. Civil disobedience, in defense of human rights, is actually divine obedience . Anger at the brutality inflicted upon King and the southern protesters was, however, widespread among northern blacks. Civil disobedience is about purposefully disobeying a law or rule to make a point, to try and change laws and rules in a specific situation, and is disobedience that is executed in a non-violent manner. 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. The Limits and Dangers of Civil Disobedience: The Case of Martin Luther 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. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. Executive Order 8802, issued in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under pressure from A. Philip Randolph, mandating antidiscrimination provisions in government defense contracts; Executive Order 9981, issued in 1948 by President Harry S. Truman, mandating the desegregation of the U.S. armed services; the U.S. Congresss enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960; and, above all, the U.S. Supreme Courts landmark, 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. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. It is difficult to imagine the change they affected coming about any other way - or certainly as quickly. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified. AFF (Civil Disobedience is morally justified in a democracy) Value: Criteria: AFF CONSTRUCTION: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified because _____ a. Contention 1: Necessity i. 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., Kings illustrations of the sort of actions he envisioned are useful in clarifying the distinction. 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.. 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. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? Civil Disobedience and Its Justification - LinkedIn Most acts of civil disobedience are justifiable. On Friday, April 10, 1963Good FridayKing marched purposefully to a Birmingham jail cell, where he was confined for leading a protest march in violation of a local ordinance. What is Civil Disobedience? This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. Essay Examples about Civil Disobedience - edufixers.com The moral justification of civil disobedience is context sensitive; it should be restricted to a certain situation when there is a defect in the legal system, and the problem that could not be resolve through the legitimate way. [We] will move on Washington, he resolved, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action . 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. 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. By this means, his admirers might plausibly argue, King acknowledged the seriousness of critics major concern and effectively addressed it. 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. Yet despite these shortcomings, his discussion adumbrates several regulating and confining conditions that, properly elaborated, could supply a defensible justification of the practice. Remember always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliationnot victory. Like slavery in this respect, segregation violates the moral law by relegating persons to the status of things., Further, the dignity of human personality signifies the, Acknowledging the seriousness of any act of lawbreaking, King recognized his responsibility to explain the criteria for judging the injustice of law and the rightfulness of disobedience. 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. 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. The former described the practice of rabid segregationist[s], while the orderly disobedience of freedom movement protesters exemplified the latter. Civil disobedience, Hugo Bedau noted, "is not just done; it is committed. These prudential regulations circumscribing the right to revolution apply similarly to acts of civil disobedience. The training that protesters received was rigorous in itself, but the moral formation King judged requisite to nonviolent protest and properly civil disobedience required more than any relatively brief workshop could produce. DOCX Home - Boone County Schools Civil disobedience occurs when an individual or group refuses to follow the rules, policies, or legislation passed by their government. 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. [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. 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,. As we will see, King failed to provide a rigorous account of civil disobedience, and it is also arguable that his practice of civil disobedience failed to adhere strictly to his principles. In 2008 Greenpeace activists unleashed a banner at a political meeting which said "Stelmach: the best Premier oil money can buy" during a speech by then . First, I argue that, in an otherwise legitimate state, civil disobedience is morally justified or excusable only in narrowly defined circumstances. [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. I have one definition to give. Civil disobediencenecessarily involves violation of the law, and the law can make noprovision for its violation except to hold the offender liable forpunishment. Here is the key point: Kings actions in Birmingham and elsewhere were born of a deep impatience, informed, as he wrote in the Letter, by a centuries-long history of injustice, including promises made and unfulfilled, that had taught him to equate slow or partial progress with no progress: Half a loaf is no bread.[REF] Despite his generally gracious recognition of NAACP efforts, King held that the courtroom victories won by that senior organization, along with the other apparent successes achieved in the electoral branches to that point, would prove practically worthless unless reinforced by further, stronger measures that would be enacted only in response to sustained, intensified pressure. It is meaningful, if unsurprising, that the SCLC required of protesters a commitment suffused with the moral spirit of Christianity. In the Letter, King contended that as applied to his direct-action campaign, the ordinance that the injunction was issued to enforce was a violation of the U.S. Constitution, in particular of the First Amendments guarantee of rights of peaceful assembly and protest. Whatever the broader causes, the Watts riots left 34 people dead and over 1,000 injured. Describing his plan to recruit three thousand of the poorest citizens from various urban and rural areas to participate in a Poor Peoples March on Washington, he indicated that this nonviolent army, this freedom church of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills.[REF], Even so, Kings remarks relative to the character and motivations of this newly recruited army suggest that here, too, he departed significantly from his earlier account. In republican governments, wrote James Madison in. However, characteristics like conscientiousness are not necessary to the definition, and those like nonviolence are inappropriate. 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 . 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. Justifying Civil Disobedience : an Essay on Political Protest in a

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