It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.[REF]. 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 . 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. Civil disobedience was practiced to great effect by people such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. 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 . However, none of these objections are decisive against every act of civil justification. Pursuant to his own insistence on respect for law, it appears that Kings proper initial recourse in Birmingham was the legal channel of judicial appeal rather than disobedience, and that until legal and political channels for reform proved clearly unavailing, his justification for his actions should have remained within the realm of positive, constitutional law. He is the author of Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) and Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (University Press of Kansas, 2008). In republican governments, wrote James Madison in. Such protest must be nonviolent and must be animated by a spirit of love for the perpetrators of the injustice against which one protests. 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. When Is It Okay to Disobey the State? | Catholic Answers The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. 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 . JoanSpero and Jeffrey Hart, "Democracy." The Politics of International Economic Relations. The Climate Necessity Defense: How activists are using civil Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in Federalist No. And if that official [is nonresponsive], you can say, All right, well wait. And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary.[REF], In advocating this radicalized form of civil disobedience, King contended that those who perceive a serious societal injustice have the right to disobey just laws to the end of reforming unjust laws or policies. Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920's and 1930's were pivotal factors in attaining independence. 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. 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. 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. Specific disobedience breeds disrespect and promotes general disobedience. PDF Session 1 Rawls, The Justification of Civil Disobedi What distinguishes "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. If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. The conclusion seems inescapable that in his desperate zeal to add rapid socioeconomic uplift to his movements previous victories in securing civil and political rights, King again neglected a piece of wise counsel from Rustin, who observed: There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that absence of power also corrupts.[REF] Especially in his final two years, King overestimated his ability to govern the anger of the urban poor that he purposely assisted in arousing. In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. 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. 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. 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. The constitutional primacy of the legislative power is the institutional corollary of the rule of law. 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. [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 . 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? 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. [REF] A democracy is as capable of injustice as is a monarchyand a societal majority as capable of it as a government. To read his Letter from Birmingham Jail with particular attention to this conservative dimension of his argument may therefore serve to initiate a renewed and enhanced public appreciation of the rule of law, both of its basis and its centrality to the health of Americas constitutional republic. Civil Disobedience. This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. 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. When Civil Disobedience Is Justified - Conversation of Our Generation Kings apologetic discussion of the rioting raises troubling questions. Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis--vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. 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. 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). That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. For present purposes, however, King serves as a source of useful lessons in both positive and negative ways. 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. The conventional definition of civil disobedience leaves open some basic and challenging questions concerning its justifying causes and its permissible scope and objectives. On a Moral Right to Civil Disobedience* | Ethics: Vol 117, No 2 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. 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. 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. When proponents of this lately predominant form conflate Kings two models,[REF] therefore, they undermine the justification for civil disobedience altogether. 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. Lockes prudent admonition, the reigns of good princes have been always most dangerous to the liberties of their people,[REF] applies equally well to the danger even the best protest leaders or movements pose to the rule of law. Introduction. On what ground could he locate the natural rights of persons, given his denigration of the property righta right affirmed in classical natural-rights philosophy as a direct corollary of the liberty of the person? Nonviolent protest so conceived may or may not involve actions in violation of positive law, but where such protest. 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. It involves people coming together to stand against its government or any oppressor, to protest vocally and using all mediums available but without any physical force or violence. 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. Civil disobedience | Definition, Examples, & Facts | Britannica 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. It is used to prevent more chaos that is to come. 33 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. Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . Civil disobedience is justified when laws made by humans are unjust. 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. 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. The nations experience over the past half-century or so highlights the need for a careful reconsideration of the case for civil disobedience. 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 . 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. 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. 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]. Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free. Why Civil Disobedience Is Morally Justified Essay 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. 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. 2. 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. Is there any tenable moral distinction between the intimidation he equivocally decried and the disruption and coercion he advocated as elements of his mature form of civil disobedience? 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. 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. 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. 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. The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. The protests he led and supported did not incite violence so much as they exposed pre-existing violence to the view of a national public. I urge you to look at . 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. Traffic laws are not in themselves unjust, King allowed, but their operation may be legitimately suspended for emergency purposes. Therefore I will keep the following ten commandments: 1. The proliferation of civil disobedience in recent times has prompted questions about violence and justified resistance. The Right People. Disobedience Breeds Disrespect Civil disobedience is an ad hoc device at best, and ad hoc measures in a law society are dangerous. By attaching to the practice of civil disobedience the regulatory conditions that he described in the Letter, King helped contain disorders that might otherwise have so expanded as to scuttle the possibility of meaningful reform. 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. Is civil disobedience wrong? This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance., A still more powerful influence was Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose teaching King discovered as a seminary student a few years thereafter. It is justifiable, in exceptional circumstances, by the first principles of free, constitutional government, but it is dangerous in that it poses a threat to the rule of law. [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. That civil disobedience may be practiced only for the right reasons is first and fundamental among the regulating conditions King suggested. In his very first public speech (as a prizewinner in his high schools oratory contest), King protested that decades after Emancipation, Black America still lives in chains. For the remainder of his secondary and advanced education, he searched for the proper means, as he put it in that initial speech, to cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.[REF]. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? Ground of Obedience. 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. 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. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. 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. a design to restore or to create a bond of community between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of the injustice at issue. 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 is a symbolic or ritualistic violation of the law rather than a rejection of the system as a whole. However paradoxical it might appear, Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. Judged by its main objectives of reforming the law and strengthening the bonds of moral community, Kings direct-action protest movement of the 1950s and early 1960s appears to have been a resounding success. 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. Defending human rights in peaceful ways outside "the law" is ultimately a form of defense of and respect for the law. 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. 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.