civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified pros and cons

Because they take up far-left, often progressive causes for defense, people outside of the groups it represents see it as a defender of only a few instead of helping everyone maintain the rights given to them by the government. Acts of civil disobedience sometimes defend equality, but it would be more accurate to say that it tries to shape or impose specific moral views on all individuals within a country. 17 Lovett, Frank, Rawls's Theory of Justice (Continuum 2011) 128–29. When someone feels as if a specific right of theirs is being trampled upon, then they join up with others who feel the same way to do something about the issue. For Rawls, the crucial question about an act of civil disobedience is whether it clearly addresses an injustice that will cause the majority to reflect and change a law (the legal flaw is typically one that creates inequality or unfairness by limiting a minority's ability to pursue a fundamental good). Promoting and reinforcing autonomy must take concrete form, i.e., it must be grounded in identifying and protecting activities that are autonomy enhancing. As a student at the Crozer Theological Seminary in 1948 and 1949, he was introduced to the canon of liberal philosophers out of which he began to form his beliefs in social justice. But if this is the case, why should we protect the rights rather than the values underlying the rights? These people then begin to plot violent acts to convince others that their moral position is strong, with the idea that others will then fall along when completed. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service. Following Rawls and Harel, we now realise that the tracking of public opinion is critical to the definition of civil disobedience. 8. I will not be taking an affirmative or negative side of this debate. Civil disobedience attempts to shape the morality of a nation. His emphasis on the substantive content of civil disobedience, in terms that belong to core features of a just society, relies on a less fully articulated, secondary argument that defines civil disobedience as ‘public speech’. John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America, Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition, Civil Disobedience: The Israeli Experience, Fundamentalist Intolerance or Civil Disobedience? How does the social responsibility of intellectuals to demonstrate civil disobedience differ from Lincoln and MLK’s time and today as demonstrated by Black lives matter and Antifa These significant pros and cons of civil disobedience allow for a fair overview of such actions, as it does become necessary from time to time for the general public to rise up against an unjust government. What on earth is going on in the American military? Because dissent is a deep feature of democracies, in particular constitutional democracies, the question of its legitimacy goes deeper than the necessarily narrow definitions afforded by a court of law. The issue with civil disobedience is that it lays bare the issues which society doesn’t want to see. Much of the book's story of the march has to do with his experience of incarceration, and his determination to join fellow protestors in crossing a negotiated line of protest that marked the difference between acceptable dissent over the Vietnam War and civil disobedience in the name of illegal public disorder. Tensions grew, but what legal remedy was there? Justify to whom, yourself, authorities, etc? Civil disobedience is “the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power” (Civil Disobedience). 32 Mailer, Norman, Armies of the Night (New American Library 1968). Why? Cox focuses his discussion of civil disobedience on the effectiveness of increasingly common ‘sit-ins, boycotts, protests, marches, and demonstrations’ (116–17), initially questioning the presumed right to interfere with normal business and government activities that cannot be considered ‘unjust’, such as a law against interrupting air traffic or laws applying to routine commercial operations. I follow Gewirth in the next section by treating Fortas as an exemplary expression of a strict, legal approach to civil disobedience, but then go on to look for a better solution with reference to the writings of John Rawls. A good summary discussion of Rawls on civil disobedience may also be found in Schaefer, David Lewis, Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (University of Missouri Press 2007). Writing about the Peace Movement in West Germany in the 1980s, modelled to some extent on anti-war protests in the United States in the 1960s, Habermas argues that civil disobedience is a necessary and valuable part of the political culture of a mature democracy, a constant check on the propensity of the government to veer off course in the direction of authoritarianism in the name of protecting civil order. Inspired in part by the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011 in New York City to fight economic and social inequality, identifying the financial sector in particular as a root of evil. From the very beginning, Rawls believed this war to be unjust and repeatedly defended his assessment in public. Such as in a democracy where civil disobedience is prohibited. Slavery is the state of a person who is the chattel of another. Although Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Crito do not exhibit a shared interpretation of when it is justified to disobey the state, considering both pieces will strengthen an understanding of when it is appropriate to practice a degree of law breaking. Entire perspectives shift from the outside because of one association point, which is seen as politically favorable to one party or group instead of being looked at as the complex issue it tends to be. They protested because they the extraction of tar sand oil and moving it from Canada to Texas will pollute the groundwater in the surface (Hammel). An entire doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience is indebted to Martin Luther King, whose writings justify the terminological standard of peaceable assembly.Footnote 7. It’s up to the rest of the population to then decide which side they’ll support. King's principle of non-violence is only marginally connected with a respect for peace and order. English 220 Let’s start off with the basics. Merely protecting the right to dissent, as dissent, fails to measure the effectiveness of civil disobedience, narrowly defined, as shifting the public consensus about core values related to social justice. As he suggests, statistical data and speculative economic models can easily blur the necessity to make clear an ‘obvious’ injustice that is being temporarily held by the majority of citizens. Segregation, by contrast, which directly touches the post-Civil War language of the Constitution is another matter. If a government system regularly sides with the minority, however, it creates an effect which is opposite of what democratic structures offer. In societies in which speech is protected for the sake of autonomy, people use speech in autonomy-enhancing ways. Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified. The distinction between dissent and disorder begins to draw the shape of the larger pattern that tries to unite a collectively held sense of injustice with a public sense of order and stability. Not all of these elements will align up in this way, and so for his purposes Rawls makes a very important qualification about what works and what does not in civil disobedience:Footnote 24.

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