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The Cause Of Civil Disobedience

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What would a free society be like without peaceful resistance to laws? Would it be better or worse? The question itself is paradoxical; because it is based on the hypothetical negation of an analytic proposition, it makes no more sense than asking what polygons would be like without sides. Polygons, by definition, have sides, just as free society, by definition, has civil disobedience. As Adlai Stevenson explains it, “a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” This statement suggests that unpopularity exists within all free societies; thus, free society cannot exist without civil disobedience. In a democracy, civil disobedience is not only morally justified, but is actually required to sustain freedom. Peaceful resistance …show more content…

It is difficult to provide an example of an instance in which civil disobedience had a negative impact on society. As essayist Henry David Thoreau said, “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” If a so-called “free society” with unjust laws has no disobedience, how can there still be freedom? Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the civil disobedience movement that freed India, said: “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless and corrupt.” Furthermore, Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the civil disobedience movement that gave civil rights to the blacks, said: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust …show more content…

Do acts of civil disobedience against just laws negatively impact society? This question, too, makes no sense, for the opposite reason as the former. The question of what free society would be like without peaceful resistance was nonsensical because it implied that a free society could exist without peaceful resistance. This question makes no sense because “justice” cannot be defined by an analytical proposition. What is defined as “just” and what isn’t varies among cultures. This is not to say that absolute morality is subjective or objective; but it is to say that the moral justice in a society is always subjective. There have been acts of civil disobedience coming from both the pro-choice and pro-life movements across America for a very long time. So which side is morally justified? It all depends on your society. If your state legalized abortion, within that society, abortion is morally just. If it outlawed abortion, within that society, abortion is morally unjust. Until our entire nation can come to a unanimous decision whether to legalize abortion or not, we will never know for sure whether it is just or unjust. It took nearly two hundred years for the whole nation the come to a unanimous consensus that it was morally just for people of different races to

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"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. "-Socrates. Peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a free society because the society is not free unless it's able to check the government. As long as the protest of the law remains peaceful it is a good thing. It is the public telling the government that they will not let them gain to much power and crush their human rights.

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Civil disobedience against unjust laws allows people to recognize the faults in our society and government. This is especially true when large numbers of people come together to protest for a certain cause, and against a law, they believe the government should not enforce. For example, Mahatma

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Civil disobedience and it's impact on society varies greatly. Those of you can recall the peaceful protests of Martin Luther King. A man who led African Americans to integration and brought each race together. How did he do this you may ask?

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He writes that “one has not only a legal but moral responsibility to obey just laws” as well as “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” (Letter from Birmingham Jail). King asserts his belief to clergymen in his Letter to Birmingham Jail that he can urge people to obey laws like the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision (to outlaw segregation in public schools) because it is one that is morally right; in like manner, he can also urge people to disobey segregation ordinances because they are ones that are morally wrong. Essentially, he uses this idea as one justification for the civil rights activists’ demonstrations. To this day, King’s ideals in correspondence with the degradation that his people faced are commended by many people whether it be to achieve credibility or to express genuine support for what he represented. Solidarity reminds that even if someone holds power over you, you are not alone in your beliefs or in your supposed

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I consider civil disobedience to be an easily-ignored pillar upon which our democracy was founded. In fact we are only established as a nation now because our founding fathers engaged in civil disobedience themselves. We were in a “social contract” of sorts with Great Britain and when we felt that they had not upheld their part of the contract (they did not allow us to create courts to maintain order, or to create a navy to defend ourselves, or to sustain our economy due to an inability to trade with any other countries), Thomas Jefferson concluded that it was our not only our right, but also our duty to break away. And it was Thomas Jefferson that combined all of the works of the great thinkers before him such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke

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However, it could also be argued that civil disobedience is beneficial to ridding a society of unjust law. If there is law, you have a duty as a citizen to obey the law or you may try to convince those in charge to change them. If using civil disobedience is a method of convincing others to change unjust law, civil disobedience must be unjust. If it is true that being a citizen of a society binds you to obeying the laws, and civil disobedience is an act which breaks the law, then it is not just for

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The civil disobedience is to describe when the public refusal to obey the law or commands of a government that violate one's personal principals without the act of violence, as an effort to induce a change in governmental policy or legislation. The purpose is to force concessions from the government or occupying power. For example, if a group of people refuses to pay taxes as a peaceful way to express disapproval of those laws they disagree with or taxes. Civil disobedience may be appropriate when a democratically elected government uses its power to discriminate against their race, sex, religion or skin color. In such a situation, people would most liking object the Laws and start a protest to show they want to be treated equally.

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Civil Disobedience Civil disobedience is defined as, the refusal to obey certain laws or governmental demands for the purpose of influencing legislation or government policy, characterized by the employment of such nonviolent techniques as boycotting, picketing, and nonpayment of taxes. Henry David Thoreau gives a complete rundown of civil disobedience in his book, Civil Disobedience. In “Letter From Birmingham City Jail”, Martin Luther King, Jr., he talks about how he was put in jail for peaceful protesting “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps..” (King), which is part of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience can be necessary in certain circumstances.

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Peaceful resistance is necessary for social change. The founders of the United States believed in this idea when writing the Declaration of Independence. John Locke, an enlightenment thinker who our founding fathers took ideas from, came up with the idea of the social contract. This is the agreement that a government and its people have and when citizens feel their government is wronging them then they have the right to revolt. Civil disobedience is a form of expressing the social contract and the consent of the governed.

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Herbert J. Storing, an Associate Professor of Political Science, in “The Case Against Civil Disobedience,” writes, “One of the practical consequences of this institution [civil disobedience] is to divert disobedience and even revolution into the channel of law” (97). What Storing is saying is that civil disobedience will encourage people to break the laws and they will hide under civil disobedience to avoid the law. Also, civil disobedience might split society by creating disagreements with the people, and it could create a political instability. However, Storing fails to see that those who break an unjust law, as discussed above, do not avoid the law, in fact they show respect to the law as they willingly accept the consequences. By accepting the consequences, they show that they are not acting for their own interests but for society’s.

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Civil disobedience is a key component to free society in and of itself. As a primary example, America herself was born from it; The American Revolution began with civil disobedience. If the colonists did not rebel, if they did not fight for their freedoms- albeit violently further on- where would we be today? Where would we be if the Boston Tea Party never happened, if the American people never disobeyed?

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Peaceful resistance to laws positively impact a free society. In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, peaceful resistance led to desegregation. Civil disobedience aided in the decision of Brown v. Topeka which overturned the “separate but equal” decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy disobeyed a Louisiana law by not sitting in a Jim Crow car. This civil disobedience led to the Supreme Court decision.

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Throughout history, disobedience has been at the forefront of change. Many revolutions started with just a few people fighting back. Numerous inequitable laws and regulations would still be in use if people didn’t take a stand. When you create rules that only cater to specific people, you force others to break them just by living. Disobedience is an inevitable part of our society that fuels necessary change.

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Despite the historical acceptance of civil disobedience, there is no universally accepted definition. For this argument, we will adopt a concept of civil disobedience that is characterized by a specific set of criteria; the act must be “nonviolent, open and visible, illegal, and done with the moral purpose to protest an unjust law” ( ). In this way, “mere dissent”, “protest”, or “disobedience” for the law does not qualify. A proponent for civil disobedience would suggest that there are situations in which this form of protest is necessary for society; however, there are many opponents of it who claim that it is unjustified. Ancient philosophers, like Socrates, believed that there could be no moral justification for civil disobedience.

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The legalization of abortion will allow a woman to fully exercise her constitutional right of freedom of choice. Benefits of abortion far exceed the disadvantages and the life to preserve and better should be that of the mother or parents and not of an unborn fetus. On this basis, abortion should be legalized in all countries. Is it really moral and ethical if the life of the mother of the unborn child is not considered in these decisions? Are we really going to allow the feelings of something that feels nothing to influence this decision?

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