Refletion On The Value Of Law From The Perspective Of The Theory Of Competition And Balance

The value of law, which is the soul of law and the logic starting point of law study, has played a very important guiding role in legislation. But the existing studies on the value of law are far from satisfaction. Various kinds of value presentations make people rather confused. Law is the social norm that coordinates human contradictions, so it is necessary to analyze the rule of the involvement of law and the essence of law from the perspective of the exploration of basic controdiction of human society. Based on such analysis, we gave a serious reflection on the concept of the value of law, the subject of the value of law and the choosing standard of the value of law. And the reflection made it possible to obtain a scientific judgement of the value of law.Marxism's contradictory theory of production relation illustrated the law of the development of human society from a very important aspect, but the theory cannot fully show the inner law of the progress of the system civilization and spiritual civilization of human society . The present study holds the idea that the conflict between the limitlessness of human needs and the limit of resources is the root of all the existing conflicts in human society, while the conflict between needs and competition is the basic motivation of social development and the conflict between competition and balance is the basic law that controls the consistent development of human society from lower level to higher level. With the advancement of human need hierarchy, the leading means of human competition follow the evolvement process in the sequence of labor, violence, power, stragety, wealth and knowledge. Correspondingly, human society can be divided into six types, the order of which is as follows: labor society, violence society, power society, strategy society, wealth society and knowledge society.Behavior of men tends to expand without any limit so the competition under the natural condition tends to be in chaos and disorder. The contrast between the strong and the weak is a necessary product brought by natural competition. When the law first came into being, it could be neither the reflection of the public will nor the order of the authority. Law is a will dominated by the strong and a contract intiated by the strong to the weak, but, anyway, law is restricted by the mode of human existence. Through getting rid of the existig unreasonable means of competition and limiting unreasonable new competition, law establishes competition relations and orders which are adaptable to the needs of the time. In fact, the progress of human legislation is a process during which nature -powered behavior is consistently restricted, a process during which human being's social attribute acts against its natural attribute and a process during which law acts against and adjusts productivity and the primitive motivation of science and technology.The primary meaning of the value of law is to guide legislation, so the subjects of the value of law should be the strong, that is, the law-makers who decide the specific content of law. The essence of the topic "the Value of Law" is to answer the question: what is law expected to be? The value of law is a kind of everlasting spiritual direction which is embodied in law. The essence of law is not the clarification of its function, but the self-requirement and self-motivation of the subject of the value of law who turns to law as a media and how the law-makers bring law into active play to a maximum extent aided by its natural funtion, thus realize the ethical scale of its due goal. In China's field of law, scholars put forward many value expresses, such as order, freedom, effectiveness, equality, benifit, fairness, power, human rights, profit, law and order, security ,civilization and the development of human beings, etc. These espresses incarnated the function,role and purpose of law in a rather comprehensive way. Some of the espresses reflected the time spirit of law and the value of law of some law departments; others reflected the common appeal of law to a certain degree. But generally speaking , they failed to present the value of law in a proper way in that they failed to show the directing character of the value of law, they were so far away from law that they could not reflect the essence of law, they had unavoidable conflicts and they could not reflect the value commonness of law. What can accurately expresses the value of law should be as follows: reason, self-discipline and justice. Among the three expresses, reason is the basic value, i.e. the unidimensional . value; self-discipline is the core value of law, i.e. the two-dimensional. value; and justice is the highest value of all, i.e. the three-dimensional value.Relatively speaking, reason is the value at the level of thought, self-dicipline at the level of behavior and justice at the level of goal. All the three interrelated expresses have their individual meaning and they cover the value demands of the value expresses put forward by other scholars. Thus, they construct a stereoscopic and strict value system. Among the three values, self-discipline, as the core value, plays a key role in the progress of law and has the most essential meaning as well.The reflection on the value of law from the perspective of the theory of competition and balance, which is based on Marxism's dialectical materialism and directed by the contradiction theory of unity of opposites, especially by the theory about the relation between the principal part and the secondary part, established a brand-new theoretical prospective. The originality of our study lies in the idea that self-discipline is the core value of law and in the establishment of the three-dimensional value system.Our study overcame the tendency to detach the value of law from the stand of the law-makers and from the legal norm and legal facts, thus it is more closely connected with reality. Nowadays, science and technology is developing rapidly, the gap between the poor and the rich keeps broadening, the luxurious producing and consuming is becoming increasingly popular, the environment is worsening and the natural resources are exhausting. In such a society, what we have achieved in our study has revelatory meaning in controlling the direction of the development of law, in supervising law construction of the harmonious society and in establishing sustainable development model of law.