Relation to others· Power and justicecoredifficulty
Law and conscience
Can it be right to disobey the law?
Any law may one day clash with conscience: an iniquitous decree, an order one cannot follow without betraying oneself. To obey nonetheless is to protect what makes common life possible; to disobey is to affirm that above the laws there is something else, at the risk that each person will follow only their own judgment. From Antigone to the great disobediences of history, the question returns with each generation. To take a position is to say what we owe the law when it commands what conscience refuses.
Obedience at all costs
0The law binds even when it displeases: it is everyone's obedience that makes common life possible, and whoever exempts themselves in the name of conscience undoes what protects all. One contests, one pleads, one seeks to change the law by the means it provides; one does not break it. Enduring a bad law remains a lesser evil than ruining the authority of all laws.
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Civil disobedience
Common view0When a law commands the unacceptable, conscience has the right, sometimes the duty, to disobey: openly, without violence, accepting the penalty. This disobedience in broad daylight is not a betrayal of the law but an appeal addressed to it: it aims to awaken the community's sense of justice, not to escape the common rule.
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Resistance to oppression
0When power itself betrays its reason for being, violates the rights it was meant to protect, and governs against those it was meant to serve, the obligation ceases: there is no longer a law to respect, only a force one has the right to resist. Resistance is then not a crime against order: it is power that broke the pact first.
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- PrescriptivePolitical & legal QuestionPersuade or obey
Condemned unjustly, Socrates refuses to escape: the Laws raised him, he accepted their benefits his whole life, and he may persuade them but not betray them. Does the injustice of a verdict permit breaking with what made us?
the debt owed to the laws
Sub-problems to deepen this axis's discussion
- PrescriptivePolitical & legalThe unwritten laws
Antigone buries her brother against the city's decree, in the name of laws no one has written: if there is a right above the laws, is a law that violates it still a law, or merely an order?
the unwritten laws - DescriptiveWhy obey at all?
No one signed a contract, and staying in a country is not consenting: one might as well say, with Hume, that one consents to the captain by remaining aboard on the open sea. If neither consent, nor fairness, nor utility grounds a general duty to obey, is political obligation an illusion?
the ground of obligation - DescriptiveUnjust according to whom?
A law never arrives labeled unjust: someone judges it so. If each conscience decides which laws bind it, what remains of the law shared by all; and if none may, how would injustice ever be denounced?
the judgment of injustice - PrescriptivePolitical & legalHow far may one resist?
From the strike to sabotage, from tax refusal to armed struggle: does just disobedience have internal limits, publicity, nonviolence, or does extreme oppression lift every bound?
the means of resistance