Human social life is governed by rules of various types. Our activities would
lead to chaos if we did not comply with a standard that defined certain types of
behavior as appropriate in certain contexts and others a inappropriate.
To start with, we must distinguish between social rules and legal rules. On the
one hand, social rules should be followed by people for a better coexistence and its
failure does not imply an institutionalized sanction, but they have some kind of
recrimination or social reproach. On the other hand, legal rules are the rules contained
in regulations or ordinances, its violation is an illegal act and carries penalties of a
financial or administrative type
Legal rules tend to the improvement of social order while morality tends to
improvement of each individual. For this reason, I consider really important that moral
behavior is also controlled by government laws, because if we get a good moral
behavior it will be easier to control society as a whole. Nonetheless, it would be very
difficult to establish general laws for moral behavior, considering that rules vary from
one culture to another and what is considered normal in a particular context is seen as
unusual in another.
To conclude, I believe that doing a good study of every social norm and
applying a law to punish non-compliance we can improve the world situation. For
example, the role of women here is very different from its role in the Islamic world. The
woman is considered inferior, there is a great male chauvinism that can normally end in
death. We could condemn such behavior “male chauvinism” and so we would rather not
have to condemn several men for killing their wives.