civil disobedience is not morally justified

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Further, he was convinced that his direct-action movement, having suffered notable setbacks since the initial victory in Montgomery in 1956, had arrived at a crisis moment in Birmingham, such that any significant delay at that juncture would likely prove fatal to the movement as an effective force for reform. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. But, if one person can create change that gives them more power than others. To convey the proper respect for law, one must obey as much of the law as possible. That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. 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. Having characterized civil disobedience we can now discuss reasons for why people may act civilly disobedient. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. Kings account of unjust laws in the Letter specifically targeted laws in Americas Old South that sustained race-based segregation and disfranchisement, laws inconsistent in principle with any plausible understanding of human moral equality. Executive Order 8802, issued in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under pressure from A. Philip Randolph, mandating antidiscrimination provisions in government defense contracts; Executive Order 9981, issued in 1948 by President Harry S. Truman, mandating the desegregation of the U.S. armed services; the U.S. Congresss enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960; and, above all, the U.S. Supreme Courts landmark, In Birmingham, the very citadel of southern segregation, the movement would either revitalize itself, King believed, or it would fail and all previous gains would come to naught. 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. JoanSpero and Jeffrey Hart, "Democracy." The Politics of International Economic Relations. I have one definition to give. . 9. 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. 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. People. What is Civil Disobedience? 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. 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. 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. Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love. 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. [REF] It reached its full fruition in the pivotal campaign of the entire movement, the Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963, which occasioned his most extended and influential reflection on the subject. 8. 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. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. 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. 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. 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. 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. Understand laws before you obey them Yes, but yet slightly no. 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]. [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. The subsequent campaign in Selma, organized on the same principles and initiated by its own act of civil disobedience, generated a similar energy for the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 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. 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, 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. Rawls indicates that to be completely open and nonviolent manifests one's sincerity, honesty, and the depth of commitment . Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. 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. 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. 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. 10. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706, United States. Is civil disobedience morally OK because governments aren't progressive enough when it comes to protecting non-humans? 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. 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. What is Civil Disobedience? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Beyond such simple formulations, King took seriously the objections Kilpatrick, the clergymen, and others raised. Introduction. 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 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? 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. 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. However paradoxical it might appear, Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. 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). As King rightly understood, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (1) for the right reasons; (2) in the right spirit; and (3) by the right people. 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. " is the official definition from the Britannica Encyclopedia. I do not share Jason's optimism concerning the ease of questions surrounding civil . The latter sort of action is unintelligible as a claim upon conscience. Americans trust in government has fallen to historic lows as our partisan divisions and animosities have intensified;[REF] large and increasing numbers of Americans are convinced, for one set of reasons or another, of the illegitimacy of the ruling order. 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. Moreover, all should consider the degree to which the successful practice of civil disobedience in the early 1960s, by virtue of its very success, has functioned in the post-Civil Rights era to normalize the practice of lawbreaking as an element of protest and commensurately to erode popular respect for law. 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 . 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. In the Declaration of Independence, the ultimate recourse is a right, again where circumstances dictate, to full-blown revolution: Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [its proper] ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government., Further, it should be clear that the imperative subjection to the rule of law applies no less to the people themselves, as represented by a ruling majority, than to government. Two years later, a riot in Detroit wrought even greater destruction.[REF]. 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. To its proponents, 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. 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. A delegation of poor people can walk into a high officials office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. Many officials and theorists nowadays concede that civil disobedience can be morally justified, while maintaining the need to criminally punish civil disobedients, on the basis of arguments very . 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. Civil disobedience is an effective tool which can help resolve unjust situations and display public rejection to participate in immoral activities. Nonetheless, critics of Kings arguments and actions relative to civil disobedience even in this more successful phase of his career have a point in warning of their tendency to propagate disrespect for law and an enthusiasm for (purportedly) righteous disobedience. The eight were not segregationists; they were moderate proponents of gradual integration. The practice of civil disobedience required a special kind of personmeaning, in most cases, a specially trained kind of person. "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. 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. 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.. 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. 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. " Democracy. Some definitions suggest that non-violence"civility" is a necessary condition for political disobedience to qualify as civil disobedience. 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. When proponents of this lately predominant form conflate Kings two models,[REF] therefore, they undermine the justification for civil disobedience altogether. 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. 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. 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. To ward off such disorders, it is necessary to sort out the virtues and vices of Kings arguments and to use the virtues in those arguments to light the way back to the sounder understanding of civil disobedience and the rule of law that is implicit in Americas first principles. Readers receive only very limited guidance as to how they are to judge, amid a wide range of plausible interpretive possibilities, what sorts of laws work to uplift or to degrade human personality. [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? Attempting to find virtue in the difference, King offered a troubling description of the prospective participants in his second-phase project, highlighting not their moral discipline but their social desperation: The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose.[REF], In a similar vein, King attempted to find even in the riots themselves support for his contention that the disaffected urban poor constituted a promising new class of potential pilgrims to nonviolence. a design to restore or to create a bond of community between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of the injustice at issue. Traffic laws are not in themselves unjust, King allowed, but their operation may be legitimately suspended for emergency purposes. 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. To the contrary, it signifies a purposeful encroachment on others rights and interests as members of civil society. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to co-operate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . 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). In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. 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. He claims that the government's power is based more on the influence that the majority possesses rather than . This means that the practitioner of civil disobedience must judge properly in identifying unjust laws as the justification for disobedience. 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. 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. 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. Even during the civil rights movement, led by the nonviolent southern preacher, hundreds were injured and killed during these "nonviolent" protests. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Martin Luther King, Jr. was deeply influenced by Gandhi in his use of non-violent protest. In Kings account, therefore, justice entails the principle of equality under law, and legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed. In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. At least momentarily, he lost faith in the democratic processes the Voting Rights Act had newly reformed. His argument for civil disobedience in the later phase of his career diverges significantly from the relatively moderate argument he presented in his earlier, more successful phase. 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. ABSTRACT. The disruption of traffic, infringing on a right of access to a public road, is in his view a permissible means of extracting a public concession to an aggrieved groups demands. 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. If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. Civil disobedience is not used to create chaos. 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. His first illustration was offered as a hypothetical, though it has since become a common method in actual protests. Those evils did ensuebut as King emphasized, they came in the main from the actions of segregations defenders, not from its protesters. To such questions King offered no compelling answers.

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