This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. Visiting Scholar, 2016-17 Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought. In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. Defending human rights in peaceful ways outside "the law" is ultimately a form of defense of and respect for the law. 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 . Having characterized civil disobedience we can now discuss reasons for why people may act civilly disobedient. 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. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive.[REF]. Kings awareness of the power of civil disobedience as a protest method quickened in the course of his first nonviolent direct-action campaign, the Montgomery bus boycott, and developed further as he reflected on the sit-in movement initiated by black college students in early 1960. People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. Lockdowns are unlawful, and are not justified Lockdown orders are not justified. [2] Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. a conscientious refusal to submit to a law deemed unjust; a respectful acceptance of the legal consequences (typically jailing) of ones action; and. [REF] A democracy is as capable of injustice as is a monarchyand a societal majority as capable of it as a government. 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. A consideration of Americas first principles, as explicated in the political thought informing the American Founding, corroborates Kings view. Kings distinction between disobedience that is evasive or defiant and disobedience marked by acceptance of the authority of law is vividly meaningful in context. 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. 91 reference notes. In the "Resistance to civil government" essay, which was posthumously published as "Civil disobedience," Thoreau explains the need to choose one's moral sense over the conventional dictates of laws. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. This analysis of the nature and moral justification of civil disobedience notes that the term has been used in varying ways and proposes a wider definition than the one that is often used. Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. Civil Disobedience: A Threat to Our Society Under Law A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. 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. Kings Defense: The Right Reasons. 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. [REF] For the same reason, they are to embody the greatest respect for man-made positive laws that circumstances permit. Kings Classic Exposition of Civil Disobedience: The Letter from Birmingham Jail, 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. 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. 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.. 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 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. a design to restore or to create a bond of community between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of the injustice at issue. 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. 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. 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. Civil disobedience is justified when laws made by humans are unjust. 2. 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. In a 1960 televised debate with King, the segregationist James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, remarked that in the controversy over public school integration, [W]e at the South were exhorted on every hand to abide by the law and it is therefore an interesting experience to be here tonight and see Mr. King assert a right to obey those laws he chooses to obey and disobey those that he chooses not to obey.[REF] Prominent black leaders also objected to the practice of civil disobedience, as Emory O. Jackson, editor of the black newspaper The Birmingham World, Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Conference, and even the great civil-rights attorney (and, subsequently, the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall, all called for fidelity to the law in pursuance of the movements objectives.[REF]. 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. However, the climate necessity defense is not without controversy. Within this broad conceptualization, civil disobedience can take numerous forms and be motivated by different reasons. PDF SAMPLE NEGATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE - National Speech and Debate Association 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. Because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. However, from an outside perspective, the justifications are analyzed through the values of the individual, organization or government. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey the demands of an occupying power. It is plainly at odds with his insistence on the correspondence of moral ends and moral means. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. 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. A half-century after the Civil Rights movement, an upsurge in disobedient protest has moved some observers to proclaim a new era of civil disobedience in America, even as the boundary between civil and uncivil disobedience in this latest wave of protests appears increasingly permeable.[REF]. King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. government perpetrates or abets clear violations of natural rights, involving clear abuses and/or usurpations; the violations at issue are not isolated or exceptional but occur in a long train indicative of a design to subject their victims to absolute Despotism; the violations, persisting despite repeated petitions by the injured parties, are reasonably judged to be irremediable by any lawful measures; the violations are reasonably judged to be irremediable by any extra-lawful but non- revolutionary measures; the violations are reasonably judged to be remediable by revolutionary action. 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. 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. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. When proponents of this lately predominant form conflate Kings two models,[REF] therefore, they undermine the justification for civil disobedience altogether. Territories Financial Support Center (TFSC), Tribal Financial Management Center (TFMC). To gain our bearings amid todays protests, characterized more by disruption and coercion than persuasion, we should look beyond contemporary justifications and return to the best of Kings thinkingand beyond King, to the understanding of civil disobedience grounded in Americas first principles. Amid these conditions, a reconsideration of King could serve as a useful first stepdrawing our guidance from the. 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. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? 7. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way.. 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. When Locke said the ruling power ought to govern by law, he meant that the law must rule so that both the people may know their duty and the rulers too kept within their bounds.[REF] In Lockes design and in that of the American Founders, governmental powers are bounded in that they are limited to those specifically delegated by the people who are to be subject to them. situations in which civil disobedience would be justified; among his justifications is the need to preserve moral integrity, combat immorality, and promote positive social reform.1 Still many other philosophers, including Socrates, believed there could be no moral justification for civil disobedience. Protests against domestic injustices are to be conceived with a view toward preserving or restoring conditions of basic concord. 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. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 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. 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. Disobedience Breeds Disrespect Civil disobedience is an ad hoc device at best, and ad hoc measures in a law society are dangerous. is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as Then, the action taken has to be non-violent. Justified or not, civil disobedience is liable to legal punishment. 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. Enthusiasts of civil disobedience proper should likewise recall the eruption of hundreds of urban riots in the years 19651968, almost immediately following the civil rights movements moment of greatest triumph. The Declaration of Independence, as explained above, contains clear criteria for judging just and unjust government, along with a summation of dictates of prudence that yield an endorsement of civil disobedience only in exceptional and compelling circumstances. In a general sense, Kings conformity with this precept in the first phase of his activism appears, despite his sometimes eager usage of the language of revolution, in his scrupulous expressions of respect for the principles and institutions established by the American Founders. 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. 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.. . Specific disobedience breeds disrespect and promotes general disobedience. Here, in fuller elaboration, is the logic informing the Declarations dictates of prudence with respect to actions leading up to and including revolutionary uprising. By this means, his admirers might plausibly argue, King acknowledged the seriousness of critics major concern and effectively addressed it. 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. All lawful alternatives are to be attempted prior to the adoption of extra-lawful measures, and all plausibly viable non-revolutionary measures are to be attempted prior to the adoption of revolutionary measures. Civil Disobedience - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 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. Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love. 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. An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice. 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. 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. 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. 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. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS 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]. He then turned to their specific objection to the tactic of civil disobedience. In Kings account, therefore, justice entails the principle of equality under law, and legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed. Such protest must be nonviolent and must be animated by a spirit of love for the perpetrators of the injustice against which one protests. 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. 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. 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. An unjust law is no law at all, King declared, holding it to be both a right and a moral duty to disobey any such measure: [O]ne has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.[REF], Beyond such simple formulations, King took seriously the objections Kilpatrick, the clergymen, and others raised. Yet even Kings earlier argument conforms only imperfectly with the Founders principles, and the manner in which it departs from them prefigures his excesses in his later phase. 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., One of the great glories of democracy, King remarked at the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is the right to protest for right.. The discussion begins with a consideration of Americas founding principles, focusing in particular on the natural-rights principles summarized in the Declaration of Independence, and then moves to an extended analysis of the arguments of Martin Luther King, Jr. 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. Traffic laws are not in themselves unjust, King allowed, but their operation may be legitimately suspended for emergency purposes. In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is simply not like other acts in which menstand up courageously for their principles. 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]. 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? [REF] He contended that the social and economic rights he demanded are no less firmly rooted in Americas first principles than are the civil and political rights for which he campaigned in his movements first phase. 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. 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. This point concerning the regulation of civil disobedience by the dictates of prudence yields a vitally important corollary: Acts of civil disobedience are not necessarily revolutionary actions and do not necessarily rest on premises that justify revolutionary action.
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