Civil disobedience was practiced to great effect by people such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The discussion that follows is meant to provide such a reconsideration. 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. Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey the demands of an occupying power. 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. Civil disobedience is justified when it is used to protest democratic majorities overstepping their authority by violating fundamental rights. "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. The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. 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. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. Does the idea of civil disobedience still apply today? 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. Americans trust in government has fallen to historic lows as our partisan divisions and animosities have intensified; In the recent wave of protests and calls for protest one can find semblances of the first approach, but those more closely resembling the second model have predominated. Kings apologetic discussion of the rioting raises troubling questions. 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]. 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. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.[REF], A still more powerful influence was Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose teaching King discovered as a seminary student a few years thereafter. Let me explain. 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. His argument for civil disobedience in the later phase of his career diverges significantly from the relatively moderate argument he presented in his earlier, more successful phase. It is not clear that a patient reliance on the judicial process in the Birmingham campaign would have doomed the direct-action movement to failure, as King feared. 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. Indicative of the moral qualities required are the tenets of the Commitment Card the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) required volunteers to sign: I hereby pledge myselfmy person and bodyto the nonviolent movement. American civil disobedience in the theory and practice of Martin Luther King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. The Birmingham campaign, epitomized by the now-canonical Letter, is credited with generating an irresistible momentum for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King, Jr. was deeply influenced by Gandhi in his use of non-violent protest. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. 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. Civil disobedience is justified if the laws enacted by the majority deny the liberty of others. He adopted an idea of rights grounded in indefinite human needs rather than in definite and distinctive human faculties, thus leaving rights claims with no clear foundation or limiting principle even as he endorsed a great expansion of those claims.[REF]. He offered a second illustration in the form of a direct suggestion. Civil disobedience is often characterized as a conscientious act of illegal protest that people engage in to communicate their opposition to law or government policy. Civil disobedience is always justified by the people participating in the disobeying for the simple reason that they will always believe in what they are doing. 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. Mindful of the difficulties involved, King wrote, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? 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. Thoreau 9. AFF (Civil Disobedience is morally justified in a democracy) Value: Criteria: AFF CONSTRUCTION: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified because _____ a. Contention 1: Necessity i. Complications arise foremost from the fact that King did not hold a unitary and coherent position on civil disobedience. In the early Civil Rights Era, the paradigmatic acts of civil disobedience were designed to achieve relatively limited, reformist objectives. 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. Territories Financial Support Center (TFSC), Tribal Financial Management Center (TFMC). To establish the compatibility of his practice of civil disobedience with the rule of law, he needed to say more. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in Federalist No. is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as Classically, they violate the law they are protesting, such as segregation or draft laws, but sometimes they violate other laws which they find unobjectionable, such as trespass or traffic laws. 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. 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. Civil disobedience is a form of protest in which protestors deliberately violate a law. One might also discern in Kings eagerness to deploy the language of revolution and natural rights in preference to that of constitutional law a certain zeal for revolution at odds with his insistence on respect for positive law. 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. 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. It is permissible, on those principles, only where necessary and, in a context of functioning constitutional, republican government, only in exceptional cases. His disobedience shows a distrust for the democratic system. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. [REF], The dangers were sufficiently great that the average person, naturally concerned for the preservation of life and limb, could not be presumed willing or able to brave them. one phase of development in the civil rights revolution came to an end. He announced the advent of a second phase, targeting conditions in impoverished urban ghettoes across the country and aiming at the realization of [socioeconomic] equality across lines of class and color. I do not share Jason's optimism concerning the ease of questions surrounding civil . As Kings own legacy reveals, however, civil disobedience is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its practical effects. Civil disobedience is a nonviolent form of protest. 7. To convey the proper respect for law, one must obey as much of the law as possible. 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. "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 . 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. 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 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]. These prudential regulations circumscribing the right to revolution apply similarly to acts of civil disobedience. 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. It is the non-violent, noncompliance with unjust laws that is ordered towards changing the laws. Attempting to find virtue in the difference, King offered a troubling description of the prospective participants in his second-phase project, highlighting not their moral discipline but their social desperation: The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose., In a similar vein, King attempted to find even in the riots themselves support for his contention that the disaffected urban poor constituted a promising new class of potential pilgrims to nonviolence. " Democracy. 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 . 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. Yet despite these shortcomings, his discussion adumbrates several regulating and confining conditions that, properly elaborated, could supply a defensible justification of the practice. First, it wrongly presupposes that committing civil disobedience is morally permissible as a general matter of moral principle. Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. 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 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. 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 sort of care is especially needed at the present time. People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. [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. Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love. Its primary finding may be summarized in this lesson: Civil disobedience is justifiable but dangerous. 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. To say that less radical measures are to be preferred to more radical measures is to say that actions outside established legal and political channels are to be taken only where necessary and only so far as necessary. How can civil disobedience be explained and justified so as to foreclose the possibility that it could implicitly license uncivil, non-rightful disobedience, or to ensure that even its legitimate usages will not prove corrosive of the rule of law? [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? It must convey a respect for law as a necessary bond of moral communityincluding, so far as possible, the laws governing the particular community one means to reform. When proponents of this lately predominant form conflate Kings two models,[REF] therefore, they undermine the justification for civil disobedience altogether. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. Civil disobedience and conscientious objection are social practices motivated by moral and political beliefs. 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.[REF]. 2. Because, as Madison put it, the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,. 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. Kings Achievement. 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. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. 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. Rawls argues that civil disobedience, if it is engaged in only when justified, will be a stabilizing force on society. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. As the Declaration makes clear, the right to disobey the laws or decrees of unjust government, whether by civil or uncivil means, must be exercised with great caution. In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. . If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. Kings illustrations of the sort of actions he envisioned are useful in clarifying the distinction. 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. Within this broad conceptualization, civil disobedience can take numerous forms and be motivated by different reasons. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.[REF]. In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. 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. Finally, as for the principle that civil disobedience may be practiced only by people of properly formed character, Kings call for an expanded and disruptive campaign of civil disobedience did include a training period. 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). Updated: Apr 25th, 2023. Civil disobedience under these circumstances is at best deplorable and at worst destructive. He reiterated his calls for nonviolent action, including civil disobedience, but this time in a significantly modified form. 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 departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. 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. Rawls thus limits justified civil disobedience to cases where a democratic majority has implemented a law that violates a basic liberty right and thus oversteps its authority. Conceiving of civil disobedience as a willing submission of self to a higher discipline, King made clear that this mode of protest carried a high risk. 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. 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. Most worrisome in the recent waves of purportedly civil disobedience is their participants disregard for the divided legacy of the Civil Rights movement. He believed that among the available channels for such demands, action via the court system was at best dilatory and often ineffectual; it needed reinforcement by direct-action, demonstrative protest. 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. 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. Therefore I will keep the following ten commandments: 1. What sort of person, marked by what sorts of qualities, volunteers for such training in the first place? 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. 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. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. The nations experience over the past half-century or so highlights the need for a careful reconsideration of the case for civil disobedience. 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? Visiting Scholar, 2016-17 Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought. In the years that followed, King would radicalize his calls for civil disobedience. 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. In more recent times, the riots in Baltimore saw the death . 3. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. Civil disobedience is an effective tool which can help resolve unjust situations and display public rejection to participate in immoral activities. Again, the justification of civil disobedience in this kind of case depends on the particulars. 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. [REF], The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. 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. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. Two years later, a riot in Detroit wrought even greater destruction.[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 . 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. Civil disobedience is a particular form of political protest that involves the deliberate violation of the law for social purposes. Against their own purposes, they corroborate warnings by critics to the effect that acts of purportedly civil disobedience are likely to turn lawless and violent.[REF]. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration. Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free. 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? 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. At this point arises the issue of civil disobedience. " is the official definition from the Britannica Encyclopedia. Those evils did ensuebut as King emphasized, they came in the main from the actions of segregations defenders, not from its protesters. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. Those two statutes constitute the most ambitious and effective civil- and political-rights guarantees in the nations history, and their enactment coincides with the onset of a profound reformation in Americans moral sentiments about race relations. Because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. The ontology of civil disobedience merely sets out that disobeying a law is potentially justified on extra-legal grounds. 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. Like Gandhi, King believed that citizens have a duty to engage in . In a 1960 televised debate with King, the segregationist James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the, 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. Thus originated the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.[REF], The Objections to 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.

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