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. 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. It is justifiable, where circumstances warrant, by the first principles of the American republic and of free, constitutional government, and it is dangerous in that it poses a threat to the rule of law. 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. As we will see, American civil disobedience in its most widely admired form, in the theory and practice of King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. . Thoreau 3. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. 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. 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. Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. 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. Positive or man-made law must conform with higher lawwith natural or divine law. [REF] Acutely aware of the turbulent history of republics,[REF] Americas revolutionary Founders hoped that Americans would prove exceptional in our lawfulness: lawful both in our obedience and, where need be, in our 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. Nor did he address in the Letter the implications of his idea of equality for other, more difficult questions pertaining to justice in race relations and to the cause of social and political equality in generalquestions controversial even among proponents of equality. is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as "Refusal to obey governmental demands or commands, especially as a nonviolent and usually collective mean. 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. They have the right, by his logic, to violate the rights of innocent parties (travelers, office workers, or public officials, along with their clients, patrons, and constituents). Moreover, the most prominent eruptions in the past decade of what supporters persist in calling civil disobedience, including the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the anti-Trump Resistance,. Rawls indicates that to be completely open and nonviolent manifests one's sincerity, honesty, and the depth of commitment . 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? King held further acts of civil disobedience to be warranted because he regarded prevailing conditions of poverty and rising discontentment as effects of a set of terrible economic injustices no less grievous and even more widespread than the wrongs of the Jim Crow regime: In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income . 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. The practice of civil disobedience required a special kind of personmeaning, in most cases, a specially. Some definitions suggest that non-violence"civility" is a necessary condition for political disobedience to qualify as civil disobedience. The Right Spirit. 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. In the early Civil Rights Era, the paradigmatic acts of civil disobedience were designed to achieve relatively limited, reformist objectives. For enthusiasts of rightful disobedience (civil or not), events such as the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement serve as congenial examplesbut the participants in the slaveholders rebellion of 1861 and the mid-20th century campaign of massive resistance to desegregation no less firmly believed their causes to be just. 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. Many officials and theorists nowadays concede that civil disobedience can be morally justified, while maintaining the need to criminally punish civil disobedients, on the basis of arguments very . However, the climate necessity defense is not without controversy. If it conflicts with the higher law, it cannot be binding as law. 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]. He offered a second illustration in the form of a direct suggestion. Lockdown orders are not justified. 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.. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr. was deeply influenced by Gandhi in his use of non-violent protest. Because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. 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. Second, I attempt to identify a reliable . Yet despite these shortcomings, his discussion adumbrates several regulating and confining conditions that, properly elaborated, could supply a defensible justification of the practice. [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. Above all, because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. 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.. Again, the justification of civil disobedience in this kind of case depends on the particulars. With Selma and the Voting Rights Act, King wrote in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Dissatisfied with Johnsons War on Poverty, King called for a multifaceted real war on poverty designed to provide jobs, income, and housing for all in need of them: in sum, a new economic deal for the poor, consisting in a massive, new national program.[REF]. 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. Critics argue that it promotes lawlessness and undermines the rule of . 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. In the years that followed, King would radicalize his calls for civil disobedience. 2. Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. Their appeal provided a perfect occasion for a response from King, who with other movement leaders had been contemplating, since a previous campaign in Albany, Georgia, the composition of a prison epistle to serve as a manifesto for their movement. The latter sort of action is unintelligible as a claim upon conscience. "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. 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. 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. 2. 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. 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 . Civil disobedience must convey a respect for the authority of law as an indispensable and inherently fragile instrument of human governance, no less than for the rational principles from which the law must ultimately derive. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. 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]. Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. 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. 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. 32 Civil disobedience is justified because it promotes human dignity, promotes the idea that the government is limited in 33 Civil disobedience proclaims that humans have dignity. [REF] Its present legitimacy and prestige, however, reflect the influence of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a movement characterized by its leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., as the greatest mass-action crusade for freedom that has ever occurred in American history.[REF] Prompted by that movement, America has undergone sea changes in law and in public sentiment regarding race relations and the antidiscrimination idea, and Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, containing his most elaborate justification of the practice of civil disobedience, has become a widely anthologized writing and a fixture in U.S. secondary and collegiate civics education. 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. 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. At this point arises the issue of civil disobedience. A consideration of Americas first principles, as explicated in the political thought informing the American Founding, corroborates Kings view. He reiterated his calls for nonviolent action, including civil disobedience, but this time in a significantly modified form. The eight were not segregationists; they were moderate proponents of gradual integration. 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). When the civil disobedient dis- obeys one law, he invariably subverts all law. 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. However, he was "interested primarily in social matters". 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. To its proponents, the idea of civil disobedience represents a compelling linkage of morality and efficacy, a happy marriage of moral ends to moral means in the pursuit of social or political reform. 10. Defending human rights in peaceful ways outside "the law" is ultimately a form of defense of and respect for the law. An enactment to which lawmakers subjected only others, not themselves, would be no true law, and a similar disqualification would apply to any legislation imposed upon an unjustly disfranchised portion of the population.[REF]. In that specific application, his explanation of just cause for civil disobedience may be judged successful. King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. 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]. 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. It is permissible, on those principles, only where necessary and, in a context of functioning constitutional, republican government, only in exceptional cases. 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. Whether dissension prefer one run of protest to another depends upon the particular historical . A lock ( But this is not all: many theorists argue that civil disobedience is compatible with the moral duty to obey. 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. [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. His first illustration was offered as a hypothetical, though it has since become a common method in actual protests. Kings account of unjust laws in the Letter specifically targeted laws in Americas Old South that sustained race-based segregation and disfranchisement, laws inconsistent in principle with any plausible understanding of human moral equality. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.[REF]. How, for instance, are we to know that protestors claims of injustice are valid and the changes they demand are salutary? People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. 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. The proliferation of civil disobedience in recent times has prompted questions about violence and justified resistance. Civil disobedience is more than just "a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in law or policies of government.". 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. In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. Plato's topic on circumstances in morally permissible disobedience, I shall arguing, anticipates that approach. Not only does civil disobedience imply contempt for the law, but it threatens those involved and those surrounding the act of protest. 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. " Democracy. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. The conventional definition of civil disobedience leaves open some basic and challenging questions concerning its justifying causes and its permissible scope and objectives. 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. 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. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. Many types of objections to civil disobedience have been raised, often based on the view that citizens in a democracy are obliged to obey the law. 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. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. What is Civil Disobedience? That is not to say that he fully met that responsibility, either in the Letter (which he continued to compose and revise after his release[REF]) or elsewhere in his published work. Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . 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. Civil disobedience is justified for many reasons such as moral responsibility, legal attempts to change these unjust laws have failed, and it can be used to publicize an issue. 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. [REF] For the same reason, they are to embody the greatest respect for man-made positive laws that circumstances permit. For both Locke and the Founders, however, the ultimate law to which human government is subjectincluding the fundamental legislative authority of constitution-framers and ratifiersis a law beyond human making, the law of nature. 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. Aspects of civil disobedience. As Kings own legacy reveals, however, civil disobedience is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its practical effects. Whatever the broader causes, the Watts riots left 34 people dead and over 1,000 injured. 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. 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. Mindful of the dangers in an excessively permissive justification, he rejected the sort of disobedience that would lead to anarchy and explained his own practice in terms that indicate an earnest intention to negate or minimize any anarchic effects. 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. 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. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free. Advocates argue that, when used judiciously, civil disobedience can be a powerful tool for social change, and the climate necessity defense provides a legal framework for activists to make their case in court. 10. There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. The judgment as to when circumstances warrant, along with the practice of civil disobedience itself, must be governed by the most careful prudential regulation. 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. 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. 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. 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]. LockA locked padlock 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. 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 .