Relation to others· Power and justiceCommon view
Civil disobedience
Axis: Law and conscience — Can it be right to disobey the law?
When a law commands the unacceptable, conscience has the right, sometimes the duty, to disobey: , 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.
Philosophers 1
Russellexplicit
Disobedience is for Russell neither a right of conscience nor a revolt, but a means of information within a democracy: when a decision puts everyone's survival at stake and the ordinary channels fail to get what is at stake heard, breaking the law publicly and taking the penalty is one of the few acts visible enough to force attention. Two conditions attach to it — the publicity of the act and the acceptance of the penalty — which distinguish it from fraud. He practised it twice, at forty-six against conscription and at eighty-nine for disarmament.
"Civil Disobedience and the Threat of Nuclear Warfare" (1961) · The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969), vols. II-III
- 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 - 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