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]. 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. 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. [2] 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. Understand laws before you obey them Yes, but yet slightly no. 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. 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. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. 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. Rawls indicates that to be completely open and nonviolent manifests one's sincerity, honesty, and the depth of commitment . 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. It was integral, in other words, to his larger design of exposing the stark conflict between local positive laws sustaining racial subordination and the moral laws of nature. That civil disobedience may be practiced only for the right reasons is first and fundamental among the regulating conditions King suggested. Critics argue that it promotes lawlessness and undermines the rule of . 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. 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. What sort of person, marked by what sorts of qualities, volunteers for such training in the first place? The Limits and Dangers of Civil Disobedience: The Case of Martin Luther King, Jr. 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. [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]. 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. King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. 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. 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. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation. Nor was there a legitimate opportunity for effecting change by the normal electoral process: Throughout Alabama all typesof devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters., In sum, King argued, we had no alternative but to engage in street protests, andafter Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor obtained an anti-demonstration injunction from an Alabama courtno alternative but to engage in civil disobedience. The conventional definition of civil disobedience leaves open some basic and challenging questions concerning its justifying causes and its permissible scope and objectives. 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. 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. This right, like every other, however, comes with correlative responsibilities, among which the most fundamental are responsibilities to law and republican government. Noting that the injunction method was proving an effective tool for segregationists in thwarting blacks rights to peaceful protest, King therefore decided to reject his fathers advice to submit to the courts ruling. Where uncivil or violent disobedience would be rightful but unwise, the lesser means of civil disobedience must likewise be rightful. Ground of Obedience. 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 . 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. The latter sort of action is unintelligible as a claim upon conscience. Further, because the rule of law is not only indispensable to free and just government but also inherently fragile, the practice of disobedient protest can only qualify as properly civil if it is circumscribed with the greatest care. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. " is the official definition from the Britannica Encyclopedia. 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? The account of civil disobedience developed in this thesis can be defended . Civil disobedience cannot be an armed struggle. Civil disobedience can thus be justified at least where the moral duty to obey is nonbinding. American civil disobedience in the theory and practice of Martin Luther King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. These prudential regulations circumscribing the right to revolution apply similarly to acts of civil disobedience. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. An unjust law, he continued, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas, is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law or natural law. A law that uplifts human personality is just, and one that degrades human personality is unjust. Governmentally mandated segregation by color is unjust, because it distort[s] the soul and damages the personality, producing in perpetrators and victims false senses of superiority and inferiority. Civil disobedience has been widely used to challenge injustice in the United States, most visibly in the second half of the 20th century, with the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. It is permissible, on those principles, only where necessary and, in a context of functioning constitutional, republican government, only in exceptional cases. Civil disobedience is the opposite notion to the morality and duty in society. 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. Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. 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. 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. 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. Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: TEN-HERNG LAI, CHONG-MING LIM Environmental Activism and the Fairness of Costs Argument for Uncivil Disobedience, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 19 (Jan 2023): 1-20. 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. Is civil disobedience morally permissible? Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. 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. Civil disobedience and conscientious objection are social practices motivated by moral and political beliefs. Second, I attempt to identify a reliable . Amid these conditions, a reconsideration of King could serve as a useful first stepdrawing our guidance from the. Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . 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. At the heart of the American character is a seeming paradox: America is a republic of laws, yet it has a long tradition of civil disobedience. When proponents of this lately predominant form conflate Kings two models, The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. 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). 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. 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. [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? People. An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. Justified or not, civil disobedience is liable to legal punishment. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. The discussion that follows is meant to provide such a reconsideration. 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). 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. Within this broad conceptualization, civil disobedience can take numerous forms and be motivated by different reasons. Again, the justification of civil disobedience in this kind of case depends on the particulars. 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. King called this modified conception a more mature form of civil disobedience. Violent in itself, that injustice was in Kings view also violent in its emerging effectsabove all in the rioting that began in Watts just days after the Voting Rights Act became law and spread, in the two years thereafter, to hundreds of cities across the U.S. As was the case in Watts, the riots were often precipitated by disputes involving policebut evidence suggests that neither charges of police brutality nor discontentment at socioeconomic deprivation was the predominant cause. All plausibly viable lawful alternatives are to be attempted prior to the adoption of extra-lawful measures, just as all plausibly viable peaceful means are to be employed prior to any recourse to violent force. It is meaningful, if unsurprising, that the SCLC required of protesters a commitment suffused with the moral spirit of Christianity. Our impatience, he said, was legitimate and unavoidable. The implication is that civil disobedience was undertaken as a last, nonviolent resort and was justified as such. The correction of unjust government may not require radical, thoroughgoing regime changeand in the Declarations teaching of prudence, where such revolutionary change is not required, it is not permitted: Actions to alter unjust government are to be preferred, where possible, to actions taken to abolish it. 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. 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. First, it wrongly presupposes that committing civil disobedience is morally permissible as a general matter of moral principle. 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. Civil disobedience is a form of civil war An act of civil disobedience sets a precedence of breaking the law. 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. 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. 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. 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). These are untenable claims. 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. "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 . Prudence, in other words, dictates a narrow-tailoring rule, according to which less radical alternative measures are to be preferred, explored, and exhausted prior to the adoption of more radical measures. 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. 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? Not only does civil disobedience imply contempt for the law, but it threatens those involved and those surrounding the act of protest. 2. When the civil disobedient says that he is above the law, he is saying that democracy is beneath him. 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. 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. In this way both the disobedience and the acceptance of the penalty are essential to Kings effort to reform the law by means of moral suasion. 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.. 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. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. [REF] Such actions have become increasingly normalized in post-1960s America, as groups protesting a wide range of issuesincluding, in a partial list, nuclear armaments, abortion, environmental policy, and more recently, alleged misdeeds in the financial-services industry, immigration policy, and alleged police misconducthave laid claim to the method of 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 . 8. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society . 4. 5. 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. 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., I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could nameif ten, During my student days at Morehouse, King wrote, I read Thoreaus essay Civil Disobedience for the first time. 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. 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. Revolution, the outermost extreme among acts of protest or resistance, is justified, according to the Declaration, only where all of the following conditions are present: Informing the Declarations admonition of prudence is the rule that revolutionary actions are to be taken only as a last resortonly in acquiescence to necessity, as the Declaration states, to the end of correcting injustice. It may involve violence, but most forms of civil disobedience involve non-violent protests and actions. Thoreau Thus originated the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail., The objection was familiar to King. In the years that followed, King would radicalize his calls for civil disobedience. Here is the key point: Kings actions in Birmingham and elsewhere were born of a deep impatience, informed, as he wrote in the Letter, by a centuries-long history of injustice, including promises made and unfulfilled, that had taught him to equate slow or partial progress with no progress: Half a loaf is no bread., Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? I do not share Jason's optimism concerning the ease of questions surrounding civil . 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. Spirit. ) or https:// means youve safely connected to the .gov website. 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. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. 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 . [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. 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. 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. 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., King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. Despite its illegality, justified civil disobedience represents one way in which good citizens can demonstrate fidelity to the principles that regulate political power, and one way in which they can try to close the gap between principle and practice in their societies. JoanSpero and Jeffrey Hart, "Democracy." 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