Relation to others· Power and justice
Obedience at all costs
Axis: Law and conscience — Can it be right to disobey the law?
The 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.
- 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 - 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