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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