Human Law and Conscience - Essay Example

This research will begin with the statement that conscience can be regarded as a set of moral convictions arising from traditional and spiritual beliefs, which is invoked and defined by the individual himself. Unlike the structural Human Laws, which includes both the civil laws and ecclesiastical laws, conscience is a subjective concept that holds the possibility of implicating total sovereignty over these human laws. Most importantly, the value of human conscience has a direct influence on the individual’s expression of denial or compliance with the human laws.

However, the conflict between this individual conscience and human laws is inevitable. Exercising one’s own conscience by involving or refusing to the government that enforces unfair policies is one of the primary right and obligation for any citizen to act upon. There are many scholars and theorists who express the civil disobedience in the light of human conscience. Civil disobedience can be regarded as a necessary expression of human conscience and morality towards unjust laws. The concept of the right to resistance has a significant importance when the government policies turn out to be unjust or immortal towards the society.

This would help in reconfiguring the laws of the State to make it more equitable and less onerous towards its treatment of the community as a whole. According to Henry David Thoreau, the morality of individual acts can possibly outweigh the consequences of civil disobedience against the severity of the injustice. It can be asserted that acting on civil disobedience does not undermine the power of democracy but it reinforces the values of liberty and deference. In circumstances when the human laws or government policies become an intrusive power, stifling the people’s rights, civil disobedience is acceptable by all means that would recognize the freedom of every individual.

Fighting against inequality within a community has to be witnessed through the inborn, unwritten law of one’s conscience rather than inferring from the human laws that actually created it in the first place.