Legal Issues in Human Essence - Essay Example

That is the reason why we have the law, a set of principles, duties and obligations articulated by the people’s representatives. Because people are essentially different, not everybody agrees with the law; but for the law to work, everybody must abide by it. Yes, it is true that in this great country of ours, each person is free to abide by the dictates of his conscience; but this has a limit, and the limit is fixed by law. If people were excused from following the law because they did not believe in it, then the law would be useless, and anarchy would result. The Latin maxim, Dura lex sed lex, is thus highly appropriate in this regard; it means, “The law may be harsh, but it is the law”.

When a country is made up of people of the same race, religion, cultural background, and other such attributes, then the conflict among them would fall along personal traits. But where differences in race, religion, cultural background, and other such attributes exist, then there is added basis by which to perceive imagined injustices.

The affirmative action law, however, is different in that it makes the differences in racial, cultural, or even gender attributes the basis for making a favourable decision on employment. No longer is it just to state that “no distinction must be made”, but that a distinction should be made precisely on that basis, except where the distinction used to be negative because of prejudice, it is now mandated to be positive by force of law. This is where injustice is alleged.

In the bigger picture, however, it appears that at least for now, we do need affirmative action.  Even today, our managers in multinational corporations still harbour, sometimes unintentionally, stereotypical images of people who differ in race, creed or nationality (Egan & Benedick, 2008, p. 388). The hardwiring of centuries of cultural programming has ingrained in the privileged majority a set of convictions that will take a protracted amount of time to change, or require the compelling power of the law to change more quickly. To effect this change, institutional support is necessary, such as the industry engagement of minorities (NRN, 2009). The aim is to break down the social mindset for not just lip service to individual equality, but true multicultural diversity, to become the modern social paradigm.

This being said, I believe that while affirmative action is necessary now, it will be defensible as just and equitable only for a temporary period It is supposed to attain the social state wherein diversity is commonly accepted, not merely tolerated. When such a state has been attained, persons whose ancestors had been set back by prejudice should already have overcome such setback, and would be at equal footing with the “majority”. It is at such time that affirmative action will lose the reason for its existence, and thus should lapse into obscurity or be repealed by law.