Which writers believed in civil disobedience

Second, the communicative aspect of civil disobedience could be said to aggravate disobedient offenses since their communication usually is attended by much greater publicity than most covert violations are. This forces legal authorities to concern themselves with the possibility that law-abiding citizens will feel distressed, insecure, and perhaps imposed on, if no action is taken. So, notes Greenawalt, while authorities may quietly let minor breaches pass, failure to respond to violations performed, in some respect, in the presence of authority, may undercut claims that the rules and the persons who administered them deserve respect , —2.

Third, and related, civil disobedients often invite, and might inspire, other citizens to do what they do. Such risk of proliferation of civil disobedience and, further, of its escalation into lawlessness and violence, may support the imposition of more severe punishment for agents engaged in civil disobedience.

However, both the models of civil disobedience presented above, which stress its role and value in liberal democracies, and the arguments for the right to civil disobedience examined below, strongly push for the opposite view that civil disobedients, if punished at all, should be dealt with more leniently than others who have offended. The government can exercise its responsibility of leniency by not prosecuting civil disobedience at all, depending on the balance of reasons, including individual rights, state interests, social costs, and constitutional benefits.

In general, prosecutors should not charge disobedients with the most serious offenses applicable and judges should give them light sentences. Leniency follows from the recognition of the special constitutional status of civil disobedience. In this view, officials at all levels have the discretion to not sanction civil disobedients, and they should use it.

Prosecutors have and should use their discretion not to press charges against civil disobedients in some cases, or to charge them with the least serious offense possible.

Dworkin urges judges to engage in an open dialogue with civil disobedients at least those who articulate legal arguments in defense of their actions and dismiss their charges after hearing them, or to use their discretion in sentencing, for instance by accepting guilty pleas or guilty verdicts but imposing trivial punishments. To the contrary, judges might well systematically decide against civil disobedients, upholding the special interests of the ruling class of which they are part.

For Rawls, there is only a moral right to engage in justified civil disobedience. Dworkin outlines what such a right of conduct might look like, analogizing civil disobedients with Supreme Court justices, who test the constitutional validity of unjust law through direct disobedience of that law.

For the latter, Dworkin argues that utilitarian reasons for punishing should be weighed against the fact that the accused acted out of principled convictions, and that the balance should generally favor leniency. Joseph Raz puts forward a different account of the right to civil disobedience, insisting that this right extends to cases in which people ought not to exercise the right: it is part of the nature and purpose of rights of conduct that they give persons a protected sphere in which to act rightly or wrongly.

To say that there is a right to civil disobedience is to allow the legitimacy of resorting to this form of political action for causes one opposes Raz , By contrast, in a liberal state, the right to political activity is, by hypothesis, adequately protected by law and, hence, the right to political participation cannot ground a right to civil disobedience. A different view of rights holds that when a person appeals to political participation rights to defend her disobedience, she does not necessarily criticize the law for outlawing her action.

Lefkowitz maintains that members of minorities can appreciate that democratic discussions often must be cut short so that decisions may be taken, and those who engage in civil disobedience may view current policy as the best compromise between the need to act and the need to accommodate continued debate. Nonetheless, they also can point out that, with greater resources or further time for debate, their view might have held sway. Given this possibility, the right to political participation must include a right to continue to contest the result after the votes are counted or the decisions taken.

And this right should include suitably constrained civil disobedience because the best conception of political participation rights is one that reduces as much as possible the impact that luck has on the popularity of a view Lefkowitz ; see also Smith , ch. An alternative response to Raz questions whether the right to civil disobedience must be derived from rights to political participation. Brownlee , ch. Whether such a right would fall under participation rights depends on the expansiveness of the latter rights.

When the right to participate is understood to accommodate only legal protest, then the right conscientiously to object, which commonsensically includes civil disobedience, must be viewed as distinct from political participation rights. A further challenge to a regime-focused account is that real societies do not align with a dichotomy between liberal and illiberal regimes; rather they fall along a spectrum of liberality and illiberality, being both more or less liberal relative to each other and being more or less liberal in some domains than in others.

Philosophers have typically focused on the question of how courts should treat civil disobedients, while neglecting to apply that question to law enforcement. Yet the police have much discretion in how to deal with civil disobedients. In particular, they have no obligation to arrest protesters when they commit minor violations of the law such as traffic obstruction: accommodation of and communication with protesters is something they can but all too rarely decide to do.

Instead, many governments practice militarized repression of protests. Local police departments in the U. Also, the British government sought to strengthen public order laws and secure new police powers to crack down on Extinction Rebellion XR , the global environmental movement whose street protests, die-ins, and roadblocks for climate justice have brought cities to a standstill.

Accommodation requires communication channels between police and activists and involves strategies such as pre-negotiated arrests. While the U. Neither approach respects anything like a right to civil disobedience. A constitutional government committed to recognizing the right to civil disobedience would also have to reform part of its criminal laws and make available certain defenses.

Brownlee proposes two. Second, states should accept necessity as a justificatory defense for civil disobedience undertaken as a reasonable and parsimonious response to violations of and threats to non-contingent basic needs Brownlee , ch.

As these defenses suggest, constitutionally recognizing civil disobedience does not mean making civil disobedience legal. Disobedients would still be arrested and prosecuted, but they would get to explain and defend their actions in court. They would be heard. Even so, civil disobedience remains an enduring, vibrant part of political activism and, increasingly, benefits from transnational alliances. Theorists have long assumed that civil disobedience only begs justification in liberal, democratic societies — the best real-world candidates for legitimate states.

However, civil disobedience also raises questions in undemocratic and illegitimate contexts, regarding its overall role, strategic value, and tactical efficacy. Yet they still beg significant questions concerning the proper contours of extra-institutional dissident politics and the justification of uncivil and forceful tactics in repressive contexts, including violence against police and the destruction of pro-China shops and Chinese banks.

Finally, whereas theorists have tended to think of civil disobedience as generally undertaken to achieve worthy public goals, liberal democratic states have recently witnessed much disobedience in pursuit of anti-democratic and illiberal goals, including conscientious refusal to abide by antidiscrimination statutes and violations of, and protests against, laws requiring the provision of reproductive services and the public health measures enacted to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

We may need a different lens than liberal and democratic theorists have offered to evaluate the full range of conservative social movements, counter-movements, and reactionary movements which resort to civil and other forms of disobedience.

Thanks to Kelsey Vicar for research assistance. Features of Civil Disobedience 1. Other Types of Protest 2. Justification 3. Responding to Civil Disobedience 4. Features of Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau is widely credited with coining the term civil disobedience.

Other Types of Protest 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.

Justification 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. Responding to Civil Disobedience How should the state respond to civil disobedience?

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Torpey, trans. Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 95— Rehg, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hidalgo, Javier S. Himma ed. King Jr. Chaos or Community? Bedau ed. Sobel, P. Vallentyne, and S. Wall eds. Locke, John, []. Second Treatise of Government , C. Macpherson ed. Shelby and B. Terry eds. Lackey ed. Revised edition. Raz, Joseph, Russell, Bertrand, Autobiography , London: Routledge. Sabl, Andrew, Scheuerman, William E. Shelby, Tommie, and Terry, Brandon M.

Simmons, A. Smart, Brian, Ng and J. Wong eds. Terry, Brandon M. Zerilli, Linda M. Sarat ed. Academic Tools How to cite this entry. Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database. Related Entries civil rights legal obligation and authority legal philosophy punishment, legal Socrates terrorism Thoreau, Henry David. Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. It is thought that this night in jail prompted Thoreau to write Civil Disobedience.

Thoreau delivered the first draft of the treatise as an oration to the Concord Lyceum in , and the text was published in under the title Resistance to Civil Government. The two major issues being debated in the United States during Thoreau's life were slavery and the Mexican-American War. Both issues play a prominent part in Thoreau's essay. By the late s, slavery had driven a wedge in American society, with a growing number of Northerners expressing anti-slavery sentiments.

In the s, the country became even more polarized, and the introduction of slavery-friendly laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law , prompted many abolitionists to protest the government's actions via various forms of civil disobedience.

Slavery was only to come to an end a generation later when the abolitionist North would win the Civil War , Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would free all slaves in Confederate territory; eventually, the 13th Amendment would ban slavery everywhere. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Read More. Your current browser may not support copying via this button.

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