A moral right to dissent? the case of civil disobedience

2003

This article compares and contrasts the way Gandhi understands the right to civil disobedience with the way this right is understood by some contemporary liberals. Some of the implications of the right to civil disobedience are also discussed. The right to civil disobedience implies that the authorities should extend some tolerance to civil disobedients not only when they are correct, but also when they are reasonably mistaken in their views. Tolerance here does not involve preventing civil disobedients from breaking the law, and implies that when civil disobedients break the law, they have a claim not to be punished or have their punishment reduced. Of course such claims have to be balanced against other considerations, such as the need for deterrence.

APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper, 2013

With the concept of democratic disobedience this paper introduces a justification for civil disobedience that differs from the traditional account of liberal civil disobedience primarily in two aspects: first, the grounds on which disobedient actions are justified and second, the scope of legitimate demands within this mode of protest. To demonstrate the potential of this new mode of justification it is applied to the case of anti-abortion activism in the U.S.The liberal concept of civil disobedience is based on the idea that in cases of blatant injustices civil disobedience is a means to trump and correct democratic decisions in the name of justice. Democratic disobedience, on the other hand, does not invoke an external corrective instance, but rather bases its justification on the assumption that the democratic process is inherently imperfect and therefore inevitably produces democratic deficits, i.e. incongruities between the will of the citizens and governmental politics. Contrary to the liberal model, democratic disobedience does not refer to pre-political or metaphysical concepts like justice, God or personal conscience, but grounds its justification in the conflictual practice of democratic decision-making processes. This theoretical reorientation expands the legitimate reasons for civil disobedience beyond strict violations of justice. To counterbalance this tendency democratic disobedience is strictly confined to demand only a reintroduction into the political decision-making process and, accordingly, the justification for democratic disobedience expires if a political reengagement with the issue in question is successfully triggered – and this includes the case in which the sovereign reaffirms the policy. By virtue of this construction liberal and democratic disobedience can co-exist and complement each other depending on the particular context and the justifying reasons for civil disobedience. What renders the concept of democratic disobedience especially valuable, however, is that this new formulation avoids any tendencies towards an instrumental understanding of democracy and justifies disobedience rather as a productive form of participation than as a parasitic external revising mechanism that limits democratic self-government.

Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, 2018

The article argues that civil disobedience must be perceived as an action with progressive and political significance, thus reflecting, from a Kantian perspective, the recognizable paradox between morality and law, as expressed in Kant's moral and political writings. Hence, this article firstly analyzes on which grounds Kant claims rebellion to be unjust. Secondly, it examines how and if people, from a Kantian point of view, can defend themselves against an unjust sovereignty. On this basis, it argues that 'civil disobedience' can be juxtaposed with the Kantian idea of 'freedom of the pen,' thus having the same function as a political corrective. However, two questions are still to be answered, namely if civil disobedience must be punished, and if civil disobedience as a political corrective can be justified? By considering civil disobedience primarily as political agency, both questions are answered in the affirmative.

Res Publica, 2018

Acts of civil disobedience are undertaken in defense of a variety of causes ranging from banning GMO crops and prohibiting abortion to fighting inequality and saving the environment. Recently, Brownlee has argued that the merit of a cause is not relevant to the establishment of a moral right to civil disobedience. Instead, it is the fact that a dissenter believes his cause for protest to be morally right that is salient. We may term her and similar such theories belief-relative theories of civil disobedience. In this paper, I first argue that Brownlee's important argument from conscientious conviction fails in its aim to establish a belief-relative moral right to civil disobedience. I then provide a more general argument that no purely beliefrelative theory of civil disobedience grounded in a basic moral value will be tenable. Any moral warrant of civil disobedience that is derived from a value must be limited by the value from which it is derived, as well as by other similarly weighty values. If the moral warrant of civil disobedience is derived from the value of autonomy, then the warrant does not extend to acts of civil disobedience that violate the autonomy of others, or other similarly weighty values. Furthermore, granting a right to disobey in promotion of a grossly unjust view is problematic because civil disobedience ought to serve the role of promoting justice.

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2015

In her book, Conscience and Conviction, Kimberley Brownlee argues that there is nothing undemocratic about the robust, primary right to civil disobedience that she devotes most of her argument to defending. To the contrary, she holds that there is nothing paternalistic about civil disobedients opposing the will of democratic majorities, because, inter alia, democratic majorities cannot claim particular epistemic superiority, and because there are flaws inherent to democratic procedures that civil disobedience addresses. I hold that Brownlee's arguments fail. In particular, her argument fails because it does not properly construe the nature of the epistemic claim that can be made either by democratic procedures or by civil disobedients, and because it illegitimately conflates the concern about permanent minorities that has been a constant thorn in the side of democratic theorists, with a concern with all outvoted minorities, whether permanent minorities or not. Keywords Civil disobedience Á Democracy Á Rights Á Minorities Kimberley Brownlee's Conscience and Conviction (2012; references to this work given parenthetically in the text) is the most systematic philosophical account we possess of the place of civil disobedience in liberal democratic theory. Actually, it is much more than that. It is a subtle and humane articulation of the notion of conscience itself, and a deep and searching exploration of the changes that would be wrought in our professional lives and in our lives as citizens were the claims of conscience to be taken seriously. I can't possibly do justice to the richness of the book in the context of a short essay. Rather, I will concentrate on a rather small corner of her overall argument: that there is nothing inherently undemocratic about civil disobedience. One of the complaints about recognizing too extensive a right to civil disobedience in the political ethics of liberal democracies is that those who engage in it are in effect taking the law into their own hands. They are, after all, disobeying laws that have been democratically deliberated upon and

Philosophy & public affairs, 1998

This article concerns two strands of civil disobedience theory. One involves the moral judgment of theorists. The other concerns moral judgments that theorists ascribe to those who engage in civil disobedience. Our philosophical literature on civil disobedience is largely a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Responding to critics of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, philosophers argued that unlawful protest can sometimes be justified. For a number of these writers, justifying civil disobedience means overcoming a serious moral objection. They assume we have a moral obligation to obey the law-in other words, political obligation.' Regarding this first strand of civil disobedience theory, I argue that the assumption of political obligation is morally untenable.

(Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, 2022

Adopting a genealogical methodology, this paper aims to unveil the historical intricacies of civil concept and the liberal model of civil disobedience. As suggested by Hanson, there has been a Resistance to civil government later republished as Civil disobedience that goes from its editors until Gandhi. By the same token, there has been a second process, not of selective appropriation per se, but of colonization in which authors of the liberal model of civil disobedience impose a series of theoretical constraints in the form of constitutive elements that ought to be fulfilled in order for a political movement to be considered a legitimate case of civil disobedience. This has resulted in civil disobedients being required to recognize the legitimacy of legal and political systems and to demand changes only within the boundaries of the rule of law. Conversely, we suggest a different and radical approach to civil disobedience, one that acknowledges that civil-base, i.e., determined from real political actions and not necessarily centered on legal foundations or normative status.