, Karl Marx’s future classless society would be free from the restraints of civil and criminal law because those very factors that give rise to the need for law †the institution of money, the social division of labour and the system of private property †would have been removed. What unites all the differing â€Å"lawless” utopias is the requirement that these desirable states of affairs can only be brought about by a implicit in(p) change in clement nature.\r\nMarx, for instance, stresses that the abolition of the social division of labour associated with the bourgeois mode of production would entail a change in human nature. Yet the most elementary of human nature would make these interpretations fantastical ly optimistic because it seems to indicate the demand for some rules, many of which are bound to be backed by organised sanctions (these will come to be known as â€Å"laws”). Other political theorists, perhaps with a less elevated view of human potential, have argued that individuals have found the better(p) form of protection in the existence of general rules of conduct binding on all.\r\nIt is ironic that in his integritys, a much later work, Plato describes a society under the rule of law. Many commentators have mum this striking change in viewpoint as a capitulation to hard facts. If so, the facts may be no more compelling than that a wise(p) ruler can be effective only by the promulgation of general regulations. No ruler of a large society could make every critical decision and transmit it rapidly through and through the populace. The best one can do is to define general limits within which individual citizens make their own decisions. Likewise, in practice, Com munist regimes have maintained some sort of court system.\r\nIndeed, as the dream of a stateless, coercionless society faded, the notion of â€Å"legality” crept back into Soviet jurisprudence. Constitution law was revived and made lucid with socialism; and even some Western legal concepts and practices which would previously have been denounced as bourgeois reappeared in the later development of the Soviet legal system. and so there was a legal order in the Soviet system. From these illustrations, it executes more difficult to conceive of a society in which the people are not disciplined by laws.\r\nA system of law provides three qualities for social life: stability, uniformity and cooperation. The shell of social stability that law provides is reliability of expectation. When launch laws exist, citizens know what they can expect from their fellow citizens and government officials. Criminal law is a system of rules that provides mover for the apprehension of individual s who break the law and that circumscribe the procedures that the government must follow in arrest and seizure. Civil law defines the procedures required for legal status with respect to property, contracts, marriages and many other relations among individuals and institutions.\r\nTo a great extent, the more persuasive is law throughout a society, and the more are social relations regulated by it, the more stable is the society and the more re reasonable are expectations of members of the society as to how others will act if they respect the law. The greatest virtue of law is that it achieves an explicitness frequently absent from other regions of social life, severalize custom, preventing arbitrariness and caprice and making clear what is demanded of individuals.\r\nNext, the total and persuasive feature of law is its promulgation of a general rule binding equally on everyone who fits the conditions electropositive. The principle that everyone is equal before the law is inherent in all laws, not just in a democracy. Uniformity is important for stability, cooperation and fairness. It expresses the heart of the principle of equality before the law. A stable society requires uniform procedures for regulating activities and for rectifying imbalances. Citizens must be cognizant by formal legislation that activities are prescribed and prohibit. Where cooperation throughout large groups and regions is pursued, stable and reliable expectations are required. Vehicle drivers cooperate at road junctions through the laws that regulate left of way. Finally, the urge towards fairness shared by everyone, even those who reject some laws, requires implementation in laws if it is to be effective.\r\nThirdly, a society can be beneficial to its members only where it achieves cooperation among them. If all activities were alone individual within a society, the society would learn the usual price for social life from its members without compensating benefits. rectitude pr ovides a necessary organisational and structural force in cooperative ventures. Exchange and possession of property could not be as smooth as they are in many countries without rules regulating the flow of money, procedures for the exchange of property and so forth.\r\nThe most obvious device characteristic of laws is that they are enforced, involving the police, courts of laws, punishments and penal institutions. I accept that the general justifying aim punishment is to secure greater obedience to laws and rules by deterring acheers, both potential repeat offenders and those who so far have not offended but might if not deterred. If this seems too obvious a statement to be worth making, I do so at this point because different opinions have been offered, such as that the general purpose of punishment is to reform offenders, or to visit retribution on them or to reveal the moral order. Judicial punishment is incurred for an offence against laws or rules, which can be inspected in statute books.\r\nThe connection is that when a person can know in advance, because rules have been published, what he is liable to be punished for, it is possible for him to exercise the excerption and live in the security that are hypothetic to be the advantages of order being maintained through punishment rather than manipulation or advance(a) bullying. Thus punishment is supposed to have the be of respecting the individual’s responsibility, of giving him the choice of whether to offend and to pay the price or observe the rule and preserve his exemption, so conferring the benefit that he is in charge, in this respect at least, of his own life and destiny.\r\nTo insist that it is precisely where matters of importance are concerned that people must be given crucial responsibility may seem strange in the context of punishment, for what we want to do is to prevent crimes and offences, not leave people with the choice of whether to commit them or not. Punishments are not si mply a design of fines and restrictions designed to put a price on certain forms of conducts; it would be far better if the acts proscribed by penal statutes were never done. The point of punishment is that while it aims to prevent offences, it does this in a way that leaves room for other principles and goods that we value, which a more simple-minded, Draconian system of preventing offences would not.\r\nMore is at stake than the sustenance of laws at their most efficacious level: if that were all we wanted, we would behave very differently. We might, for example, take measures to isolate or even exterminate those sections or age groups of the macrocosm statistically most likely to commit crimes and would no doubt institute curfews. Yet we have reservations about measures such as these because as well as freedom from crimes, we value other things like freedom of speech, of movement and association. In this light, punishment as a means of discipline is important in society.\r\nAt the same time, this importance can be small(a) in the view of the adverse effects of law and punishment. The value of law is so great and the adore for law becomes so overpowering that it may become self-stultifying and destructive. Laws can make a society become too stable and inexorable, incapable of adapting to new conditions. The laws of a society may represent social relations long out of date, promoting oppression and invasion of privacy. Law may impose too great a uniformity upon society, stifling creativity, originality, human variation and heathen heterogeneity.\r\nWhen the faults of law intrude, people become desperate. When injustices prevail within the ruling system of injustice, when society becomes too uniform, inflexible and oppressive, law can be viewed as an obdurate evil. When the prevailing legal system is held up as worthy because it is the law, no matter how oppressive and unjust, people lose their respect for law without knowing any alternative. The most pernicious danger is that respect for law may be imposed and not earned, and may be assumed even when the law is unjust. whence we have the hidden oppression of Kafka’s â€Å"The discharge”, in which a man suffers under a system of Law that accuses and trials him but never explains why. That system should not merit such respect and must instead be condemned.\r\nIn conclusion, I view discipline exercised by and over the populace as important in society; however, it should co-exist with an active civil voice. Can discipline be maintained by means other than law and punishment? Liberal-rationalists notice rule-governed behaviour from habitual behaviour on the premise that the former involves â€Å"internalisation”. A rule is internalised when it is understood by the participants in a social practice as indicating a right and haywire way of doing things.\r\nUnlike the carefully trained brute in the zoo who follows the keeper’s book of instructions autom atically, individuals who are guided by rules regard them as expressing meaningful standards of behaviour. Furthermore, rules entail the idea of choice for, different well-trained animals, humans may disobey rules. Sanctions are necessary to cope with the minority of rule-breakers but this does not mean that sanctions can replace internalisation as the warrantor of regularised behaviour.\r\nThis concept of â€Å"internalisation” is reminiscent of Confucius’ teachings: â€Å" exact them by the edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, at any rate having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”\r\n'