Wednesday, 28 October 2015

ETHICS, LAW AND JUSTICE IN ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART



ETHICS, LAW AND JUSTICE IN ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART
A suggestion that like communities of other climes, their ethical, legal and justice systems were open to evolution was highlighted. Findings revealed that even though Achebe did not engage himself directly in the polemics of the derivable value of the white man’s action in Umuofia, his disclosures underscored the genesis of bribery and corruption –a twin monster which have blos some din people’s psyche today. Keywords: Customs, Ethics, Justice System, Law, Peaceful co-existence.
Ethics As a noun, the term Ethics is generally used in two senses: a) as motivation based on ideas of right and wrong; and b) as the philosophical study of moral values and rules. The former deals with values (which are right or wrong) as they guide people’s actions; the later deals with the analysis of the rightness or wrongness of human actions. While it is impossible to totally divestone from the other, we shall attempt to devote our attention to the former sense since it forcefully captures the context under which the term is used here.
Consequently, ethics is defined as the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc
The Notions of Law and Justice
The term Law is a common but complex concept capable of signifying multiple phenomena. It is common because it is a house-hold term in every culture, organization and institution, and people generally seem to understand what it represents; on the other hand, its complexity lies in the fact that by nuanced step, it could be used to represent distinct layers and/or categories of realities thereby creating room for prevarication typical of ambiguous concepts.
LAW
Has no simple answer. And so it is expedient to provide a précising definition of law in order to streamline the limits of its applicability within the context of our discussion. Law is construed to mean the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. This designation is very instructive since it is believed that for anything whatsoever to qualify as Law, it must incorporate some or all of these or their variants, namely:
a system of rules.
Law is a rational ordering of things which concern the common good that is romulgated by whoever is charged with the care of the community his contention is somewhat a confirmation of these principal qualities by charting the source of force of the rules that govern people’s lives, a competent authority.
That is, for any rule to have the force of law, it must be given by those who have been charged by the common will to do so.
Law on the principle of maximizing the Happiness of the greatest numbers. So, whether the emphasis is on the acceptability of the law, or on the authority of its maker(s), or on its utility, every law which is enforceable through human sanctions is made by man, to be obeyed by all and for the wellbeing of everyone. Rousseau (1762) noted: But what, after all, is a law? [...] When I say that the object of laws is always general, I mean that law considers subjects en masse and actions in the abstract, and never a particular person or action. [...] On this view, we at once see that it can no longer be asked whose business it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will; nor whether the prince is above the law, since he is a member of the State; nor whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how we can be both free and subject to the laws, since they are but registers of our wills. [...]Laws are, properly speaking, only the conditions of civil association. The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be their author: the conditions of the society ought to be regulated solely by those who come together to form it. Laws are thus just rules of conduct freely made by man for the guidance of everyone’s life, contrived out of human need for justice and order in societies and organizations. As originating from the will of the people either directly or indirectly (as in the case of representative legislative bodies), laws are indispensable for smooth ordering of societies and institutions. A society without laws, and perhaps also, an effective means of enforcing the laws, would be like the animal kingdom where might is right, and only the fittest of animals survived; it would be a chaotic, dysfunctional state reminiscent of Hobbesian state of nature
where live was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (Hobbes,
2010 [1651]).This may seem an extreme position given as some would argue that there are people who are not selfish, and as such, would still live happily with others without laws. This objection in itself is an awfully rare situation particularly in a world of scarce resources, and especially if one was faced with the challenge of finding bare necessities for survival. It could actually be cogent to kill someone before he kills you, that is, if you want to carry on living, Ethics, Law and Justice in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.










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