| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | Justifications for Nationality Based Rights and Obligations | >
> | [Revised] Justifications for Nationality Based Rights and Obligations | | | -- By CodyHuyan - 22 Apr 2024 | | | Why do people choose to obey laws of another country? | |
>
> | While nationality-based social contrarian theory sufficiently answers the obligation question, it fails to adequately explain the choice question. One must still make a conscious choice to perform its obligations. In cases where there are less enforcement mechanisms, which can be the case for visitors in a foreign country (i.e. no extradition, short stay lowering chances of being caught), there are more opportunities for one to not obey the law while facing no negative consequence. So why do people still choose to obey laws of a foreign host country, even if the law is different from their home country or that they don’t agree with it? | | | | |
<
< | Conclusion | >
> | Some theorists, such as Yael Tamir, have put forth an associative obligations theory to explain voluntarily assumption of burdens, arguing that the willingness to assume legal obligation derive from people’s sense of responsibility towards members of the community with which they associate. Yet, travelling doesn’t necessarily change one’s association. Travelling to China and choosing to obey their law doesn’t mean I now associate with the Chinese community. Conversely, my association with the U.S. also does not negate the legal obligation upon me to follow Chinese law. | | | | |
>
> | Perhaps, an alternative cosmopolitan theory offers a better justification for the choice question. Rather than independent entities, the world should be viewed as one exhaustive community, where birthright citizenship is nothing more than the same type of contingency that race, gender, or social class are. Nationality, then, is simply a governance mechanism to better facilitate and enforce the rights and obligations each person owes as a citizen of the world. Ultimately, irrespective of individual backgrounds and nationality, we all should be owed a common baseline set of rights as human. This set of rights doesn’t denote a universal moral standard. Rather, each nation exists to cultivate their own unique culture and standards. This baseline set of rules narrowly indicates a bottom line of decency and care that all people should be entitled to, i.e. not being physically hurt by another without a justifiable cause. To respect each other’s culture and rules when temporarily intruding upon one’s community is part of that baseline decency we owe each other. Thus even when there are discrepancies and disagreements with foreign law, people often choose to obey it as long as the disagreement is not material. | | | | |
>
> | The Role of Nationality | | | | |
<
< |
You need a draft that is not more than 1,000 words. This is at least 8% too long. | >
> | In addition to its pragmatic function as the source of legal authority, nations also exist to formulate communities and promote cultural diversity. Just like race or religion based communities within a country can have their own unique rules and preferences additional to legal national requirements, each nation also creates communal norms above the baseline mandated by the world at large. These cultures and norms inform the fundamental values of an individual. When one faces discrepancies or disagreement with laws in a foreign country, the materiality of such discrepancy and whether it is “worth it” to break the law for what they believe to be righteous is dictated by their nationality and values associated. Worthiness obviously requires a more comprehensive inquiry into the costs of disobedience, which is not addressed here, but the anticipated utility from disobedience is largely influenced by the social, culture, and political backgrounds that one grows up in. While nationality is not the only factor as religion, race, social class, or any similar contingencies will have a bearing on it, it plays a foundational role as a nation’s rules of law contours the outer boundaries of one’s perspective. | | | | |
<
< | It should not be hard to cut. When choosing to re-use prior work, you should have decided to rewrite it completely. This isn't a book report about Yael Tamir anymore. Your draft should frame a question sharply. From a lawyer's perspective, which is the one you now inhabit, this is an inquiry into the source of our obligation to obey law, and how "nationality" relates to it. Rather than being a discussion about social contractarianism and liberal theory, it asks why I obey Dutch law when I am in the Netherlands, even though I have a US passport and obey US law when I am at home. The answer is not that I belong to the Dutch when I am there, or that I have associated Dutch-ness, or that I am afraid of being sent to Dutch prison or being beaten by a Dutch policeman. But those might explain why I obey Chinese law in China, or why I broke Soviet law in the Soviet Union. You learned something once, and here we are using that learning in a new way another time. Let's try a draft that acknowledges more fully what is new.
| >
> | I choose to obey China’s ban on marijuana, but maybe, if my freedom of speech is on the line instead, I will choose to break the law. | | |
|
|