Relation to others· Power and justice

Resistance to oppression

Axis: Law and conscience — Can it be right to disobey the law?

When 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.

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

↑ What grounds it

Nature of rights

If rights are natural, prior to any law, a power that violates them no longer has title to obedience: the right of resistance follows directly from natural rights. This is Locke's argument, for whom the people always retain the power to remove a government that betrays its mission of protecting life, liberty, and property.

↓ What it implies

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

Problems

PrescriptivePolitical & legal
The 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
Descriptive
Why 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
PrescriptivePolitical & legal
How 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