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: 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.
- 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