civil disobedience is not morally justified

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. 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. 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. Specific disobedience breeds disrespect and promotes general disobedience. 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]. This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. 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. 4. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. 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. is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as "Refusal to obey governmental demands or commands, especially as a nonviolent and usually collective mean. 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. 9. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. 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.. Civil Disobedience- an act against a certain law with no violence One thing that comes with civil disobedience is change. They have the right, by his logic, to violate the rights of innocent parties (travelers, office workers, or public officials, along with their clients, patrons, and constituents). Some go a step further and argue that regardless of whether civil disobedience is justified, it ought not to be punished merely because of its illegality, as there's a moral right to civil disobe-dience, either grounded on the right to conscience (Brownlee 2012; 2018) or the right to political participation (Lefkowitz 2007; 2018). 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. 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 . 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. It must convey a respect for law as a necessary bond of moral communityincluding, so far as possible, the laws governing the particular community one means to reform. 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.. We should explore legal channels first. What is Civil Disobedience? Plato's topic on circumstances in morally permissible disobedience, I shall arguing, anticipates that approach. Is civil disobedience wrong? 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. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. Because they allow sentient animals to be tortured in factory farms, or. Moreover, the most prominent eruptions in the past decade of what supporters persist in calling civil disobedience, including the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the anti-Trump Resistance,. 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. 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. 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. Territories Financial Support Center (TFSC), Tribal Financial Management Center (TFMC). 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. [REF], It follows that should government attempt to exercise powers beyond those duly delegated to it, it would forfeit its legitimacy and therewith its claim to popular allegiance and obedience. It centers on King primarily because of the near-universal acclaim now accorded Kings Letter, which stands as the most influential defense of civil disobedience in our time, if not in all U.S. history. 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. To provide against this danger, the Declaration appends to its announcement of the right to alter or abolish unjust government a crucial qualifying admonition: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.. 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. 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. 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. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. [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. These are untenable claims. 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. 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. Civil Disobedience and Americas First Principles. 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). However paradoxical it might appear, Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. Civil disobedience should not be our first remedy to an unjust situation. Traffic laws are not in themselves unjust, King allowed, but their operation may be legitimately suspended for emergency purposes. 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. Advocates argue that, when used judiciously, civil disobedience can be a powerful tool for social change, and the climate necessity defense provides a legal framework for activists to make their case in court. Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only so far as necessary. 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. 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. He adopted an idea of rights grounded in indefinite human needs rather than in definite and distinctive human faculties, thus leaving rights claims with no clear foundation or limiting principle even as he endorsed a great expansion of those claims.[REF]. "The refusal to obey the demands or commands of a government or occupying power, without resorting to violence or active measures of opposition; its usual purpose is to force concessions from the government or occupying power. 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. Two main considerations, however, convinced King of the immediate necessity of civil disobedience in the Birmingham campaign. 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. Its aim is to make that society more just, and justice is a stabilizing influence. This means that the practitioner of civil disobedience must judge properly in identifying unjust laws as the justification for disobedience. Traffic laws are not in themselves unjust, King allowed, but their operation may be legitimately suspended for emergency purposes. 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. Despite its illegality, justified civil disobedience represents one way in which good citizens can demonstrate fidelity to the principles that regulate political power, and one way in which they can try to close the gap between principle and practice in their societies. To hasten the achievement of his second-phase objectives, King renewed and intensified his call for civil disobedience. A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. He then turned to their specific objection to the tactic of civil disobedience. 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. Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. The conclusion seems inescapable that in his desperate zeal to add rapid socioeconomic uplift to his movements previous victories in securing civil and political rights, King again neglected a piece of wise counsel from Rustin, who observed: There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that absence of power also corrupts.[REF] Especially in his final two years, King overestimated his ability to govern the anger of the urban poor that he purposely assisted in arousing. 10. Civil disobedience and conscientious objection are social practices motivated by moral and political beliefs. Therefore I will keep the following ten commandments: 1. . Indicative of the moral qualities required are the tenets of the Commitment Card the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) required volunteers to sign: I hereby pledge myselfmy person and bodyto the nonviolent movement. ABSTRACT. 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. 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. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in Federalist No. The nations experience over the past half-century or so highlights the need for a careful reconsideration of the case for civil disobedience. Civil disobedience has been widely used to challenge injustice in the United States, most visibly in the second half of the 20th century, with the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. 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. 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. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. 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. Spirit. 6. 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. Civil disobedience is a form of civil war An act of civil disobedience sets a precedence of breaking the law. 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. 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. 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. [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. 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. These prudential regulations circumscribing the right to revolution apply similarly to acts of civil disobedience. 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. 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. 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. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706, United States. It is a powerful means of combating unjust laws, and freeing society from oppressive restrictions. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. People. 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. Attempts to emulate those methods have naturally followed, and the multiplication of such attempts must heighten the likelihood of a corrosive effect on the publics attachment to law. 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. 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. He is the author of Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) and Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (University Press of Kansas, 2008). However, from an outside perspective, the justifications are analyzed through the values of the individual, organization or government. King characterized poverty and unemployment as deprivations of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and he conceived of poverty as a form of segregation. When the civil disobedient dis- obeys one law, he invariably subverts all law. The practice of civil disobedience required a special kind of personmeaning, in most cases, a specially. At this point arises the issue of civil disobedience. 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. The difficulty in Kings position appears still more challenging in light of the impressive victories equal-rights activists had achieved over the previous two decades by a combination of political pressure and legal challenges. The eight were not segregationists; they were moderate proponents of gradual integration. 91 reference notes. His first illustration was offered as a hypothetical, though it has since become a common method in actual protests. Beyond such simple formulations, King took seriously the objections Kilpatrick, the clergymen, and others raised. The latter sort of action is unintelligible as a claim upon conscience. 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. Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920's and 1930's were pivotal factors in attaining independence. 7. 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. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. Is Teen Depression Epidemic Result of Too Much Social Media, Too Little Religion? If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. Civil disobedience is about purposefully disobeying a law or rule to make a point, to try and change laws and rules in a specific situation, and is disobedience that is executed in a non-violent manner. 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. 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. 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. At least momentarily, he lost faith in the democratic processes the Voting Rights Act had newly reformed. 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. Classically, they violate the law they are protesting, such as segregation or draft laws, but sometimes they violate other laws which they find unobjectionable, such as trespass or traffic laws. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. Two years later, a riot in Detroit wrought even greater destruction.[REF]. 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. 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. Such questions reflect more than merely theoretical concerns. To reform the citysand the regions and the countryslaws, it was necessary to expose that conflict, and to expose that conflict it was necessary to demonstrate to a national public the effect of those laws in inflicting brutality and imprisonment on a class of decent and law-abiding people, who would demonstrate those qualities most visibly by their voluntary acceptance of the penalties for disobeying the citys law. In addition to being nonviolent, it must proceed from a devotion to the ideal of moral community. This right, like every other, however, comes with correlative responsibilities, among which the most fundamental are responsibilities to law and republican government. King characterized poverty and unemployment as deprivations of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and he conceived of poverty as a form of segregation. The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart. To its proponents, led by King, 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. 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]. King called this modified conception a more mature form of civil disobedience. Rawls indicates that to be completely open and nonviolent manifests one's sincerity, honesty, and the depth of commitment . Moreover, as his illustrations of unjust law make clear, it must convey a special respect for the authority of democratically enacted law. [REF] He contended that the social and economic rights he demanded are no less firmly rooted in Americas first principles than are the civil and political rights for which he campaigned in his movements first phase. Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: TEN-HERNG LAI, CHONG-MING LIM Environmental Activism and the Fairness of Costs Argument for Uncivil Disobedience, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 19 (Jan 2023): 1-20. 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. 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. 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. Non-violence has traditionally been associated with civil disobedience. [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?

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