civil disobedience is not morally justified

It is plainly at odds with his insistence on the correspondence of moral ends and moral means. 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. In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. 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. Thus, civil disobedience may be morally justified, even in a democracy. But this is not all: many theorists argue that civil disobedience is compatible with the moral duty to obey. 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. The people in such circumstances hold rights to petition and protest, and should those appeals prove unavailing, to take action to effect such changes as are needed. Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. Rawls indicates that to be completely open and nonviolent manifests one's sincerity, honesty, and the depth of commitment . Such behavior would only hurt the system. Sometimes, for the greater good of your city, community, state, country, continent, or even the world, laws must be broken. There is, consequently, no moral obligation to obey them. 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]. 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. [2] He reiterated his calls for nonviolent action, including civil disobedience, but this time in a significantly modified form. But, if one person can create change that gives them more power than others. Is civil disobedience morally OK because governments aren't progressive enough when it comes to protecting non-humans? Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. 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. 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 . 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. Civil disobedience cannot be an armed struggle. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. [REF], The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. 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. This right, like every other, however, comes with correlative responsibilities, among which the most fundamental are responsibilities to law and republican government. 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. 6. 2. Civil disobedience, as defined by John Rawls, is a "public, nonviolent and conscientious act . 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. It centers on King primarily because of the near-universal acclaim now accorded Kings Letter, which stands as the most influential defense of civil disobedience in our time, if not in all U.S. history. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. 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. Thoreau 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. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. Mindful of the difficulties involved, King wrote, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. Even during the civil rights movement, led by the nonviolent southern preacher, hundreds were injured and killed during these "nonviolent" protests. Whether dissension prefer one run of protest to another depends upon the particular historical . 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. 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? Updated: Apr 25th, 2023. 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. 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. That civil disobedience may be practiced only for the right reasons is first and fundamental among the regulating conditions King suggested. Kings Achievement. 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. 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. 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. A lock ( Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.[REF] He also rejected the error Kilpatrick had ascribed to him, a reliance on conscience to distinguish just and unjust laws that reduces in practice to a mere idiosyncratic choice. 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. 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. a design to restore or to create a bond of community between the erstwhile victims and perpetrators of the injustice at issue. However paradoxical it might appear, Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. 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. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. 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. In circumstances justifying greater forms of disobedience, it is reasonable to infer that lesser forms are permissible. Critics had predicted that the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience would degenerate into uncivil disobedience, marked by lawlessness and violence. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society . He conceded that it was certainly a legitimate concern. 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. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to co-operate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. 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. 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. 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. It makes governments more accountable Sometimes it's the only tool in the box Sometimes it's the only way to publicise an issue Sometimes the law is wrong. 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. Kings later conception departs, too, from his earlier insistence that civil disobedience must be practiced in a spirit of respect for law, respect for democratic governance, and redemptive good will, manifesting a desire for reconciliation with ones erstwhile adversaries. In more recent times, the riots in Baltimore saw the death . 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.

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