Civil Disobedience Can Be Justified

just give up now
This is absolutely false in which you can’t “give up”. Civil disobedience has helped strengthen justice in America. The sole purpose in which it states is “breaking the law for a justifiable cause”. People are always going to have an opinion, and the reason for doing so is so you can, as Thoreau stated, “refrain from evil.”

Civil disobedience was practised to great effect by people such as Ghandi and Martin Luther King. It is difficult to imagine the change they effected coming about any other way – or certainly as quickly. Their civil disobedience corrected a huge injustice at a time when no politicians took them seriously. In fact Martin Luther King said that not only was it okay to break unjust laws but that we have a moral responsibility to do so. As St Augustine said, ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’

Marches are a waste of time; witness the hundreds of thousands who marched fruitlessly against the war in Iraq. But people will notice someone getting arrested – especially a celebrity. We might not like the fact that this is true but we can’t deny it is so. Causes need the oxygen of publicity and one of the best ways to get that is to get someone famous arrested.

The law has been created by the controlling elites, to serve their purposes. When one has a different purpose, bringing one into conflict with the law, why would one not break it? What possible virtue is there in obedience for the sake of it?

THE KEY WORD IS CIVIL! We are not going to kill anybody when we protest and speak about a good cause! So read your facts more correctly! Thanks!

Laws are a human construct: someone proposed them and implemented them for a reason and sometimes these reasons are completely unjustified. Therefore, disobedience can be justified.

Civil disobedience doesn’t have to be violent; just look at Gandhi. It can be an effective way to essentially tell the government,”Hell No.”

Unfortunately however, not everyone is logical or full of common sense and sometimes the best intentioned non-violent disobedience can transform into a mob with mindless violence on their mind and foam frothing from their mouth; utter chaos out of order.

Still, even with that said, I believe orderly civil disobedience is justified. See: The Civil Rights Movement – Much of it was civil disobedience.

The law tries to reflect what the society deems morally correct. But what is morally correct changes over time, and the law then has to follow suite. There is a gab in this chase, and that sometimes results in it being morally correct to break the law.

All though people have some general ideas of what does and does not constitute civil disobedience they do not agree on specific cases. Therefore we can not even agree as to what it is that we are trying to justify or condemn. For example one definition of civil disobedience that I just read includes lawful nonviolent activities such as boycotts. A majority of people in the US say that burning the US flag is an example of trying to incite a riot or at least a fight. Yet an educated minority believe that it is an example of protected free speech. If I were to correctly say in public that soldiers of the US military are scum sucking traitorous murdering war criminals, for just saying what is true, I would be censored in the US by most people but in other lands I would be called one American who has not been fooled. If I were to send a letter to the Secret Service telling them that they will be held accountable for their treasonous actions, the US government would say that I had committed an act of psycho-terrorism. Yet I and the ACLU would say that I had simply expressed a religious prophecy protected by the 1st and yes also the second amendment to the Constitution.

Not engaging in civil disobedience no matter how you define it helps criminals maintain power behind a false idea that we should not insult someone or create strife in society. People should remember it is a criminal leadership that often times creates the strife. In other cases the strife is created by genuine disagreements as to what injustice is, such as the abortion issue.

It has been said by those representing the no position that it is possible to correct injustices through normal channels of political conduct. While it may be possible it is often not likely. In a representative democracy the people who are elected to office do not have a clue as to why they were elected in the first place.

When the voters decide who to vote for they have to consider the the stand of each candidate on many different issues, and their chances of winning. A person may agree with candidate A on 3 issues be opposed on 7, with Candidate B agree on 5 and be opposed on 5, and with candidate C agree on 8 and be opposed on 2. This person may vote for candidate A because he is in agreement with him on the 3 most important issues. An ideological twin of this voter may vote for candidate B because they agree with her more often. Therefore the usual claims by a victor that she has a mandate to do this or that are nonsense. A candidate may claim that she pays attention to the polls of her constituents but studies have shown that the way a question is asked can determine the outcome of the answers.

Still another theory is that the people elected to an office should not be concerned with what the people of their district think today but that they should vote to do what they think is best reguardless of what the voters in their district think.

Furthermore many candidates only pretend to care about what their constituents think or what is in their best interests anyways. Studies done on game theory show that special interest groups will almost always come out the winners in the competition over government policies because for an investment of x amount of resources they can make a return of many hundreds of times their initial investment. Yet the people who represent the general welfare would go bankrupt if they tried to defeat these numerous and powerful groups. To even confront one of them is going to leave you worse off financially than if you had done nothing at all. Why because the costs of each special interest special treatment are spread over the whole society. It is these collective costs that destroy the general welfare. But if you confront one special interest you will bear most of the cost for your society. And since special interests usually win you will be charged twice.

Structural flaws as these cause those who have lost by playing by rigged rules to try to play by their own rules. Yes it is chaotic but chaos is unavoidable.

The only question is whether or not you will be personally affected by the chaos of government agents often acting on behalf of special interests or the chaos of some non-conformists trying to defend the common good. Or whether you think that it is the non-conformists who are the special interest group and it is the government defending the common good.

…but only in very limited circumstances.

If you think speed limits should be reduced, you should not break them as an act of civil disobedience but vote for politicians who promise to reduce them. If you want to end scientific experiments on animals, you should not commit acts of civil disobedience but vote for politicians who promise to ban them.

The flaw in this argument is that the way we elect MPs in the UK means that most people’s votes are ineffective because they live in safe constituencies and, even when they are effective, it is usually only betweeen the two leading parties in the constituency with no opportunity to choose between different candidates from the same party who may have different views on speed limits, animal experiments or whatever matters to us.

The disenfranchized black voters of South Africa were morally entitled to use civil disobedience in their campaign because democratic methods were not available to them. Oponents of the massacre of Jews by Nazis would similarly have been morally entiitled to use civil disobedience.

The present Government was elected by only 35% of the voters. Civil disobedience would be fully justifable now in the UK in favour of a more democratic voting system that resulted in more representative Parliaments and allowed us to choose between candidates of different views in the same party. Once that is achieved, civil disobedience should be less necessary and less justifiable for other causes.

Law based on truth in itself cannot be broken, only violated. It is under all circumstances advisable not to follow any regulation of any law if it does not serve the truth. Law is to protect justice based on truth and the written codex “the law” formulated to regulate / set in order peoples conducts, who are equipped with equal freedom of choice and equal rights by their creator.

If any regulation of the “law” codex is in violation with its purpose, it is justified and even advisable not to obey or follow it.

when the frech revalution was happening they talked at first but to get their put acrossed they had to start a war. so civil disobedience and the law can be broken

Sometimes we have to break an unjust law. The legislature is fallible, laws can be made for the interests of particular groups and they can become outdated. When this happens the very many people who benefit from the status quo will fight to keep it as is. In this case, there is often no alternative but to refuse to abide by a law which is morally wrong.

Laws are a basket from which we have to pick and choose because to obey unjust laws leads to anarchy just as fast as not obeying just laws.

Furthermore governments themselves often do not even obey their own laws then the population has no recourse but to resort to vigilante actions.

Whilst violence is always regrettable it is entirely possible the issue would not have got attention without it. And whilst some people will be dissuaded others are intelligent enough to look for the arguments behind the issues. Perhaps coming to a site like this to see how the other side thinks. When that happens the truth eventually emerges

Even violent CD can at times be justified especially when the government is breaking its own rules. Governments are institutions of violence. There has to be at least the threat of violence to force people to obey even just laws. The threat of violence is also the use of violence. If those threats are not sometimes carried out they will seen to be empty threats and criminals will run rampant over society. Yet often criminals capture the controls of the state. The state then wages war against society. Some people could conclude that such a situation exists in America in the early 21st Century. In such a situation if the people are not allowed to use violence to protect themselves from a morally bankrupt state it is like a conflict in which one side is waging a violent war against another side that seeks to defend itself solely by asking the criminals to cease and desist with their criminal behavior.

It is unfortunate but sometimes we do need to act against other members of the public in order to achieve a society that is fairer for all. Civil disobedience must be non-violent and when it is so the public suffers only inconvenience. Which is surely a small price to pay to correct an injustice.

`We often want change. And if politicians won’t listen, sometimes the law must be broken for the greater good.

Not to engage in civil disobedience is also to walk on a slope that is just as slippery as engaging in civil disobedience.

There is no limit to the injustices that have been perpetuated by popular governments. Is that not Chaos?