civil disobedience is not morally justified

Against his critics, King insisted that civil disobedience signifies no disrespect but, to the contrary, the highest respect for law.[REF] For King, as in the logic of the Declaration, civil disobedience may be practiced only where necessary and only so far as necessary to the purpose of reforming an unjust human law. In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. is civil disobedience in a democracy morally justified?.pdf One might also discern in Kings eagerness to deploy the language of revolution and natural rights in preference to that of constitutional law a certain zeal for revolution at odds with his insistence on respect for positive law. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. Thus originated the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.[REF], The Objections to Civil Disobedience. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. Note that in his call for a more mature form of civil disobedience, he emphasized the exercise of force aimed at interrupting societys functioning at some key point., Kings illustrations of the sort of actions he envisioned are useful in clarifying the distinction. The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. Note that in his call for a more mature form of civil disobedience, he emphasized the exercise of force aimed at interrupting societys functioning at some key point.[REF] In the Letter, King explained civil disobedience as a form of moral suasion, designed to arouse the conscience of the community.[REF] The earlier model of civil disobedience thus contrasts sharply with the model King later proposed, which was not demonstrative or persuasive in character but instead disruptive and coercive and, moreover, targeted not unjust laws but instead just laws necessary to the ordinary functioning of society. Such behavior would only hurt the system. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, King reported, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform . Even where it proves necessary to disobey an unjust law, to disobey the law in its entirety may be unnecessary to the purpose of reformand indeed may conflict with that purpose. All plausibly viable lawful alternatives are to be attempted prior to the adoption of extra-lawful measures, just as all plausibly viable peaceful means are to be employed prior to any recourse to violent force. Therefore, a more appropriate definition is that civil disobedience is a public act that deliberately contravenes a law, that is publicly-performed, and that occurs in awareness that an arrest and a penalty are likely. Let me explain. By this means, his admirers might plausibly argue, King acknowledged the seriousness of critics major concern and effectively addressed it. Civil Disobedience: Are We Morally Obliged to Obey Unjust Laws? Those evils did ensuebut as King emphasized, they came in the main from the actions of segregations defenders, not from its protesters. Peter Suber, "Civil Disobedience" - Harvard University When and How Should We Respond to Unjust Laws? A Thomistic Analysis of is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as "Refusal to obey governmental demands or commands, especially as a nonviolent and usually collective mean. Why is civil disobedience not morally justified? - Digglicious.com Monumental Disappointments in Our Public Spaces. First, the law has to be unjust and that has to be demonstrated. In his very first public speech (as a prizewinner in his high schools oratory contest), King protested that decades after Emancipation, Black America still lives in chains. For the remainder of his secondary and advanced education, he searched for the proper means, as he put it in that initial speech, to cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.[REF]. Kings apologetic discussion of the rioting raises troubling questions. Protests against domestic injustices are to be conceived with a view toward preserving or restoring conditions of basic concord. It is not clear that a patient reliance on the judicial process in the Birmingham campaign would have doomed the direct-action movement to failure, as King feared. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. Although the enlistees in that new army might receive training similar to what their first-phase predecessors received, the fact remains that the latter, drawn substantially from a population of southern churchgoers imbued with a Christian ethic of love and service, were beneficiaries of a moral heritage that many of those solicited for the later phase did not share. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.[REF]. 91 reference notes. Plato's topic on circumstances in morally permissible disobedience, I shall arguing, anticipates that approach. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way.[REF], Violent in itself, that injustice was in Kings view also violent in its emerging effectsabove all in the rioting that began in Watts just days after the Voting Rights Act became law and spread, in the two years thereafter, to hundreds of cities across the U.S. As was the case in Watts, the riots were often precipitated by disputes involving policebut evidence suggests that neither charges of police brutality nor discontentment at socioeconomic deprivation was the predominant cause. Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . An unjust law is no law at all, King declared, holding it to be both a right and a moral duty to disobey any such measure: [O]ne has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.. Civil disobedience is justified if the laws enacted by the majority deny the liberty of others. The very definition of a Republic, John Adams remarked, is an Empire of Laws, and not of menwords he wrote in the spring of 1776, even as his compatriots were engaged in an armed uprising that they as a people, with Adamss own assistance, would shortly thereafter declare to be revolutionary and justified by a law higher than any human law. To gain a full, sympathetic understanding of Kings position, it is necessary, as King scholar Jonathan Rieder has commented, to think concretely about the distinction: In Birmingham, the lawbreakers [castrated] a black man; they bomb[ed] ordinary families . Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. Those two statutes constitute the most ambitious and effective civil- and political-rights guarantees in the nations history, and their enactment coincides with the onset of a profound reformation in Americans moral sentiments about race relations. Remember always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliationnot victory. Is there any tenable moral distinction between the intimidation he equivocally decried and the disruption and coercion he advocated as elements of his mature form of civil disobedience? In Kings account, therefore, justice entails the principle of equality under law, and legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed. Conceiving of civil disobedience as a willing submission of self to a higher discipline, King made clear that this mode of protest carried a high risk. Yet, however glorious its historical associations and however appealing it may be on its face, the idea is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its potential practical effects. He was less successful, however, in clarifying the ideas of personhood and equality that were to supply the basis and the limiting principle for claims of rights and of rights violations. Among the most striking features of the city riots, he argued, was that the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people. The overwhelming majority of people killed during the riots, he went on, were protesters killed by law enforcement officers. LD Debate: Civil Disobedience - Welcome to My Page To its proponents, the idea of civil disobedience represents a compelling linkage of morality and efficacy, a happy marriage of moral ends to moral means in the pursuit of social or political reform. 10. 5. Territories Financial Support Center (TFSC), Tribal Financial Management Center (TFMC). Kings Classic Exposition of Civil Disobedience: The Letter from Birmingham Jail, On Friday, April 10, 1963Good FridayKing marched purposefully to a Birmingham jail cell, where he was confined for leading a protest march in violation of a local ordinance. So far as it is dissociated from the objective of full, fundamental regime change, it would become more widely available and appealing as a means of mere reform, and thus normalized, it would tend to act over time to corrode popular respect for the rule of law. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. Broadly defined, "civil disobedience" denotes "a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies."4 The. In cases of reformist no less than of revolutionary civil disobedience, it is therefore imperative to define clearly and to circumscribe closely the conditions under which this mode of protest is warranted. Civil Disobedience Can Be Justified - DebateWise That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. This idea of rightful disobedience has inspired protests in various degrees and kinds in America ever since the Boston Tea Party, and it continues to inspire such actions even to the present day. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way . Ground of Obedience. That same day, the local newspaper published a public letter addressed to King and his fellow protesters, written by a group of eight Birmingham clergy (seven Christian pastors and one rabbi). In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? [We] will move on Washington, he resolved, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action . Civil Disobedience, Costly Signals, and Leveraging Injustice Whatever the broader causes, the Watts riots left 34 people dead and over 1,000 injured. So understood, Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. When Locke said the ruling power ought to govern by law, he meant that the law must rule so that both the people may know their duty and the rulers too kept within their bounds.. LockA locked padlock He offered a second illustration in the form of a direct suggestion. As Kings own legacy reveals, however, civil disobedience is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its practical effects. [REF], The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. The insistence on accepting the prescribed penalty for disobedience was integral to Kings larger design of presenting to the broad American public the sharpest possible contrast between the characteristically lawful practitioners of disobedience and the lawless defenders of the local statutes and ordinances. Like Gandhi, King believed that citizens have a duty to engage in . The epistemic situation of the would-be defiant is more difficult. Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free. With Selma and the Voting Rights Act, King wrote in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Civil Disobedience and Americas First Principles. PDF Session 1 Rawls, The Justification of Civil Disobedi What distinguishes First, it wrongly presupposes that committing civil disobedience is morally permissible as a general matter of moral principle. Civil disobedience and conscientious objection are social practices motivated by moral and political beliefs. The Right People. Two years later, a riot in Detroit wrought even greater destruction.[REF]. The legislative must be the primary, supreme power because the alternative to legislative supremacy is subjection to the arbitrary will of anotherto the will of an unchecked, potentially despotic prince or ruling class. This means that the practitioner of civil disobedience must judge properly in identifying unjust laws as the justification for disobedience. In the Founders design, of course, the instrument for specifying those delegations is the U.S. Constitution, promulgated as the higher law to which the ruling authority is subject. Is civil disobedience wrong? An enactment to which lawmakers subjected only others, not themselves, would be no true law, and a similar disqualification would apply to any legislation imposed upon an unjustly disfranchised portion of the population.[REF]. A Theory of Civil Disobedience in No Less Than 10 Minutes Kings distinction between disobedience that is evasive or defiant and disobedience marked by acceptance of the authority of law is vividly meaningful in context. In a 1960 televised debate with King, the segregationist James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the, Reduced to its essence, Kings response appears in a simple, if paradoxical formulation: Civil disobedience is not lawlessness but instead a higher form of lawfulness. It is plainly at odds with his insistence on the correspondence of moral ends and moral means. First, I argue that, in an otherwise legitimate state, civil disobedience is morally justified or excusable only in narrowly defined circumstances. An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. Therefore I will keep the following ten commandments: 1. PDF The LD File - Weebly But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation. Nor was there a legitimate opportunity for effecting change by the normal electoral process: Throughout Alabama all typesof devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters., In sum, King argued, we had no alternative but to engage in street protests, andafter Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor obtained an anti-demonstration injunction from an Alabama courtno alternative but to engage in civil disobedience. To read his Letter from Birmingham Jail with particular attention to this conservative dimension of his argument may therefore serve to initiate a renewed and enhanced public appreciation of the rule of law, both of its basis and its centrality to the health of Americas constitutional republic. Civil disobedience is variously described as an act by which "one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community" (Rawls 1999, 320), as "a plea for reconsideration" (Singer 1973, 84-92), and as a "symbolic appeal to the capacity for reason and sense of justice of the majority" (Habermas 1985, 99). Judged by its main objectives of reforming the law and strengthening the bonds of moral community, Kings direct-action protest movement of the 1950s and early 1960s appears to have been a resounding success. Civil disobedience is a symbolic or ritualistic violation of the law rather than a rejection of the system as a whole. Fordham Law Review - Fordham University All will bear in mind this sacred principle, Thomas Jefferson noted, that the will of the majority to be rightful must be reasonable, and to be reasonable it must respect the equal rights of the minority. There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance., A still more powerful influence was Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose teaching King discovered as a seminary student a few years thereafter. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to co-operate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. [REF], Even after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, King believed, America remained in a state of social emergency, a desperate and worsening situation even more serious than the country had faced in 1963. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. Civil Disobedience and Conscientious Objection | Oxford Research Civil disobedience presents the ultimate respect for the existing order. It makes governments more accountable Sometimes it's the only tool in the box Sometimes it's the only way to publicise an issue Sometimes the law is wrong. [REF] For the same reason, they are to embody the greatest respect for man-made positive laws that circumstances permit. That is not to say that he fully met that responsibility, either in the Letter (which he continued to compose and revise after his release. The Problem of Civil Disobedience Subject: Politics & Government Study Level: College Words: 1375. In this way both the disobedience and the acceptance of the penalty are essential to Kings effort to reform the law by means of moral suasion. Kings later conception departs, too, from his earlier insistence that civil disobedience must be practiced in a spirit of respect for law, respect for democratic governance, and redemptive good will, manifesting a desire for reconciliation with ones erstwhile adversaries. Dissatisfied with Johnsons War on Poverty, King called for a multifaceted real war on poverty designed to provide jobs, income, and housing for all in need of them: in sum, a new economic deal for the poor, consisting in a massive, new national program.[REF]. However, from an outside perspective, the justifications are analyzed through the values of the individual, organization or government. Finally, as for the principle that civil disobedience may be practiced only by people of properly formed character, Kings call for an expanded and disruptive campaign of civil disobedience did include a training period. There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. Americans simultaneous devotion to law and insistence on a right to disobey unjust laws signifies a fruitful tension in American principles, inherent in our foundational idea of the rule of law. Justified or not, civil disobedience is liable to legal punishment. Why Civil Disobedience Is Morally Justified Essay The practice of civil disobedience required a special kind of personmeaning, in most cases, a specially trained kind of person. But this is not all: many theorists argue that civil disobedience is compatible with the moral duty to obey. 32 Civil disobedience is justified because it promotes human dignity, promotes the idea that the government is limited in 33 Civil disobedience proclaims that humans have dignity. Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920's and 1930's were pivotal factors in attaining independence. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS It was integral, in other words, to his larger design of exposing the stark conflict between local positive laws sustaining racial subordination and the moral laws of nature. In those facts, he discerned an unmistakable pattern, in which a handful of Negroes used gunfire substantially to intimidate, not to kill; and all of the other participants had a different targetproperty. On closer examination, then, the riots were actually characterized by a restraint that gave cause for hopefulness. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in Federalist No. King held further acts of civil disobedience to be warranted because he regarded prevailing conditions of poverty and rising discontentment as effects of a set of terrible economic injustices no less grievous and even more widespread than the wrongs of the Jim Crow regime: In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income . Nonetheless, critics of Kings arguments and actions relative to civil disobedience even in this more successful phase of his career have a point in warning of their tendency to propagate disrespect for law and an enthusiasm for (purportedly) righteous disobedience. Our impatience, he said, was legitimate and unavoidable. The implication is that civil disobedience was undertaken as a last, nonviolent resort and was justified as such. Two main considerations, however, convinced King of the immediate necessity of civil disobedience in the Birmingham campaign. To gain a full, sympathetic understanding of Kings position, it is necessary, as King scholar Jonathan Rieder has commented, to think concretely about the distinction: In Birmingham, the lawbreakers [castrated] a black man; they bomb[ed] ordinary families . Because, as Madison put it, the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,[REF] the doctrine of a right to resist unjust government carries the danger that it might itself be put to unjust uses and thus might operate to undermine the rule of law. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Courts decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools [o]ne may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?[REF], The objection was familiar to King. It is crucial to bear in mind that as the movement proceeded from its first to its second phase, two very different models of civil disobedience emerged. JoanSpero and Jeffrey Hart, "Democracy." The Politics of International Economic Relations. Its primary finding may be summarized in this lesson: Civil disobedience is justifiable but dangerous. Is civil disobedience wrong? - Studybuff Mindful of the difficulties involved, King wrote, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. Their letter, entitled An Appeal to Law and Order and Common Sense, urged the protesters to desist, arguing that direct-action street protests, especially those involving lawbreaking, were unhelpful as means for repairing race relations in Birmingham. Absolute arbitrary power, Locke maintained, is equivalent to governing without settled standing laws, and to be subject to it is to be exposed to the worst evils of a state of war with another. Readers receive only very limited guidance as to how they are to judge, amid a wide range of plausible interpretive possibilities, what sorts of laws work to uplift or to degrade human personality.

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