civil disobedience is not morally justified

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. 4. 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. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society . He claims that the government's power is based more on the influence that the majority possesses rather than . 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 civilit can effect a popular uprising against injustice even as it remains in conformity with the requirements of civility and social stability. 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. He offered a second illustration in the form of a direct suggestion. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? 3. 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. 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.. Those victories included: So far as it was taken not as a last resort but, to the contrary, amid a period of accumulating successes for the equal-rights cause achieved by scrupulously lawful means, Kings decision to practice civil disobedience in Birmingham appears precipitant, unwarranted by his own criterion of justification. For present purposes, however, King serves as a source of useful lessons in both positive and negative ways. If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. The details of his second-phase proposals varied over time, but the general idea was to call for a new federal antipoverty initiative, unprecedented in size and scope. 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. Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, he explained. 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. There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. For enthusiasts of rightful disobedience (civil or not), events such as the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement serve as congenial examplesbut the participants in the slaveholders rebellion of 1861 and the mid-20th century campaign of massive resistance to desegregation no less firmly believed their causes to be just. King was profoundly alarmed at these events and at the corresponding emergence of the black power faction that rejected his calls for nonviolent means and integrationist ends. 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. What is Civil Disobedience? Civil disobedience is not used to create chaos. 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. [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. 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. 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. Spirit. e government. When these attempts are turned back, civil disobedience then becomes a viable option. 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. Kings Achievement. "resistance to civil government."The main idea of Thoreau was self reliance because in his own view people are morally upright therefore there is no need for fighting with the government when it is unjust because it is easy to walk away and not . 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. [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. King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. Such a condition poses a clear danger to the rule of law. With Selma and the Voting Rights Act, King wrote in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. [REF] The details of his second-phase proposals varied over time, but the general idea was to call for a new federal antipoverty initiative, unprecedented in size and scope. 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.[REF] In Lockes design and in that of the American Founders, governmental powers are bounded in that they are limited to those specifically delegated by the people who are to be subject to them. 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. 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]. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We should explore legal channels first. 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. Civil disobedience is an effective tool which can help resolve unjust situations and display public rejection to participate in immoral activities. The discussion that follows is meant to provide such a reconsideration. His first illustration was offered as a hypothetical, though it has since become a common method in actual protests. 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. To convey the proper respect for law, one must obey as much of the law as possible. 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 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. 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. How can civil disobedience be explained and justified so as to foreclose the possibility that it could implicitly license uncivil, non-rightful disobedience, or to ensure that even its legitimate usages will not prove corrosive of the rule of law? 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. Thus originated the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.[REF], The Objections to Civil Disobedience. Alternatively, civil disobedience may be justified under a despotic regime, but not in a democracy where there are legal instruments avail-able for the redress of grievances. This thought informs his views about when civil disobedience is justified. First, I argue that, in an otherwise legitimate state, civil disobedience is morally justified or excusable only in narrowly defined circumstances. Kings distinction between disobedience that is evasive or defiant and disobedience marked by acceptance of the authority of law is vividly meaningful in context. 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. By this means, his admirers might plausibly argue, King acknowledged the seriousness of critics major concern and effectively addressed it. 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,. Yet despite these shortcomings, his discussion adumbrates several regulating and confining conditions that, properly elaborated, could supply a defensible justification of the practice. I have one definition to give. Here, in fuller elaboration, is the logic informing the Declarations dictates of prudence with respect to actions leading up to and including revolutionary uprising. However, the climate necessity defense is not without controversy. [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. 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). Ground of Obedience. Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. 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. 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]. 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. 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 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. [REF] It is no less at odds with his insistence that the ultimate objective of direct-action protest and civil disobedience is reconciliation between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of injustice, enabled by a change of heart in the latter.[REF]. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.[REF] He also rejected the error Kilpatrick had ascribed to him, a reliance on conscience to distinguish just and unjust laws that reduces in practice to a mere idiosyncratic choice. 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]. 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]. Protests against domestic injustices are to be conceived with a view toward preserving or restoring conditions of basic concord. Civil disobedience presents the ultimate respect for the existing order. Updated: Apr 25th, 2023. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? 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 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. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? 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. 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. 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. However, he was "interested primarily in social matters". Civil disobedience under these circumstances is at best deplorable and at worst destructive. . 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. Resolved: Civil Disobedience in a democracy is morally justified. Martin Luther King, Jr.s Discovery of Civil Disobedience, From his adolescence to the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., found inspiration in the promise inherent in the Declaration of Independence, although he was acutely aware that for black Americans, that promise had gone unfulfilled. 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. Civil disobedience is a particular form of political protest that involves the deliberate violation of the law for social purposes. 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]. 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. 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. 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. 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.. Civil disobedience is a form of protest in which protestors deliberately violate a law. If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. 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. That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. 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. Prudence, in other words, dictates a narrow-tailoring rule, according to which less radical alternative measures are to be preferred, explored, and exhausted prior to the adoption of more radical measures. 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. The disorders that follow from ill-considered notions of civil or rightful disobedience are abundantly and frighteningly evident in the late 1960s and lately resurgent in lesser degrees. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. [REF], The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. Understand laws before you obey them Yes, but yet slightly no. 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 . Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. Civil disobedience is more than just "a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in law or policies of government.". 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. A delegation of poor people can walk into a high officials office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. " is the official definition from the Britannica Encyclopedia. Because they allow sentient animals to be tortured in factory farms, or. He noted the silence in the room when, at a meeting of supporters to finalize plans for the Birmingham campaign, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham remarked, You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live. King meant quite literally his statement in the Letter that in direct-action protest, his group would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. His praise for the protestors sublime courage was no mere exercise in boosting morale.

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