Other theorists deny that civil disobedients need to demonstrate fidelity to law, taking what Scheuerman dubs an anti-legal turn. Civility, on a number of recent accounts Brownlee ch. Cooke , is satisfied when agents aim to communicate with an audience and engage with the public sphere.
This anti-legal turn goes along with what we may call a critical turn in scholarship on civil disobedience. Not only do theorists critique the liberal account of civil disobedience as unduly narrow and restrictive as contemporary critics of Rawls already did and articulate a more inclusive concept; but they also critique the ideology that undergirds the common account, uncovering the ways in which it distorts the reality of the practice, deters resistance, and buttresses the status quo Celikates , ; Delmas a, ch.
In this vein, several scholars have reassessed the complex legacy of Thoreau and Gandhi to the civil disobedience tradition, in order to both show the misappropriation of their writings on political resistance and to call for a reappropriation and appreciation of their visions Mantena ; Hanson ; Livingston ; Scheuerman , ch.
Scholars have also reconsidered the historical record of the American Civil Rights Movement to excavate the radical understanding of civil disobedience forged by actors themselves, in lieu of the romantic and sanitized version that dominates public perception of the Movement Hooker ; Livingston a, b; Pineda b, ch. Although civil disobedience often overlaps broadly with other types of dissent, nevertheless some distinctions may be drawn between the key features of civil disobedience and the key features of these other practices.
The obvious difference between legal protest and civil disobedience is that the former lies within the bounds of the law, but the latter does not.
Legal ways of protesting include, among many others, making speeches, signing petitions, organizing for a cause, donating money, taking part in authorized demonstrations, and boycotting. Some of these can become illegal, for instance when law enforcement declares an assembly unlawful and orders the crowd to disperse, or under anti-boycott legislation. Some causes may also be declared illegal, such that one cannot be associated with the cause or donate to it such as the Communist Party in the U.
Most of the features exemplified in civil disobedience — other than its illegality — can be found in legal protest: a conscientious and communicative demonstration of protest, a desire to bring about through moral dialogue some lasting change in policy or principle, an attempt to educate and to raise awareness, and so on. A practice distinct from, but related to, civil disobedience is rule departure on the part of authorities. Rule departure is essentially the deliberate decision by an official, for conscientious reasons, not to discharge the duties of her office Feinberg , Civil disobedience and rule departure differ mainly in the identity of their practitioners and in their legality.
First, whereas rule departure typically is done by an agent of the state including citizens serving in juries , civil disobedience typically is done by citizens including officials acting as ordinary citizens and not in the capacity of their official role.
Second, whereas the civil disobedient breaks the law, the official who departs from the rules associated with her role is not usually violating the law, unless the rule she breaks is also codified in law. For instance, jurors may refuse to convict a person for violating an unjust law. When they do, they nullify the law. However, many judges forbid any mention of jury nullification in their courtroom, so that jurors are not allowed to advise each other of the possibility to refuse to convict Brooks Conscientious objection may be defined as a refusal to conform to some rule, mandate, or legal directive on grounds of personal opposition to it.
Examples include conscripts refusing to serve in the army; public officials refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses; and parents refusing to vaccinate their children as mandated by state law. In other views, however, when an objector seeks to keep her act private and to avoid detection, this casts doubt on her sincerity and seriousness Brownlee , ch. Conscientious objection is often considered to be the private counterpart of civil disobedience: where civil disobedients address the public, are motivated by and appeal to general considerations of justice, and seek to bring about reform, conscientious objectors are supposed to be animated by personal convictions and to simply seek to preserve their own moral integrity through exemption Smith and Brownlee Conscientious objection, unlike civil disobedience, is not necessarily unlawful.
Indeed, the law protects conscientious objectors in many contexts, including in the military and healthcare, by carving out exemptions for them. Some thinkers distinguish conscientious objection from conscientious evasion and stress that we should not overstate the private and personal characteristics of the former. Conscientious objectors often act openly and non-anonymously and take responsibility for their non-conforming act by attempting or being willing to justify it to authorities.
To that extent, they may be said to meet the publicity-as-visibility requirement. Some agents, in contrast, undertake their conscientious objection covertly and evasively as conscientious evasion. A young man drafted to fight a war he opposes, for instance, may openly refuse to serve and be arrested and charged for his refusal, or covertly dodge the draft by going AWOL.
While conscientious evasion is incompatible with the intention to communicate, conscientious objection may have a public or communicative component, as Thoreau clearly did with his conscientious tax refusal, in a way that blurs the distinction with civil disobedience. Moreover, when such actions are taken by many people — as they often are — their collective impact can approximate the kind of communicative protest exemplified in civil disobedience Delmas a, ch.
Writings on immigration and on civil disobedience have merged into an area of research devoted to principled disobedience in response to anti-immigration policies. One view, which focuses on what individual actors should do about immigration, examines various unlawful tactics of resistance, including evasion, deception, use of force against state officials, and smuggling Hidalgo , chs.
Another view conceives of illegal migration as a form of resistance to global poverty Blunt , ch. It is further useful to distinguish transnational civil disobedience from global civil disobedience.
For instance, when the sans-papiers in France openly protest against their socio-political and legal exclusion through occupations, demonstrations, and hunger strikes, they may be viewed as engaged in acts of global civil disobedience. See also Applbaum , ch. Digitalization — access to personal computers and the Internet — has transformed not only our lives and interactions, but also our disobedient practices.
From piracy to DDoS attacks and from open-access coding to Digital Care Packages which provide tools to circumvent censorship and surveillance , digital disobedience has emerged as a rich terrain for theoretical inquiry.
Scholars disagree about the application of the defining features of civil disobedience to the digital, e. These debates aside, it is useful to distinguish different kinds of digital tools, sites, strategies, and aims. First, activists use digital technology as tools to organize, document, communicate, raise funds, and make decisions.
For instance, Black Lives Matter activists use social media to promote their cause, raise consciousness about systemic racism, and publicize instances of police brutality. They use crowdfunding platforms for fundraising to cover bail and other legal expenses for those arrested.
They encourage people to use police scanner apps to watch police activity and legal assistance apps to record encounters with law enforcement officials. Second, the digital is itself a crucial site and object of activism.
Hacktivists envision a different Internet — one that is democratic and democratically controlled, free, respectful of privacy, and creative. They protest against the digital architecture of surveillance and control that has been imposed on netizens without their consent. Third, some properly digital strategies of principled disobedience have emerged, such as DDoS actions, web defacement, and hacking. The Open Access Movement, which advocates for open-source software and an open-source repository of academic and scientific research, combines all three dimensions of digital disobedience: it uses networked computers to organize and communicate; it seeks to bring about a free Internet characterized by the free flow of software, science, and culture and has developed a coherent political platform in its defense; and it deploys properly digital strategies, such as illegal downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing which is illegal when the content torrented is copyrighted material.
The Open Access Movement epitomizes a public, geeks-and-grassroots mass movement that not only promotes online democratic governance, but also enacts it within the movement Swartz [Other Internet Resources]; Delmas b, 79— Uncivil disobedience is not a distinct category of political action, but a cluster concept or umbrella term that can be used to designate acts of principled disobedience that may or may not be communicative, and which violate one or more of the marks of civility by being covert, violent, evasive, or offensive Delmas a, ; Lai Examples include animal rescue, Sanctuary assistance, sabotage, ecotage e.
These various act-types do not share any essential property, besides violating one or more of the commonly accepted criteria of civility. Each form of uncivil disobedience must be examined conceptualized and assessed on its own.
Identifying some principled disobedient acts as uncivil makes room to focus on their justification. Scholars have defended such uncivil disobedience as political rioting Pasternak , vandalism Lim ; Lai , violent protest Kling and Mitchell , coercive strike tactics Gourevitch , and direct action Smith While a civil disobedient does not necessarily oppose the regime in which she acts, the revolutionary agent is deeply opposed to that regime or a core aspect of that regime.
Revolutionary agents may not seek to persuade others of the merits of their position — communication is usually not their primary aim, although they convey the urgency of a regime change.
When revolution is called for, such as under colonial occupation, there is no need to justify constrained acts of protest like civil disobedience. Indeed, more forceful resistance can be justified as we pass into the realm of just war theory Buchanan ; Finlay This is not to say that all violent tactics, including terror, are permissible, since the use of violence must not only pursue a just cause but also accord with proportionality and necessity i.
As will be discussed in the next section, revolutionary activists and thinkers like Frantz Fanon , ch. The task of defending civil disobedience is commonly undertaken with the assumption that in reasonably just, liberal societies people have a general moral duty to follow the law often called political obligation. It is on the basis of such an assumption that civil disobedience requires justification. This section examines common understandings of the problem of disobedience 3. Whether or not theorists assume that civil disobedience is presumptively impermissible and in need of justification, their analyses also articulate the value and role of civil disobedience in non-ideal, nearly just or less-than-nearly-just liberal democracies 3.
Philosophers have given many arguments in favor of the moral duty to obey the law see entry on political obligation. Despite the many critiques of, and general skepticism toward, arguments for the moral duty to obey the law, most prominently following A. They contend that civil disobedience in particular is presumptively wrong because of its anti-democratic nature. The agent who violates the outcomes of democratic decision-making processes because she disapproves of them puts herself above the law and threatens the legal and democratic order.
Recent scholarship on civil disobedience has taken what may be dubbed an anarchist turn , as theorists tend to no longer approach civil disobedience as presumptively wrong and in tension with political obligation.
Others defend a disjunctive moral duty to obey the law or disobey it civilly Lefkowitz ; and still others argue that the grounds commonly used to support political obligation — the natural duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and associative obligations — yield duties to resist injustice, through civil and uncivil disobedience, under non-ideal circumstances, and that such duties should be considered among our political obligations Delmas a.
Likewise, on a virtue-ethical account, political obligation can be understood as an obligation to respect rather than to obey the law, which can sometimes give rise to a duty to engage in civil disobedience Moraro , ch. Given the assumption that people have a moral duty to obey the law and the concern that civil disobedience has the potential to destabilize society, Rawls famously raised the bar for the justified use of the practice, requiring acts of civil disobedience 1 to target serious and long-standing injustice and at the same time appeal to widely accepted principles of justice, 2 to be undertaken as a last resort, and 3 to be done in coordination with other minority groups with similar grievances Rawls , —9.
These conditions for the justification of civil disobedience, which are critically examined in this part, are closely tied not only to the ostensible need to diffuse its destabilizing potential and discourage proliferation of the practice, but also to the efficacy and role of civil disobedience in society which is explored further in 3.
Longstanding Injustice : Why did Rawls restrict the target of civil disobedience to entrenched, longstanding injustices — in particular, violations of the principle of equal basic liberties? Racial segregation fell in this category, according to Rawls, but not economic inequality. Rawls thinks that appeals to publicly shared principles of constitutional morality per the publicity-as-appeal requirement are more likely to persuade the majority and succeed to bring about reform.
Critics reject this justificatory condition because it arbitrarily excludes both progressive but not widely shared conceptions of justice such as cosmopolitanism and appeals to other principles of morality besides justice say, regarding the ethical treatment of animals; Singer , 86— Scholars also include in the class of justifiable targets private agents such as trade unions, banks, health insurance companies, labs, farm factories, and private universities Walzer , ch.
Cooke Finally, observation of past and present social movements, including the Abolitionist movement, MeToo, and Black Lives Matter, suggests that, rather than appealing to the public principles of political morality, civil disobedients may in fact seek to transform common sense morality.
Last Resort : What grounds the widely accepted requirement that civil disobedience be undertaken as a last resort? How do we know agents have met it? One position is that, in a liberal democracy, citizens should use proper legal channels of political participation to express their grievances Raz ; though Raz grants that individual acts of disobedience can be justified in liberal regimes.
But, since causes defended by a minority are often those most opposed by persons in power, legal channels may be less than wholly effective Rawls , Moreover, it is unclear when a person could claim to have reached a situation of last resort; she could continue to use the same tired legal methods without end. To ward off such challenges, Rawls suggests that, if past actions, including by others, have shown the majority to be immovable or apathetic, then further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless and the dissenter may be confident her civil disobedience is a last resort , Minority Group Coordination : The coordination requirement is designed to regulate the overall level of dissent Rawls , While there is some merit to this condition, arguably civil disobedience that does not meet it can still be justifiable.
In some cases, there will be no time or opportunity to coordinate with other minorities. In other cases, other minority groups may be unable or unwilling to coordinate. A reason for Rawls to defend this coordination requirement is that often coordination serves a more important concern, namely, the achievement of good consequences.
It is often argued that civil disobedience can only be justified if there is a high probability that it will produce positive change, since only such change can justify exposing society to the risks of harm usually associated with civil disobedience — namely, its destabilizing and divisive potential and the risk that it could encourage lawbreaking or escalate into uncivil disobedience. In response to these challenges, one might question the empirical claims that civil disobedience is divisive and that it has the consequence of leading others to use disobedience to achieve changes in policy.
One might also question whether it necessarily would be a bad thing if civil disobedience had these consequences. Concerning likelihood of success, civil disobedience can seem most justifiable when the situation appears hopeless and when the government refuses to listen to conventional forms of communication. Additionally, even when general success seems unlikely, civil disobedience might be defended for any reprieve from harm that it brings to victims of a bad law or policy.
Tree-hugging, for example, can delay or curtail a clear-cut logging scheme and thereby prolong the protection of an ecosystem. The justification of civil disobedience further articulates the conditions for its effective role in society. Far from undermining the rule of law or destabilizing society, civil disobedience could strengthen the social and legal order. Both ideas deem the practice of civil disobedience to be a valuable component of the public political culture of a near-just constitutional democratic society.
Deliberative democrats Markovits ; Smith , ch. Agents engaged in civil disobedience can enhance democratic legitimacy in a number of ways, including by putting a heretofore-neglected issue on the political agenda and raising awareness about its stakes; contributing to and informing democratic deliberation; highlighting the outsize influence of powerful players and the exclusionary effects of certain processes of public deliberation, and working to make the latter more inclusive.
Civil disobedience does not only aim to invigorate democratic sovereignty, but also can constitute a form of democratic empowerment in itself — an exercise of political agency that is especially meaningful for marginalized groups. Through civil disobedience, individuals discover and realize their power. They work together and forge bonds of solidarity. They engage in democratic politics. Many activists further enact within their movement the norms and values that guide their struggles, for instance through radical inclusion, direct democratic decision-making, aspiration to consensus, and leaderless organizational structures.
Some theorists insist on the need to align the means of protest with its aims, by deploying only persuasive, non-violent forms of protest that reflect democratic ideals Habermas , —4; M.
Cooke , while others contend that civil disobedience can be confrontational and coercive without betraying its democratic aims Smith ; Fung , A third approach to the value of civil disobedience, besides the liberal and democratic lenses, comes from the political realist perspective. Other realists criticize both liberal and deliberative democratic perspectives for their deductive, top-down approach to moral analysis, their quest for rational consensus, and their assumption that people can be persuaded by rational arguments alone Sabl , ; Mantena Martin Luther King Jr.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Students held sit-ins protesting the Vietnam War. Cesar Chavez improved conditions faced by migrant workers. The list continues to grow as people actively participate in civil disobedience regarding such issues as abortion, the war in Iraq, gay marriage, chopping down rain forests, politics and stem cell research.
Sometimes, for the greater good of your city, community, state, country, continent, or even the world, laws must be broken. Most acts of civil disobedience are justifiable. I urge you to look at your own lives, at what rights and privileges you now have because others took it upon themselves to disobey.
That's what civil disobedience is really about. Civil disobedience is often frowned upon because these acts are illegal, although nonviolent.
However, many positive changes have been achieved through civil disobedience. Henry David Thoreau, a Transcendentalist writer, wrote an essay, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," which states that people should follow their own perspective when it comes to what is right or wrong.
It is because of those people who stuck to their beliefs when times seemed harsh and unfair that changes came about, ultimately improving the lives of the people in this country. The Boston Tea Party is just one of several examples where citizens used civil disobedience against the government in order to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. If it weren't for that act of defiance, Americans would have continued to pay obscene taxes and the Revolutionary War would not have happened.
Organized acts of civil disobedience were part of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks, who simply refused to give up a bus seat to a white man, made a difference. If it were not for this movement, African-Americans would not have the opportunities they have today and the opportunities that every American citizen has the right to claim would not exist.
And our country would not now be led by its first African-American president. If I were to send a letter to the Secret Service telling them that they will be held accountable for their treasonous actions, the US government would say that I had committed an act of psycho-terrorism. Yet I and the ACLU would say that I had simply expressed a religious prophecy protected by the 1st and yes also the second amendment to the Constitution.
Not engaging in civil disobedience no matter how you define it helps criminals maintain power behind a false idea that we should not insult someone or create strife in society. People should remember it is a criminal leadership that often times creates the strife. In other cases the strife is created by genuine disagreements as to what injustice is, such as the abortion issue. Civil disobedience requires the outright and explicit breaking of law, breaching the contract we made with the government when we voted them into power.
Law-abiding demonstrations and protests fall under the same category as lobbying, which is decidedly not civil disobedience. These practices infringe on the rights of other in many different and complex ways, sometimes these effects can be direct, such as destruction from rioters, and other times they can be indirect, such as ineffectual, useless, and non-controversial legislation passed in an effort to dissuade potential rioters.
Even more damaging is legislation that is passed directly to appease rioters, which consequently harms those who are not demonstrating in illegal ways.
In a modern, developed state, i. Canada vs. Iraq, civil disobedience is a harmful shortcut that many cynics unfortunately resort to. People need to realize that civil disobedience has both short, and long term consequences. There is an abundance of acceptable paths to take in order to combat an allegedly corrupt government that need to be exhausted which is theoretically impossible before true civil disobedience in the form of a coup should morally take place.
It has been said by those representing the no position that it is possible to correct injustices through normal channels of political conduct. While it may be possible it is often not likely. In a representative democracy the people who are elected to office do not have a clue as to why they were elected in the first place. When the voters decide who to vote for they have to consider the the stand of each candidate on many different issues, and their chances of winning.
A person may agree with candidate A on 3 issues be opposed on 7, with Candidate B agree on 5 and be opposed on 5, and with candidate C agree on 8 and be opposed on 2. This person may vote for candidate A because he is in agreement with him on the 3 most important issues. An ideological twin of this voter may vote for candidate B because they agree with her more often.
Therefore the usual claims by a victor that she has a mandate to do this or that are nonsense. A candidate may claim that she pays attention to the polls of her constituents but studies have shown that the way a question is asked can determine the outcome of the answers. Still another theory is that the people elected to an office should not be concerned with what the people of their district think today but that they should vote to do what they think is best reguardless of what the voters in their district think.
Furthermore many candidates only pretend to care about what their constituents think or what is in their best interests anyways. Studies done on game theory show that special interest groups will almost always come out the winners in the competition over government policies because for an investment of x amount of resources they can make a return of many hundreds of times their initial investment.
Yet the people who represent the general welfare would go bankrupt if they tried to defeat these numerous and powerful groups. To even confront one of them is going to leave you worse off financially than if you had done nothing at all. Why because the costs of each special interest special treatment are spread over the whole society. It is these collective costs that destroy the general welfare.
But if you confront one special interest you will bear most of the cost for your society. And since special interests usually win you will be charged twice.
Structural flaws as these cause those who have lost by playing by rigged rules to try to play by their own rules. Yes it is chaotic but chaos is unavoidable. The only question is whether or not you will be personally affected by the chaos of government agents often acting on behalf of special interests or the chaos of some non-conformists trying to defend the common good. Or whether you think that it is the non-conformists who are the special interest group and it is the government defending the common good.
If you think speed limits should be reduced, you should not break them as an act of civil disobedience but vote for politicians who promise to reduce them. If you want to end scientific experiments on animals, you should not commit acts of civil disobedience but vote for politicians who promise to ban them.
The disenfranchized black voters of South Africa were morally entitled to use civil disobedience in their campaign because democratic methods were not available to them.
Oponents of the massacre of Jews by Nazis would similarly have been morally entiitled to use civil disobedience. Civil disobedience would be fully justifable now in the UK in favour of a more democratic voting system that resulted in more representative Parliaments and allowed us to choose between candidates of different views in the same party.
Once that is achieved, civil disobedience should be less necessary and less justifiable for other causes. Law based on truth in itself cannot be broken, only violated. It is under all circumstances advisable not to follow any regulation of any law if it does not serve the truth. It must be considered and obeyed under all circumstances in order to protect peoples equal freedoms of choice and equal rights, and consequently maintain justice.
I dont really think it is a good example of civil disobedience rather of political conflict — which does not have to involve violence. The law is not a basket from which we get to pick the ones we like and ignore all the rest; that way leads to anarchy. We need to send a message that the only way to change the law is through legitimate means.
Sometimes we have to break an unjust law. The legislature is fallible, laws can be made for the interests of particular groups and they can become outdated. When this happens the very many people who benefit from the status quo will fight to keep it as is. In this case, there is often no alternative but to refuse to abide by a law which is morally wrong.
0コメント