That the idea of penal codes was well established at the dawn of the philosophical era is further confirmed by Confucius famous arguments against the rule of law and punishment. If you guide with the punishment institutions, people will do what is right, but they will not develop shame. If you guide them with conventional codes of behavior and order them with virtuosity, they will have a sense of shame and rule themselves. Let us call this argument Confucius' psychological objection to penal codes. It is an argument that legal punishment is, in the long term, a self-defeating strategy for achieving social order.
Social order is more likely to come from a moral education that instills good character in people.
There is another line of Confucian argument against rule of law, however. This one we can call the interpretive objection. Its core is a suspicion of using fixed codes of conduct to guide behavior. The point is that using any code to guide behavior requires interpretation. The Confucian faction, for partisan and theoretical reasons, argued for a monopoly on interpretation.