civil disobedience is not morally justified

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. 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. Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920's and 1930's were pivotal factors in attaining independence. 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 . a design to restore or to create a bond of community between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of the injustice at issue. 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. 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. [We] will move on Washington, he resolved, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action . 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]. PDF Session 1 Rawls, The Justification of Civil Disobedi What distinguishes Rawls argues that civil disobedience, if it is engaged in only when justified, will be a stabilizing force on society. It is notable in this regard that the numerous authorities King cited in the Letter do not include Thoreau, whose highly individualist idea of conscience, disdain for majoritarian democracy, and pronounced antinomianism King did not share.[REF]. DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE | The Lawyers & Jurists The Limits and Dangers of Civil Disobedience: The Case of Martin Luther But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way . Reasons. [REF] If we obey this injunction, he concluded, we are out of business.[REF]. 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. 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. Since no one knows the answer if civil disobedient will ever be justified, Brian Kogelmann said, "one's act of civil disobedience may result in horrible consequences might give one a moral reason to not commit the act of civil disobedience, a moral reason to obey the law." (Kogelmann). Is Teen Depression Epidemic Result of Too Much Social Media, Too Little Religion? In addition to being nonviolent, it must proceed from a devotion to the ideal of moral community. 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.[REF] The rule of law itself, in his reasoning, entails the legitimacy of civil disobedience. 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. 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. 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. 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. Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey the demands of an occupying power. 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. 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]. To What Extent is Civil Disobedience Justified in a Democracy Does the idea of civil disobedience still apply today? In republican governments, wrote James Madison in Federalist No. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. Here is the key point: Kings actions in Birmingham and elsewhere were born of a deep impatience, informed, as he wrote in the Letter, by a centuries-long history of injustice, including promises made and unfulfilled, that had taught him to equate slow or partial progress with no progress: Half a loaf is no bread.[REF] Despite his generally gracious recognition of NAACP efforts, King held that the courtroom victories won by that senior organization, along with the other apparent successes achieved in the electoral branches to that point, would prove practically worthless unless reinforced by further, stronger measures that would be enacted only in response to sustained, intensified pressure. 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.[REF]. That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. 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. 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. 5 Pros and Cons of Civil Disobedience | APECSEC.org For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. In the early Civil Rights Era, the paradigmatic acts of civil disobedience were designed to achieve relatively limited, reformist objectives. Further, the dignity of human personality signifies the equal dignity of human persons. At least momentarily, he lost faith in the democratic processes the Voting Rights Act had newly reformed. 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. 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. We started havingworkshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves the questions: Are you able to accept blows without retaliating? Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?[REF]. Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy. 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.. is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as Moreover, as his illustrations of unjust law make clear, it must convey a special respect for the authority of democratically enacted law. 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. The Problem of Civil Disobedience Subject: Politics & Government Study Level: College Words: 1375. A Debate About Whether or Not Civil Disobedience Is Justified and Under What Circumstances . 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. 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. 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. 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.. King called this modified conception a more mature form of civil disobedience. 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.[REF] By failing to heed Rustins advice, King departed from his previously stated principles regarding civil disobedience. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified. Civil disobedience is a form of protest intended to draw attention to a wrong or injustice which the protesters believe is sufficiently serious to morally justify violation of the law. Nor did he address in the Letter the implications of his idea of equality for other, more difficult questions pertaining to justice in race relations and to the cause of social and political equality in generalquestions controversial even among proponents of equality. The philosopher and sociologist Jrgen Habermas defined civil disobedience as follows: "Civil disobedience is moral justified Protest, which should not only be based on private beliefs or personal interests; he is a more public Act that is usually announced and the course of which can be calculated by the police; he closes the intentional Injury individual . 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. Civil Disobedience, Costly Signals, and Leveraging Injustice Civil Disobedience, Punishment, and Injustice | SpringerLink The substitutes for civil disobedience in a democracy include the court system, and at another level, the legis-lature. [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. As we will see, American civil disobedience in its most widely admired form, in the theory and practice of King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. 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. 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. 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. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. 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. 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. 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. 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. I do not share Jason's optimism concerning the ease of questions surrounding civil . In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. 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. [REF], It is meaningful, if unsurprising, that the SCLC required of protesters a commitment suffused with the moral spirit of Christianity. Amid these conditions, a reconsideration of King could serve as a useful first stepdrawing our guidance from the best, not the whole, of Kings thinking regarding civil disobedience. Among the most striking features of the city riots, he argued, was that the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people. The overwhelming majority of people killed during the riots, he went on, were protesters killed by law enforcement officers. Beyond such simple formulations, King took seriously the objections Kilpatrick, the clergymen, and others raised. A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Because, as Madison put it, the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,. What Martin Luther King Jr. Said About Civil Disobedience For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice. Specific disobedience breeds disrespect and promotes general disobedience. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most renowned advocate of civil disobedience, argued that civil disobedience is not lawlessness but instead a higher form of lawfulness, designed to bring positive or man-made law into conformity with higher lawnatural or divine law. 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. 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. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in. 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. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. 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. Territories Financial Support Center (TFSC), Tribal Financial Management Center (TFMC). Even during the civil rights movement, led by the nonviolent southern preacher, hundreds were injured and killed during these "nonviolent" protests. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.[REF]. 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. Such protest must be nonviolent and must be animated by a spirit of love for the perpetrators of the injustice against which one protests. 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. 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. This idea of rightful disobedience has inspired protests in various degrees and kinds in America ever since the Boston Tea Party, and it continues to inspire such actions even to the present day. Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. 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. 2. 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. In its most concrete manifestation, however, the precept of obeying law so far as possible appears in his insistence on submitting to the legally prescribed punishment for disobedience. The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. King held further acts of civil disobedience to be warranted because he regarded prevailing conditions of poverty and rising discontentment as effects of a set of terrible economic injustices no less grievous and even more widespread than the wrongs of the Jim Crow regime: In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income . 19 Major Pros and Cons of Civil Disobedience - ConnectUS On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? 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. 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. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way.[REF], Violent in itself, that injustice was in Kings view also violent in its emerging effectsabove all in the rioting that began in Watts just days after the Voting Rights Act became law and spread, in the two years thereafter, to hundreds of cities across the U.S. As was the case in Watts, the riots were often precipitated by disputes involving policebut evidence suggests that neither charges of police brutality nor discontentment at socioeconomic deprivation was the predominant cause. All plausibly viable lawful alternatives are to be attempted prior to the adoption of extra-lawful measures, just as all plausibly viable peaceful means are to be employed prior to any recourse to violent force. Updated: Apr 25th, 2023. 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]. " Democracy. Amid these conditions, a reconsideration of King could serve as a useful first stepdrawing our guidance from the. 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. Critics had predicted that the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience would degenerate into uncivil disobedience, marked by lawlessness and violence. So understood, Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr. was deeply influenced by Gandhi in his use of non-violent protest. The failure of federal authorities to adopt antipoverty measures on the scheduleand in the degree and kind he desirednecessitated, in Kings view, a new round of protests. Here is the key point: Kings actions in Birmingham and elsewhere were born of a deep impatience, informed, as he wrote in the Letter, by a centuries-long history of injustice, including promises made and unfulfilled, that had taught him to equate slow or partial progress with no progress: Half a loaf is no bread., Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only. In Kings account, therefore, justice entails the principle of equality under law, and legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed. 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? To such questions King offered no compelling answers. What sort of person, marked by what sorts of qualities, volunteers for such training in the first place? Civic Disobedience and Climate Change | HuffPost Religion

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