Kings Defense: The Right Reasons. As Kings own legacy reveals, however, civil disobedience is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its practical effects. Like Gandhi, King believed that citizens have a duty to engage in . Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified. The epistemic situation of the would-be defiant is more difficult. Thoreau 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. Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart. 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 . Many types of objections to civil disobedience have been raised, often based on the view that citizens in a democracy are obliged to obey the law. It is the non-violent, noncompliance with unjust laws that is ordered towards changing the laws. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS Against his critics, King insisted that civil disobedience signifies no disrespect but, to the contrary, the highest respect for law.[REF] For King, as in the logic of the Declaration, civil disobedience may be practiced only where necessary and only so far as necessary to the purpose of reforming an unjust human law. Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. " is the official definition from the Britannica Encyclopedia. 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. In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. [REF] For the same reason, they are to embody the greatest respect for man-made positive laws that circumstances permit. 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 . First, I argue that, in an otherwise legitimate state, civil disobedience is morally justified or excusable only in narrowly defined circumstances. It is justifiable, where circumstances warrant, by the first principles of the American republic and of free, constitutional government, and it is dangerous in that it poses a threat to the rule of law. 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). Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . Now, millions of people are being strangled that way.. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. The insistence on accepting the prescribed penalty for disobedience was integral to Kings larger design of presenting to the broad American public the sharpest possible contrast between the characteristically lawful practitioners of disobedience and the lawless defenders of the local statutes and ordinances. 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., Kings illustrations of the sort of actions he envisioned are useful in clarifying the distinction. For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. 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. 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.[REF]. Spirit. 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. Where uncivil or violent disobedience would be rightful but unwise, the lesser means of civil disobedience must likewise be rightful. Yet despite these shortcomings, his discussion adumbrates several regulating and confining conditions that, properly elaborated, could supply a defensible justification of the practice. An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. 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. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? 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. Specific disobedience breeds disrespect and promotes general disobedience. Civil disobedience is a form of protest in which protestors deliberately violate a law. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. 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.". The ontology of civil disobedience merely sets out that disobeying a law is potentially justified on extra-legal grounds. 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. He claims that the government's power is based more on the influence that the majority possesses rather than . 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. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. 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). What is Civil Disobedience? . Is civil disobedience morally OK because governments aren't progressive enough when it comes to protecting non-humans? 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. 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 . To hasten the achievement of his second-phase objectives, King renewed and intensified his call for civil disobedience. Is Teen Depression Epidemic Result of Too Much Social Media, Too Little Religion? 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. 91 reference notes. Civil disobedience occurs when an individual or group refuses to follow the rules, policies, or legislation passed by their government. 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]. . 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. Having characterized civil disobedience we can now discuss reasons for why people may act civilly disobedient. Ground of Obedience. When the civil disobedient says that he is above the law, he is saying that democracy is beneath him. Legitimate, constitutional government can possess only those powers delegated to it by the people who are its constituents, and the people in turn can delegate only powers they rightfully possess under the law of nature. However, he was "interested primarily in social matters". For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. The civil disobedient, finding legitimate avenues of change blocked or nonexistent, feels obligated by a higher, extralegal principle to break some specific law. [2] 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. 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. 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. Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. [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 . 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. 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. 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. The conventional definition of civil disobedience leaves open some basic and challenging questions concerning its justifying causes and its permissible scope and objectives. 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.[REF]The idea entered Americas public consciousness in 1849 via Henry David Thoreaus essay Civil Disobedience, prompted by Thoreaus objections to the Mexican War as an instrument of the slaveholding interest. is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as "Refusal to obey governmental demands or commands, especially as a nonviolent and usually collective mean. As we will see, King failed to provide a rigorous account of civil disobedience, and it is also arguable that his practice of civil disobedience failed to adhere strictly to his principles. 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. In the definition cited above, the general objective of civil disobedience, to effect a change in laws or government policies, encompasses a variety of possible specific objectives, ranging from reform of particular laws or policies to fundamental change in constitutional order. Again, the justification of civil disobedience in this kind of case depends on the particulars. 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. 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. Beyond such simple formulations, King took seriously the objections Kilpatrick, the clergymen, and others raised. Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only so far as necessary. Despite its shortcomings, the initial model, epitomized in Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, was marked by a high degree of moral discipline, by professions of conscientious respect for law and for Americas founding principles, and, not by mere coincidence, a remarkable degree of success in achieving its practical objectives. Although his zeal for prompt reform moved him at times to transgress his own prudential regulations, in his earlier phase King showed himself to be a more sober and careful exponent of civil disobedience than the despairing, radicalized King of the second phase, advocate of the disruptive, disorderly mode of disobedience lately prevalent. 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. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. 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]. 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.. Justified or not, civil disobedience is liable to legal punishment. 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. In summary, as King presented it in the Letter, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (1) for the right reasons; (2) in the right spirit; and (3) by the right people. Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. 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. In roughly the first third of the letter, King responded to the clergymens charge that it was imprudent of him to lead protests at that moment in Birmingham. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.[REF]. 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 . 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 such questions King offered no compelling answers. A lock ( 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. 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. 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. 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. To establish the compatibility of his practice of civil disobedience with the rule of law, he needed to say more. The very definition of a Republic, John Adams remarked, is an Empire of Laws, and not of menwords he wrote in the spring of 1776, even as his compatriots were engaged in an armed uprising that they as a people, with Adamss own assistance, would shortly thereafter declare to be revolutionary and justified by a law higher than any human law. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. Monumental Disappointments in Our Public Spaces. 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. 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,[REF] have in fact featured a volatile mixture of acts of nonviolent and violent disobedience. In his first Massey Lecture, he declared: Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. 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. Is civil disobedience wrong? 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. I urge you to look at . Kings apologetic discussion of the rioting raises troubling questions. LockA locked padlock King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. The practice of civil disobedience required a special kind of personmeaning, in most cases, a specially. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. [REF] If we obey this injunction, he concluded, we are out of business.[REF]. "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 . 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. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. 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. So far as it is dissociated from the objective of full, fundamental regime change, it would become more widely available and appealing as a means of mere reform, and thus normalized, it would tend to act over time to corrode popular respect for the rule of law. To convey the proper respect for law, one must obey as much of the law as possible. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. [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. Believing that only prompt remedial action by the federal government could bring peace to the cities, he amplified his demands for the enactment of his phase two, antipoverty measures as an emergency program. Congresss failure to enact that program angered him; he called it a provocation and ascribed it to a white backlash indicative of a broader and deeper racism among whites than he had previously estimated. Legitimate, constitutional government can possess only those powers delegated to it by the people who are its constituents, and the people in turn can delegate only powers they rightfully possess under the law of nature. Not only does civil disobedience imply contempt for the law, but it threatens those involved and those surrounding the act of protest. Whatever the broader causes, the Watts riots left 34 people dead and over 1,000 injured. [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]. 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. 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. But, if one person can create change that gives them more power than others. Civil disobedience is a particular form of political protest that involves the deliberate violation of the law for social purposes. He added that federal courts have consistently affirmed his position that the threat of violence by othersthe so-called rioters vetoprovides no legally defensible ground for an abridgement of the right of peaceful protest. What is Civil Disobedience? e government. What be important for present purposes a that this ground is sufficient for justified civil 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]. Above all, because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. Thus originated the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail., The objection was familiar to King. One of the great glories of democracy, King remarked at the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is the right to protest for right.[REF] Americans in the exercise of that right gave birth to a new and singular republic, and the same right endures as an endowment by nature and a precious national heritage. In the fourth of his Massey Lectures,[REF] delivered in late 1967 and published under the title, The Trumpet of Conscience, he stated: There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. 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 . In sum, however paradoxical it might appear, Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. This right, like every other, however, comes with correlative responsibilities, among which the most fundamental are responsibilities to law and republican government. Most worrisome in the recent waves of purportedly civil disobedience is their participants disregard for the divided legacy of the Civil Rights movement. Civil disobedience is justified when laws made by humans are unjust. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. [REF] Its present legitimacy and prestige, however, reflect the influence of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a movement characterized by its leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., as the greatest mass-action crusade for freedom that has ever occurred in American history.[REF] Prompted by that movement, America has undergone sea changes in law and in public sentiment regarding race relations and the antidiscrimination idea, and Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, containing his most elaborate justification of the practice of civil disobedience, has become a widely anthologized writing and a fixture in U.S. secondary and collegiate civics education. Rawls argues that civil disobedience, if it is engaged in only when justified, will be a stabilizing force on society. 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. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. Resolved: Civil Disobedience in a democracy is morally justified. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham, King reported, than in any other city in the nation. In response, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. 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. Americans simultaneous devotion to law and insistence on a right to disobey unjust laws signifies a fruitful tension in American principles, inherent in our foundational idea of the rule of law. 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. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. 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. 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].
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