How Important is Discipline in Society? Essay

Among those who work in difficult or dangerous jobs, for vitrine in coal mines, there is often a correct that comes non from being subject to the will of any person, however rational and well-intenti oned, except if from the work itself. If it is to be done successfully and with the minimum danger and soreness to all those eng erad in it, certain procedures must(prenominal) be followed and safeguards observed. Since the workers disregard see that the nature of the work demands this, there is correspondingly less pauperism for case to be enforce on them by some other agency.This is an ideal situation, as utter or so as chasten is concerned where the national is inherent in the work or activity, and where prevails and procedures argon followed because they are perceive as appropriate if the work is to be done. In the same variant of way it does happen, and fortunately non all that rarely, that a companionship appears conjointly to embrace the idea that behaving inwa rdly the court-ordered confines is in the prevalents interest, and that if they are to be practice of law of nature-abiding, then various routines, such as remaining content with earning ones own keep and non committing fraud, throw away to be kept to.How goat prepare be defined? Some would reserve the parole for the following of rules because the rules are seen appropriate to the occupation in hand, and would apply the adjective train to the abovementioned participation but not to another one which has been brought to order by some external sop up such as the g all overnments threats of punishment. Others incorporate a more(prenominal) holistic view of discipline in which it is perfectly proper to peach of one person or split of persons being disciplined by anothers imposition of authority.It would be pointless to stipulate that the word should be used in one way or another. However, I wish to stress that whatever words we use, there are clearly differences amon g the following three cases one, where we follow rules willingly because we perceive them as good or appropriate two, where we follow them under manipulative coercion, such as when we are persuaded that there is no alternative to the rules and three, where we follow them under what may be called punitive coercion, being threatened with punishment or in global some unpleasant consequences if we do not.In a narrow-minded view of things, many of mankinds pass onments in education,economics, culture, athletics and attainment screw be attributed to the persistence of disciplined, and often self-motivated, individuals. Sterling examples would include Archimedes, the neat mathematician, who before being killed by a Roman soldier was gulp symbols in sand Marie Curie who dedicated her widowed years in continuing research in radioactivity and eventually died of a radiation-triggered disorder and Siddhartha Gautama who exercised strict discipline over himself to mediate under the pi pal shoetree and eventually achieved enlightenment. Even in Singapore, we see a most disciplined mountaineer in Mr. Khoo Swee Chiow who genuinely believes in his cause.However, discipline in the human race would assume great significance if we consider its polar opposite polite disobedience, or the taking of a token challenge in insubordination of the law for the purpose of changing the law. Those who act in a well-manneredly disobedient manner harbour no adore for law (whereas discipline is the manifestation of a look upon for law). It is impossible to retain a law that authorises individuals to violate it. Respect for law is essential for any system to function. An effectual system of law is possible wholly when appeals cannot be made to principles outdoors the heavy system. Civil disobedients determine for themselves what laws to obey and what laws to violate.Without law, there will only be chaos as each individual and group decides unilaterally what is right. The victims in such a lawless society will probably be many of the real same concourse who argue so adamantly for the right of well-bred disobedience, namely, the advocates of civil rights, amicable justice, and peace. If one group can decide for itself which laws to obey, so as well as will other groups. A system of law protects all groups in society. Without it, anarchy prevails, discussion ceases and effect begins. Therefore, discipline is a figure out of civilly responsible demeanor which helps keep affable order and contributes to the preservation, if not advancement, of collective interests of society at large.Having give tongue to that, a society whose members are too self-disciplined to ever confuse out civilly disobedient is likely to be a stagnant one. On the other hand, civil disobedience may be good in the superstar that a tolerance of it strengthens land. For a system to be democratic, it must have broadsupport among diverse elements of society. The processe s of a representative democracy (with a system of representative government based on unbosom elections and a system of limitations on state activity) work slowly, and often groups flummox disenchanted with the slow responsiveness of government. Groups subjected to discrimination or injustice cannot be expected to rely exclusively on constitutional processes, man remedies steer years to be instituted. Faced with the problems deeply felt by a group, its leaders must have an alternative to dissent or resistance.In the 1960s, for example, black people in America felt that the processes of kind, particularly social and economic change, were moving too slowly to produce tangible benefits. closely of them resisted extremist solutions as unsuitable for democracy but motto in civil disobedience a remedy that would allow them to engage the legitimacy of the system. Hence Martin Luther Kings policy of direct action the taking of non-violent measures like boycotts and sit-ins which w as based on the necessity of violating unjust laws. Here, acts of civil disobedience were justified because racial requisition by law is morally reprehensible.Another of the twentieth centurys great proponents of civil disobedience was Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian leader. His policy of satyagraha (literally firmness in the truth) was often equated with peaceable 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 hunger strikes and for other acts of non-violence. unrivalled of his tactics was to have his followers lie win on force tracks, thus preventing trains from moving. By taking such peaceful acts of civil disobedience, Gandhi contributed to the front man both in India and in Great Britain for the independence of his country.Although not bless by law, civil disobedients can strengthen democratic cornerstones because they channel their ene rgies in directions that a broader segment would ultimately accept the abolition of slavery and segregation laws, the expression of civil rights, the establishment of nation independence, and the promotion of peace. They bring somewhat positivesocial changes. Returning to the three cases I highlighted in the warrant paragraph, it seems clear enough that the first case, whether or not we call it discipline, is what any government would prefer to find in its people. After all, it guarantees melted implementation of even the most unpopular laws and in extreme cases, enables social engineering to be carried out. The question 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 necessary for the hushed running of society, and so for civilised dealinghips in general, to take place?More than often, governments ensure discipline in the people by instituting a wakeless system. Un discreditedl y, a legal system is a specialised system of rules, distinct from moral rules, which at the least provides a framework in which individual behaviour can be in some sense square upd 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 individuals action. To discuss the importance of discipline, or rather disciplinary action, in society, we would study to validate the existence of legal systems.It is true that some political philosophers have toyed with the idea of the possibility of social order without law indeed, the first study work on this subject, Platos Republic, describes a lawless utopia in which the complete play of the intelligence of the philosopher-kings is allowed to proceed untrammelled by legal restraints. Also, Karl Marxs future classless society would be free from the restraints of civil and culpable 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 lawless utopias is the requirement that these desirable states of affairs can only be brought about by a fundamental change in human nature.Marx, for instance, stresses that the abolition of the social division of labour associated with the bourgeois method of production would entail a change in human nature. to that degree the most elementary of human nature would make these interpretations fantastically approving because it seems to indicate the necessity for some rules, many of which are bound to be backed by organised sanctions (these will come tobe cognize as laws). Other political theorists, perhaps with a less proud view of human potential, have argued that individuals have found the best form of protection in the existence of general rules of conduct binding on all.It is ironic that in his Laws, a much later work, Plato describes a society under the rule of law. Many commentators have still this striking change in viewpoint as a capitulation to hard facts. If so, the facts may be no more compelling than that a wise formula can be effective only through the promulgation of general regulations. No ruler of a large society could make any critical decision and transmit it rapidly through the populace. The best one can do is to define general limits within which individual citizens make their own decisions. Likewise, in practice, Communist regimes have well-kept some sort of court system.Indeed, as the dream of a stateless, coercionless society faded, the notion of fairness crept back into Soviet jurisprudence. Constitution law was revived and made conformable 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. therefore there was a legal order in the Soviet system . From these illustrations, it travels more difficult to conceive of a society in which the people are not disciplined by laws.A system of law provides three qualities for social life perceptual constancy, uniformness and cooperation. The type of social stability that law provides is reliability of expectation. When established laws exist, citizens know what they can expect from their married person citizens and government officials. Criminal law is a system of rules that provides means for the understanding of individuals 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.To a great extent, the more compelling is law throughout a society, and the more are social relations regulated by it, the more stable is the society and the more current are expectation s of members of the society as to how others will act if they respect the law. The superlative virtue of law is that itachieves an explicitness frequently absent from other regions of social life, conjecture custom, preventing arbitrariness and caprice and making clear what is demanded of individuals.Next, the fundamental and persuasive induce of law is its promulgation of a general rule binding every bit on everyone who fits the conditions prescribed. The principle that everyone is equal before the law is inherent in all laws, not just in a democracy. Uniformity is strategic 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 informed by starchy legislation that activities are prescribed and proscribed. Where cooperation throughout large groups and regions is pursued, stable and trustworthy 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.Thirdly, a society can be beneficial to its members only where it achieves cooperation among them. If all activities were wholly individual within a society, the society would exact the usual price for social life from its members without compensating benefits. Law provides a necessary organisational and structural force in joint 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 supercede of property and so forth.The most obvious 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 obe dience to laws and rules by deterring offenders, 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 toreveal the moral order. Judicial punishment is incurred for an umbrage against laws or rules, which can be inspected in statute books.The connection is that when a person can know in advance, because rules have been published, what he is nonresistant to be punished for, it is possible for him to exercise the prime(a) and live in the security that are supposed to be the advantages of order being maintained through punishment rather than manipulation or sophisticated bullying. Thus punishment is supposed to have the merit of respecting the individuals province, of prominent him the choice of whether to off end and to pay the price or observe the rule and preserve his granting immunity, so conferring the benefit that he is in charge, in this respect at least, of his own life and destiny.To insist that it is precisely where matters of importance are concerned that people must be given significant 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 simply a scheme of fines and restrictions designed to honk a price on certain forms of conducts it would be far split up 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 esteem, which a more simple-minded, draconian system of preventing offences would not.More is at stake than the aid of laws at their most efficacious level if that wer e 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 population 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.At the same time, this importance can be diminished in the view of the adverse effects of law and punishment. The value of law is so great and the reverence for law obtains so consuming that it may become self-stultifying and destructive. Laws can make a society become too stableand persistent, incapable of adapting to new conditions. The laws of a society may represent social relations long out of date, promoting oppression and violation of privacy. Law may impose too great a uniformity upon soci ety, stifling creativity, originality, human variation and cultural heterogeneity.When the faults of law intrude, people become desperate. When injustices prevail within the ruling system of injustice, when society becomes too uniform, inflexible and autocratic, law can be viewed as an intractable 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. wherefore we have the hidden oppression of Kafkas The Trial, 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 kind of be condemned.In 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 distinguish rule-governed behaviour from habitual behaviour on the premise that the former involves incorporation. A rule is internalised when it is understood by the participants in a social practice as indicating a right and wrong way of doing things.Unlike the carefully trained brute in the zoo who follows the keepers instructions automatically, individuals who are direct by rules regard them as expressing meaningful standards of behaviour. Furthermore, rules entail the idea of choice for, unlike well-trained animals, humans may disobey rules. Sanctions are needed to pull off with the minority of rule-breakers but this does not mean that sanctions can replace internalisation as the guarantor of regularised behaviour.This concept of internalisation is reminiscent of Confucius teachings Guide them by the edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and thecommon people will hang-up out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.