First, it wrongly presupposes that committing civil disobedience is morally permissible as a general matter of moral principle. Civil disobedience presents the ultimate respect for the existing order. To convey the proper respect for law, one must obey as much of the law as possible. 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. The training that protesters received was rigorous in itself, but the moral formation King judged requisite to nonviolent protest and properly civil disobedience required more than any relatively brief workshop could produce. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? I do not share Jason's optimism concerning the ease of questions surrounding civil . First, I argue that, in an otherwise legitimate state, civil disobedience is morally justified or excusable only in narrowly defined circumstances. So understood, Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. The moral justification of civil disobedience is context sensitive; it should be restricted to a certain situation when there is a defect in the legal system, and the problem that could not be resolve through the legitimate way. In the wake of SARS and H1N1, . Granted, the commitment pledge did not quite signify a religious test for participation; it required meditation on Jesuss teaching, not worship of Jesus, and it required prayer to a God of love, not necessarily to the God Christians recognize. Since no one knows the answer if civil disobedient will ever be justified, Brian Kogelmann said, "one's act of civil disobedience may result in horrible consequences might give one a moral reason to not commit the act of civil disobedience, a moral reason to obey the law." (Kogelmann). As King rightly understood, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (1) for the right reasons; (2) in the right spirit; and (3) by the right people. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. situations in which civil disobedience would be justified; among his justifications is the need to preserve moral integrity, combat immorality, and promote positive social reform.1 Still many other philosophers, including Socrates, believed there could be no moral justification for civil disobedience. Many types of objections to civil disobedience have been raised, often based on the view that citizens in a democracy are obliged to obey the 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. Critics argue that it promotes lawlessness and undermines the rule of . An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. Is civil disobedience wrong? [REF], The dangers were sufficiently great that the average person, naturally concerned for the preservation of life and limb, could not be presumed willing or able to brave them. ) or https:// means youve safely connected to the .gov website. Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. For present purposes, however, King serves as a source of useful lessons in both positive and negative ways. He then turned to their specific objection to the tactic of civil disobedience. [REF] At bottom, it was this deep mistrust for merely partial, preparatory, or ephemeral gains that moved him to consider civil disobedience a moral imperative. By attaching to the practice of civil disobedience the regulatory conditions that he described in the Letter, King helped contain disorders that might otherwise have so expanded as to scuttle the possibility of meaningful reform. LockA locked padlock A Debate About Whether or Not Civil Disobedience Is Justified and Under What Circumstances . One might further suggest that even in the first phase of his activism, Kings actions and his rhetoric did not fully accord with the strict criteria for civil disobedience that he adumbrated in the Letter. Critics have a point in charging that King bore a measure of responsibility for the eruptions of lawlessness that would begin to sweep U.S. cities from 19651968, even as the direct-action movement was achieving its greatest triumphs. 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). 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. Its aim is to make that society more just, and justice is a stabilizing influence. Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free. This fact, along with the profession of nonviolence, helps explain the mainstream legitimacy accorded such acts, but it also means that civil disobedience so conceived may pose a greater threat to Americas republican constitutional order than would a conception of civil disobedience as an inherently revolutionary practice. Civil disobedience is often characterized as a conscientious act of illegal protest that people engage in to communicate their opposition to law or government policy. Mindful of the difficulties involved, King wrote, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. 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 . At first glance, this suggests that either deontology or virtue ethics, or a combination of both, could be well-suited to form a theoretical basis on which Sioux tribes chose to peacefully oppose DAPL; however, the normative moral approach with the strongest claim to influence over the employment of civil disobedience, in this case, remains . 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. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. Then, the action taken has to be non-violent. 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. Again, the justification of civil disobedience in this kind of case depends on the particulars. 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. As Kings own legacy reveals, however, civil disobedience is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its practical effects. What be important for present purposes a that this ground is sufficient for justified civil 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. Of this venerable right, the practice of civil disobedience is extolled by its proponents as an ingeniously conceived varianta finely calibrated method of protest, at once safe and effectivenot so radical as needlessly to unsettle an established order and just radical enough to remediate governmental or societal injustices. Online. In addition to being nonviolent, it must proceed from a devotion to the ideal of moral community. Sometimes, for the greater good of your city, community, state, country, continent, or even the world, laws must be broken. 10. The protests he led and supported did not incite violence so much as they exposed pre-existing violence to the view of a national public. Critics had predicted that the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience would degenerate into uncivil disobedience, marked by lawlessness and violence. Famous examples include Gandhi's Salt March in 1930, Rosa Parks's refusal in 1955 to give up her bus . a design to restore or to create a bond of community between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of the injustice at issue. To practice civil disobedience only where necessary means, in the precise sense, to practice it as a next-to-last resort, short only of uncivil or violent resistance to tyranny. It is plainly at odds with his insistence on the correspondence of moral ends and moral means. In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. [REF] If we obey this injunction, he concluded, we are out of business.[REF]. Revolution, the outermost extreme among acts of protest or resistance, is justified, according to the Declaration, only where all of the following conditions are present: Informing the Declarations admonition of prudence is the rule that revolutionary actions are to be taken only as a last resortonly in acquiescence to necessity, as the Declaration states, to the end of correcting injustice. At this point arises the issue of civil disobedience. The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. [2] 10. JoanSpero and Jeffrey Hart, "Democracy." The Politics of International Economic Relations. Whether dissension prefer one run of protest to another depends upon the particular historical . These prudential regulations circumscribing the right to revolution apply similarly to acts of civil disobedience. 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. However, the climate necessity defense is not without controversy. To gain our bearings amid todays protests, characterized more by disruption and coercion than persuasion, we should look beyond contemporary justifications and return to the best of Kings thinkingand beyond King, to the understanding of civil disobedience grounded in Americas first principles. However, none of these objections are decisive against every act of civil justification. 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. 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). I urge you to look at . They included the Protestant theology of personalism that he had studied as a graduate student,[REF] the philosophy of Aquinas, and the charter of liberty that he described as a repository of Americas sacred values, the Declaration of Independence.[REF] Those sources contain overlapping (but not identical) accounts of the moral law and its basis, and King failed to explain precisely what he drew from each, how they were compatible with one another, or their order of priority in his argument. 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 . However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706, United States. Their appeal provided a perfect occasion for a response from King, who with other movement leaders had been contemplating, since a previous campaign in Albany, Georgia, the composition of a prison epistle to serve as a manifesto for their movement. 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. 33 Such exposure is a condition to be avoided at all costs; to escape or avoid it is the primary objective in the formation of political society. 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. Complications arise foremost from the fact that King did not hold a unitary and coherent position on civil disobedience. This analysis of the nature and moral justification of civil disobedience notes that the term has been used in varying ways and proposes a wider definition than the one that is often used. In the Declaration of Independence, the ultimate recourse is a right, again where circumstances dictate, to full-blown revolution: Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [its proper] ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government., Further, it should be clear that the imperative subjection to the rule of law applies no less to the people themselves, as represented by a ruling majority, than to government. 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 . For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. However paradoxical it might appear, Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. Their appeal provided a perfect occasion for a response from King, who with other movement leaders had been contemplating, since a previous campaign in Albany, Georgia, the composition of a prison epistle to serve as a manifesto for their movement. It had been raised not only by moderate southern whites such as the eight clergymen but also by defenders of segregation and by some conservative, moderate, and even liberal black supporters of the cause. They are to be conceived in the Declarations spirit of justice and consanguinity, and likewise in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln (We are not enemies, but friends. 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?
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