[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. Mindful of the dangers in an excessively permissive justification, he rejected the sort of disobedience that would lead to anarchy and explained his own practice in terms that indicate an earnest intention to negate or minimize any anarchic effects. Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. Civil Disobedience, Environmental Protest and the Rule of 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. Noting that the injunction method was proving an effective tool for segregationists in thwarting blacks rights to peaceful protest, King therefore decided to reject his fathers advice to submit to the courts ruling. Plato's topic on circumstances in morally permissible disobedience, I shall arguing, anticipates that approach. 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. 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. 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. People. 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.. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. 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. Admirers of King and the movement might contend further that these successes were achieved by generally peaceful means, without effecting lasting ruptures in civil order in the southern venues in which protesters campaigned. Recent protesters have been generally heedless of the obligation to compose well-reasoned, empirically careful, rights-based arguments to support the justice of their cause, and their protests have consisted largely in efforts at disruption and coercion rather than persuasion. Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920's and 1930's were pivotal factors in attaining independence. [REF], During my student days at Morehouse, King wrote, I read Thoreaus essay Civil Disobedience for the first time. First was the famous essay by Thoreau, who therein declared: I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could nameif ten honest men only, ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. 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? 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. 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. The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. To the contrary, it signifies a purposeful encroachment on others rights and interests as members of civil society. 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. He reiterated his calls for nonviolent action, including civil disobedience, but this time in a significantly modified form. Thoreau Kings distinction between disobedience that is evasive or defiant and disobedience marked by acceptance of the authority of law is vividly meaningful in context. Despite its shortcomings, the initial model, epitomized in Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, was marked by a high degree of moral discipline, by professions of conscientious respect for law and for Americas founding principles, and, not by mere coincidence, a remarkable degree of success in achieving its practical objectives. 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. 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. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706, United States. In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. 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. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. Bull Connor, the chief lawman, colluded with the Klan so they could carry out bloody mayhem on Freedom Riders. Given the context, it would seem a gross distortion of perspective to see in Kings and his fellow protesters actions a danger to law and order comparable to that posed by pro-segregation extremists. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. Civil disobedience was practiced to great effect by people such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Here, for King, are the primary and overarching conditions of morally sound protest: As a subclass of nonviolent protest, civil disobedience in Kings understanding is marked by: Kings awareness of the power of civil disobedience as a protest method quickened in the course of his first nonviolent direct-action campaign, the Montgomery bus boycott, and developed further as he reflected on the sit-in movement initiated by black college students in early 1960. 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. and we are entering the area of human rights.[REF] To say that Kings later claims about rights fall outside Americas constitutional tradition is not necessarily to discredit them, but by construing poverty itself as indicative of injustice, irrespective of any action or inaction by those who suffer it, he implicitly placed rights on an infirm foundation. Civil disobedience is a form of protest in which protestors deliberately violate a law. The Problem of Civil Disobedience Subject: Politics & Government Study Level: College Words: 1375. Obedience and Disobedience in Plato's Crito and the Apology Like slavery in this respect, segregation violates the moral law by relegating persons to the status of things.[REF] Such practices and the positive laws that support them do violence to the divine and natural order by denying to some classes of human beings the status of full moral humanity or personhood. 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. He attended a talk on Gandhis life and teaching and found the message so profound and electrifying that he immediately bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi. 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. Such protest must be nonviolent and must be animated by a spirit of love for the perpetrators of the injustice against which one protests. The people in such circumstances hold rights to petition and protest, and should those appeals prove unavailing, to take action to effect such changes as are needed. Mindful of the difficulties involved, King wrote, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. 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. That earlier argument, the argument presented in the Letter, conforms for the most part with the closely circumscribed idea of civil disobedience supported by the Founders understanding of natural rights and the rule of law. 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.[REF]. Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only so far as necessary. The difficulty appears first in the fact that, as King at times acknowledged, his expansive, second-phase conception of rights was rooted in principles outside Americas constitutional tradition: We have left the realm of constitutional rights, he remarked in Where Do We Go From Here? 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. Against their own purposes, they corroborate warnings by critics to the effect that acts of purportedly civil disobedience are likely to turn lawless and violent.[REF]. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. 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. But this is not all: many theorists argue that civil disobedience is compatible with the moral duty to obey. Thus, civil disobedience may be morally justified, even in a democracy. This framing is evident in the classical liberal definition that one can find in the work of the most influential theorists of civil disobedience such as John Rawls (1971), Ronald Dworkin (1985), and, to a lesser extent, Jrgen Habermas (1985): civil disobedience occurs when citizens break the law in public, nonviolent, morally justified, and . The conventional definition of civil disobedience leaves open some basic and challenging questions concerning its justifying causes and its permissible scope and objectives. Mindful of the same socioeconomic conditions that alarmed King, Bayard Rustin (Kings longtime adviser and perhaps the movements shrewdest tactician and organizer) called for activism within the regular democratic processes of petition, electoral persuasion, and voting; he endorsed a strategic turn toward political action and a temporary curtailment of mass demonstrations., King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS AFF (Civil Disobedience is morally justified in a democracy) Value: Criteria: AFF CONSTRUCTION: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified because _____ a. Contention 1: Necessity i. 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. 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. Civil Disobedience, Costly Signals, and Leveraging Injustice If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. King concluded: If one can find a core of nonviolence toward persons, even during the riots when emotions were exploding, it means that nonviolence should not be written off for the future as a force in Negro life.[REF]. American civil disobedience in the theory and practice of Martin Luther King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. In the endeavor to fulfill the law, the would-be reformer must be properly mindful of the danger of destroying it. 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. It is difficult to imagine the change they affected coming about any other way - or certainly as quickly. Civil disobedience must convey a respect for the authority of law as an indispensable and inherently fragile instrument of human governance, no less than for the rational principles from which the law must ultimately derive. 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. Beginning in the mid-20th century, however, a significant modification of the idea has gained legitimacy and prestige in this country and around the world, as many Americans and others have become persuaded that organized disobedience can be not only rightful and, in a higher sense, lawful, but also, 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., In his major statement on civil disobedience, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote that the practitioner of civil disobedience does not disregard or undervalue the rule of law but, to the contrary, express[es] the highest respect for law., 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. 2. The difficulty appears first in the fact that, as King at times acknowledged, his expansive, second-phase conception of rights was rooted in principles outside Americas constitutional tradition: We have left the realm of constitutional rights, he remarked in, A corollary of Kings earlier position that civil disobedience may be practiced only where necessary is that such disobedience should cease as soon as possiblei.e., as soon as the necessary reforms are achieved or lawful, political avenues to their achievement become available. Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society . A concern about injustice was a minimum condition, but King insisted that civil disobedience must be animated also by an ethic of love and service for other human beings, including perpetrators as well as primary victims of injustice. 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. 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]. In sum, at the present moment in American public life, the practice of purportedly civil disobedience is becoming increasingly normalized even as its proper basis, tactics, and objectives are subject to increasing confusion. 19 Major Pros and Cons of Civil Disobedience - ConnectUS Believing that only prompt remedial action by the federal government could bring peace to the cities, he amplified his demands for the enactment of his phase two, antipoverty measures as an emergency program. Congresss failure to enact that program angered him; he called it a provocation and ascribed it to a white backlash indicative of a broader and deeper racism among whites than he had previously estimated. The later model was altogether more problematic: less respectful of law, of the moral sentiments of the American public, and of democratic government, and less grounded in the American tradition of natural-rights liberalism. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. Describing his plan to recruit three thousand of the poorest citizens from various urban and rural areas to participate in a Poor Peoples March on Washington, he indicated that this nonviolent army, this freedom church of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills.[REF], 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. Civil Disobedience in a Democracy: Is it Morally Justified? . 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). 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. Civil Disobedience. If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. Kings Defense: The Right Reasons. 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. Something similar was true with respect to the indignations and provocations to which protestors would be subjected, which could be expected often to surpass the limits of the average persons patience. Civil disobedience is always justified by the people participating in the disobeying for the simple reason that they will always believe in what they are doing. Over the weekend Jason Brennan published an article at Bleeding Heart Libertarians called "A Theory of Civil Disobedience in Three Minutes." As one might be able to guess from the title, the crux of the article is that philosophical questions surrounding civil disobedience are easy questions to answer. Resolved: Civil Disobedience in a democracy is morally justified. 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. 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. It is permissible, on those principles, only where necessary and, in a context of functioning constitutional, republican government, only in exceptional cases. [REF] For the same reason, they are to embody the greatest respect for man-made positive laws that circumstances permit. What is Civil Disobedience? [REF] Such actions have become increasingly normalized in post-1960s America, as groups protesting a wide range of issuesincluding, in a partial list, nuclear armaments, abortion, environmental policy, and more recently, alleged misdeeds in the financial-services industry, immigration policy, and alleged police misconducthave laid claim to the method of civil disobedience. In a 1960 televised debate with King, the segregationist James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, remarked that in the controversy over public school integration, [W]e at the South were exhorted on every hand to abide by the law and it is therefore an interesting experience to be here tonight and see Mr. King assert a right to obey those laws he chooses to obey and disobey those that he chooses not to obey.[REF] Prominent black leaders also objected to the practice of civil disobedience, as Emory O. Jackson, editor of the black newspaper The Birmingham World, Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Conference, and even the great civil-rights attorney (and, subsequently, the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall, all called for fidelity to the law in pursuance of the movements objectives.[REF].