Harris, Paul Raymond
Description
The considerable increase in the literature on civil
disobedience during the 1950s and 1960s led to the development
of an orthodoxy with respect to the definition of civil disobedience
and to a concentration on questions of its
justifiability. It was held that these were two separate
questions, that there is a logical separation between what
counts as civil disobedience and whether civil disobedience
can be morally justified, either in general or in particular
cases. One of the major...[Show more] aims of this thesis is to show that
position to be untenable.
There are moral principles that are objective in the
sense that they must be included in any moral theory. These
core principles are concerned with the minimum conditions of
social life itself; they cover the areas of truth, life,
and duty. Particular moral theories, however, may interpret
and build upon these principles in various ways. Hence any
moral person must recognise that some facts are moral values,
although the moral judgements are presumptive rather than
conclusive.
To morally justify an action is to meet charges against
it from within the moral point of view. There are, however,
important differences between three levels of justificatory
discourse (agent, action, and practice) and between undermining
and overriding responses to charges. Moreover, that
an action is morally right is neither a necessary nor a
sufficient condition of its being morally justified. Any moral person must acknowledge a non-conclusive
moral obligation to obey the law where the institution of
law helps secure the social conditions within which persons
may be moral. The moral point of view itself also limits
that obligation through the constraints of process and of
content. The obligation to obey is undermined if the process
through which laws are enacted does not satisfy the requirements
of reasoned discourse as part of the moral point of view.
Political obligation may be overridden according to the
constraint of content if the law requires a moral person to
act contrary to the important and reasoned provisions of his
own moral theory.
The orthodox analysis of civil disobedience cannot
maintain a strict separation between criteria of recognition
and criteria of justification. The ways civil disobedience
is defined affect both the onus of justification and the ways
civil disobedience so defined may be morally justified, since
it allows certain charges to be made against it and rules out
others. There are important differences between civil disobedience
directed towards securing changes in laws, policies,
decisions, etc., and an agent's disobeying in order to
preserve his own moral integrity. In either case, disobedience
may be direct or indirect.
A number of charges against civil disobedience are
considered; none is decisive against the practice of civil
disobedience. The conditions for their success against
particular acts of disobedience are also examined. Civil
disobedience may be morally justified within a democracy.
The claim to a 'right' to disobey serves only to underline
a claim to agent-justification.
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