The Limits and Dangers of Civil Disobedience: The Case of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the heart of the American character, evident since our nations birth, is a seeming paradox: Americans take pride in our self-image as a republic of laws and no less pride in our propensity toward righteous disobedience. Why Civil Disobedience Is Morally Justified Essay To say that less radical measures are to be preferred to more radical measures is to say that actions outside established legal and political channels are to be taken only where necessary and only so far as necessary. 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. Civil disobedience is simply not like other acts in which menstand up courageously for their principles. The orthodox definition of civil disobedience notes that civil disobedience is both illegal and civil, takes place in public, involves an act of protest, is nonviolent, is conscientiously-motivated, and involves both acceptance of the legitimacy of the system and submission to arrest and punishment. Kings Achievement. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. ABSTRACT. An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. However, when a human law directs action that flatly contradicts God's commands, Aquinas says that not only is disobedience morally permissible, it is morally required. Because, as Madison put it, the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,. Hacking as Politically Motivated Digital Civil Disobedience: Is When the civil disobedient dis- obeys one law, he invariably subverts all law. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. Evaluating the Ethical Dimensions of Indigenous Civil Resistance A delegation of poor people can walk into a high officials office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. Drawing upon the higher-law tradition of American and western political thought, King argued that to qualify as law in the proper sense, a given statute or ordinance must conform with the principles of justice. While it is plausible to think that unlawful acts of civil disobedience should not, as a moral matter, be punished because of their potential contributions to political debate, it does not follow that those acts are . It involves people coming together to stand against its government or any oppressor, to protest vocally and using all mediums available but without any physical force or violence. 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.[REF]. Resolved: Civil Disobedience in a democracy is morally justified. 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. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. As the Declaration makes clear, however, the right to disobey the laws or decrees of unjust government, whether by civil or uncivil means, must be exercised with great caution. A half-century after the Civil Rights movement, an upsurge in disobedient protest has moved some observers to proclaim a new era of civil disobedience in America, even as the boundary between civil and uncivil disobedience in this latest wave of protests appears increasingly permeable. If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis--vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. Civil Disobedience- an act against a certain law with no violence One thing that comes with civil disobedience is change. And if that official [is nonresponsive], you can say, All right, well wait. And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary., In advocating this radicalized form of civil disobedience, King contended that those who perceive a serious societal injustice have the right to disobey, Even so, Kings remarks relative to the character and motivations of this newly recruited army suggest that here, too, he departed significantly from his earlier account. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. In a general sense, Kings conformity with this precept in the first phase of his activism appears, despite his sometimes eager usage of the language of revolution, in his scrupulous expressions of respect for the principles and institutions established by the American Founders. Finally, it is clear that civil disobedience is not in any way disrespect for the law, because unjust laws are not bad laws, but no laws at all. The eight were not segregationists; they were moderate proponents of gradual integration. Nonviolent protest so conceived may or may not involve actions in violation of positive law, but where such protest. 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. 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. [REF] Finally, in his second-phase advocacy of intensified civil disobediencejustified, he claimed, by the force of the white backlash and the depth of white racism in Americawhat remained of the ethic of redemptive love that animated his first-phase argument? Understand laws before you obey them Yes, but yet slightly no. One cannot say that Kings explanation of the distinction between just and unjust laws suffices in itself to ward off the charges of anarchism leveled by critics. [REF] Nonetheless, it is significant that King stipulated, as a requisite of civil disobedience, that the practitioner must possess a distinctive set of religiously grounded moral qualities, including a firm commitment to a higher, natural and divine law and a faith that suffering in the service of that law can be redemptive for oneself and others. Rawls thus limits justified civil disobedience to cases where a democratic majority has implemented a law that violates a basic liberty right and thus oversteps its authority. 3. 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. His first illustration was offered as a hypothetical, though it has since become a common method in actual protests. 10. When is civil disobedience appropriate? - sj-r.com 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. Peter C. Myers was the 20162017 Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, of the Institute for Constitutional Government, at The Heritage Foundation, and is Professor of Political Science at the University of WisconsinEau Claire. 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). A closer analysis makes clear, however, that it signifies a radical departure from the practice he defended in the Letter. Whereas in that earlier account he explained that civil disobedience must be practiced only for the right reasons, in the right spirit, and by the right people, the mass civil disobedience he advocated in 1967 effects decisive modifications of all three of those regulating conditions. 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. Civil disobedience is justified for many reasons such as moral responsibility, legal attempts to change these unjust laws have failed, and it can be used to publicize an issue. They included the Protestant theology of personalism that he had studied as a graduate student. 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. 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., I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could nameif ten, During my student days at Morehouse, King wrote, I read Thoreaus essay Civil Disobedience for the first time. The result of these shortcomings is that the argument of Kings Letter, while strong and clear enough to identify the injustice of racial segregation and disfranchisement, is also abstract and ambiguous enough to expose a broad range of positive laws to charges of injusticeand therefore, potentially, to acts of disobedient protest. For both Locke and the Founders, however, the ultimate law to which human government is subjectincluding the fundamental legislative authority of constitution-framers and ratifiersis a law beyond human making, the law of nature. 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.[REF]. On what ground could he locate the natural rights of persons, given his denigration of the property righta right affirmed in classical natural-rights philosophy as a direct corollary of the liberty of the person? 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[REF]) or elsewhere in his published work. He proudly described his movement as a mass-action crusade, but by insisting on proper training and character formation, he made clear that not simply anyone was suitable for direct-action protest and civil disobedience: Not all who volunteered could pass our strict tests.[REF]. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. 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. In the Letter, King contended that as applied to his direct-action campaign, the ordinance that the injunction was issued to enforce was a violation of the U.S. Constitution, in particular of the First Amendments guarantee of rights of peaceful assembly and protest. 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. The correction of unjust government may not require radical, thoroughgoing regime changeand in the Declarations teaching of prudence, where such revolutionary change is not required, it is not permitted: Actions to alter unjust government are to be preferred, where possible, to actions taken to abolish it. Such questions reflect more than merely theoretical concerns. For present purposes, the fundamental questions concern whether his judgments to disobey the courts injunction and to justify that disobedience by an appeal to natural and divine law rather than U.S. constitutional law are properly characterized as last resorts, taken in response to a genuine necessity. 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. 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. The Declaration of Independence, as explained above, contains clear criteria for judging just and unjust government, along with a summation of dictates of prudence that yield an endorsement of civil disobedience only in exceptional and compelling circumstances. Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. 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 wake of SARS and H1N1, . In the Declaration, as previously noted, prudence dictates that action to alter or abolish an unjust order may be taken only by necessityonly after patient sufferance of a long train of abuses, wherein repeated Petitions offered in the most humble terms have been answered only by repeated injury., In the Letter, King contended that the history of race in America met and exceeded those criteria. PDF Session 1 Rawls, The Justification of Civil Disobedi What distinguishes In the definition cited above, the general objective of civil disobedience, to effect a change in laws or government policies, encompasses a variety of possible specific objectives, ranging from reform of particular laws or policies to fundamental change in constitutional order. In this respect, his dissatisfaction with the half a loaf gained in previous decades applied also to his movements accomplishments, which marked, in his view, not the end of its work but only the end of the beginning, as President Lyndon Johnson said in anticipation of the Voting Rights Act.[REF]. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive.[REF]. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.. He believed that among the available channels for such demands, action via the court system was at best dilatory and often ineffectual; it needed reinforcement by direct-action, demonstrative protest. government perpetrates or abets clear violations of natural rights, involving clear abuses and/or usurpations; the violations at issue are not isolated or exceptional but occur in a long train indicative of a design to subject their victims to absolute Despotism; the violations, persisting despite repeated petitions by the injured parties, are reasonably judged to be irremediable by any lawful measures; the violations are reasonably judged to be irremediable by any extra-lawful but non- revolutionary measures; the violations are reasonably judged to be remediable by revolutionary action. 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. Is civil disobedience justifiable? - mlive.com 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. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. 8. If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. 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 . Civil disobedience is a form of civil war An act of civil disobedience sets a precedence of breaking the law. Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only so far as necessary. Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: May the Use of Violent Civil 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.[REF], Beyond such simple formulations, King took seriously the objections Kilpatrick, the clergymen, and others raised. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. Kings second main regulating condition, that civil disobedience must be undertaken in the right spirit, means foremost that civil disobedience must convey a proper respect for law. The orthodox definition of civil disobedience notes that civil disobedience is both illegal and civil, takes place in public, involves an act of protest, is nonviolent, is conscientiously-motivated, and involves both acceptance of the legitimacy of the system and submission to arrest and punishment. 6. . The eight were not segregationists; they were moderate proponents of gradual integration. The Right Spirit. Moreover, a broad national consensus now glorifies the Civil Rights movement as a 20th century American revolution, conferring moral prestige on its signature methods of direct-action protest and civil disobedience. DOCX Home - Boone County Schools Civil Disobedience and Conscientious Objection | Oxford Research 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]. 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. Acknowledging the seriousness of any act of lawbreaking, King recognized his responsibility to explain the criteria for judging the injustice of law and the rightfulness of disobedience. Enthusiasts of civil disobedience proper should likewise recall the eruption of hundreds of urban riots in the years 19651968, almost immediately following the civil rights movements moment of greatest triumph. The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. So there are three parts to my definition. It is justifiable, in exceptional circumstances, by the first principles of free, constitutional government, but it is dangerous in that it poses a threat to the rule of law. Such a condition poses a clear danger to the rule of law. In the early Civil Rights Era, the paradigmatic acts of civil disobedience were designed to achieve relatively limited, reformist objectives. Americans trust in government has fallen to historic lows as our partisan divisions and animosities have intensified; In the recent wave of protests and calls for protest one can find semblances of the first approach, but those more closely resembling the second model have predominated. Critics had predicted that the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience would degenerate into uncivil disobedience, marked by lawlessness and violence. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. An unjust law, he continued, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas, is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law or natural law. A law that uplifts human personality is just, and one that degrades human personality is unjust. Governmentally mandated segregation by color is unjust, because it distort[s] the soul and damages the personality, producing in perpetrators and victims false senses of superiority and inferiority.
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