Is civil disobedience ever justified?

Résumé du document

“Man is bound to obey secular princes in so far as this is required by order of justice. Wherefore if the prince's authority is not just but usurped, or if he commands what is unjust, his subjects are not bound to obey him, except perhaps accidentally, in order to avoid scandal or danger.” Civil disobedience can be defined – and that will be the definition I will consider in this essay – “as a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” . Thus it must not be confused with anarchy, anomie or a blank refusal of an existing law, verily of all the law. It is as old as Prometheus' disobedience of Zeus in order to give fire to mankind and as ongoing as the students' sit-in in Beijing's Tiananmen Square or demonstrations against Iraq war. Actually, the problem of the relationship between the individual and the laws of his State has been debated since ever. The theory of civil disobedience has been introduced in an essay by Henry David Thoreau . Half a century later, his ideas were brought to international attention through the writings of Leo Tolstoy and by Mohandas Gandhi.

Extraits

[...] Acceptance of majority decisions is a fair way of resolving conflicts and if a citizen declines to abide by majority decisions, he is abrogating to himself the decision- making process and seeking to impose his own view on others. The answer of a disobeyer would be that not everyone does actually have an equal chance of influencing decisions, an equal say, and an equal voice in the process. It is true. It is one of the main problems of concrete democracies of the real world but in this case, the problem must be resolved by improving the democracy and seeking to reconcile theory and practice. [...]

[...] Since obeying the laws of a political system is a way to support it, faith in democracy implies obedience to its laws. To discuss reasons for obedience in a democratic framework is part of a wider debate on the many reasons to prefer democracy to other political systems. Bibliography H.A Bedau “Introduction”, John Morreall “chapter The justifiability of violent civil disobedience”, Kent Greenawalt “chapter 11: Justifying non-violent disobedience” in Civil Disobedience in focus (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1-12, 130-143 and 170-188. [...]

[...] Peter Singer, Democracy and disobedience, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p.19. The ancestry of which can be traced back through Rousseau, Jefferson, Locke, Hobbes, to the ancient world where Plato, in Crito, speaks of the citizen entering into an implied contract that he will do as the State commands. P. Bachrach, The theory of Democratic Elitism (London: Athlone Press, 1969), pp. 19-20. J.G. Riddall, “Chapter 22: Having one's cake” in Jurisprudence, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp Peter Singer, Democracy and disobedience, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p.19. [...]

[...] From then, it can be argued that civil disobedience cannot be non-violent. At last, another point can then be mentioned: preventing and limiting disobedience leads to the expenditure of public resources (especially since it is assumed that civil disobedience cannot be really non-violent) and the resources could have been better spent in more useful ways[14]. To conclude, I would like to come back to the quotation of Saint Thomas Aquinas given in introduction. As he said, since the power of the sovereign is legitimate law must be obeyed. [...]

[...] In the same spirit we would argue the following against civil disobedience. The fact that one has received benefits from the laws of a society is a reason for obeying the laws. The members of a society have in fact all benefited from previous decisions. Since decisions made by non-democratic procedures may benefit everyone as much as decisions made by democratic procedures, the argument applies wherever there is a benefice. It is the argument of “gratitude” used by Socrates to respond to the concerns of his friends when he was under sentence of death and was urged by his friends to escape and flee to another country on the grounds of the injustice of the sentence.[9] According to Socrates, disobeying to the law in his case by escaping would be showing ingratitude to a state that had brought him to life and provided him with an education. [...]