Xkot quotes, in the context of the gay marriage brouhaha in San Francisco:
Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
— Henry David Thoreau
To which I’d add:
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
— Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), Attributed (1912)
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
— Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Letter from Birmingham Jail (1964)
On the other hand:
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
— James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), _The American Democrat_ (1838)
and:
I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
— Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), Inaugural Address
and, of course:
What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary?
— Marion S. Barry, Jr. (b. 1936), Attributed
The main problem being, of course, that “unjust” is a relative term, and what our neighbor considers to be a just breaking of a law to obey a higher sense of justice may, to us, be anarchy, tyranny, or just plain old reprehensible.
To take the current example, the city of San Francisco is disobeying state law and issuing marriage licenses to gays. Some folk consider that law as unjust (I certainly do), and so applaud SF’s actions.
On the other hand, if the city government were handing out syringes of heroin, letting people buy machine guns, or putting large displays of the Ten Commandments up on city property — each of which would violate laws that some folk think are unjust — I suspect that very different constituencies would applaud and condemn them.
I think King’s formulation is best, because it recognizes civil disobedience as an individual act (not a governmental one), and it requires folks to take responsibility for their flouting of the law. Civil disobedience is meant to stir up the conscience to see the law changed, not to promote disrespect for the law per se.
While I agree with the sentiment of the San Francisco city government in this, if I’m going to condemn other thumb-nosing at laws by other communities, I have to condemn it, as well. There are certainly other, and better, avenues available to change or overturn the state law in question (a ballot proposition, so truly the vox populi) than simply ignoring it.
Well said! I concur completely.
On the other hand, there is the logic of the city’s argument that the law itself is against the state constitution. So it can be argued that the law is itself illegal (well, technically unconstitutional) and thus, one not only should defy it for its injustice, but also must defy it because it goes against the primary duty a government has to its constitution.
If it is unconstitutional (and I’m willing to buy that argument), there are ways of challenging it in court. A gay couple could file suit, or, as an interested party, the city could.
Most cases similar to this involve lack of enforcement — simply not upholding a given law. SFO’s stance is more active — actually violating the law, as opposed to not enforcing it. It’s the difference between (if I can use a drug analogy) not arresting people who are smoking pot, and actually supplying them.
What I find interesting is the people lining up in San Francisco who see themselves as practicing civil disobedience but that implies a law is broken. The people getting “married” are breaking no laws. The county clerk and the mayor on the other hand…
If it weren’t for thousands of people’s lives being affected this would be great farce. Imagine the Terminator arresting Mayor Newsom. What is not so funny is the AFA seriously considering this possibility. Come on people games are what happens at Dave’s house not San Francisco City Hall!
Speaking of vox populi : The law being broken was a 2000 ballot initiative. If part of Gray Davis’ demise was because of his killing of Proposition 187, then this incident might put California in play for the Republicans. 61% of Californians voted for Proposition 22 and they may be pretty disgusted about the whole thing.
There certainly are ways to challege the law in court, and one of those ways is exactly what SF has done. Furthermore, it can be argued that Newsom’s job is in fact to uphold the constitution as an elected official (granted, as Mayor, he’s not necessarily the front line of the state constitution) and where he sees a conflict between state law and that constitution he is required to choose the constitution over state law. That would make sense to me.
Ultimately, this will be decided in court, as it should be. While Newsom and SF are in violation of the law, if that law is itself unconstitutional they are under no obligation to obey it. And if it is both unjust and unconstitutional, then it is both a matter of obligation and a matter of principle to defy it.
Dave,
I’m surprised that you’re willing to state so boldly that injustice is relative. Certainly people have different opinions about justice and injustice, but this alone doesn’t make them relative. The chief problem with saying that justice and injustice are relative, in my opinion, is that it makes it impossible to criticize any moral view. If one allows that injustice is relative, then racists of any type can assert that racism of their kind may be unjust relative to your point of view, but that it isn’t relative to theirs. If a theory allows the jusitification of the Holocaust or Jim Crow laws, that’s a reductio ad absurdum of the theory in my eyes. A relativistic theory of justice allows such justifications, and consequently I think it’s clearly false.
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood your comment about relativism, in which case please forgive me.
>>Dave
P.S. Damn the fonts are small on your site! How can you stand it?
Once you let a philosopher into the room, you’re bound to have rings run around you logically. Hi Dave!!
I don’t think I would agree that (in)justice is relative in an objective sense, but that it’s relative in a subjective sense. Thus, as you say, people may claim (and do) that racial bigotry is just. I would disagree, but my calling it unjust doesn’t make it any more so than someone else calling it just. I believe that justice is an absolute, but I’m not sure I believe it’s a demonstrable quality.
Even presuming that one could develop an objective measure of justice that would identify which laws ought to be disregarded, I strongly suspect that most people would delve that deeply into it, and instead would go by what they consider just. Thus, encouraging folks to simply disobey laws they think unjust (or, to use the particular rationale in SFO, unconstitutional) without due process, is to invite anarchy.
Regarding fonts — I suspect the next redesign, one of these days, will use relative fonts. That seems to be returning to vogue, and I use enough computers with different screen resolutions that I can see where they would be handy.
Thanks for your comments, Dave — good to hear from you.
Dave,
To say that something is “relative in a subjective sense” is puzzling to me. Do you mean that everyone has their own view of what the truth is? That can be true even if justice is objective rather than relative since the epistemology of justice may be quite different from its metaphysics. I’m puzzled about what you mean because I think that ‘subjective’ means relative to each individual rather than (say) relative to culture. That’s a metaphysical concept, and I think you may be using ‘subjective’ in an epistemic sense. Whether any particular moral principle can be demonstrated is an epistemic question of course. It may well be that skepticism is justified with respect to morality (epistemology), but that’s not the same thing as relativism (metaphysics).
Yes, as a practical matter, it’s clearly troublesome to encourage people to disobey laws they think are unjust. In addition to your worries, it would be too easy for people to come up with some kind of sophistic argument about why a law is unjust and then disobey the law on those grounds. I definitely don’t think it’s wise to go that route, and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I just meant to say that appeals to relativism shouldn’t be used to justify any moral claims.
At the same time, after having re-read the Letter from Birmingham Jail recently, I think there has to be some allowance for civil disobedience lest we go too far in the direction of a police state.
>>Dave
P.S. Regarding the fonts, It’s not *that* big of a deal. I just have to remember to use the feature of Mozilla that allows me to grow the fonts in a browser window on the fly. It doesn’t work so well on pages that use lots of tables or frames, but it works ok for your pages.
P.P.S. Hi Mary. Yeah, we Philosophers are troublemakers, aren’t we! We’re also pedantic and fairly frustrating to converse with, or so I’m told.
I don’t have a problem with civil disobedience — since it implies (as MLK put it) a willingness to go to prison in order to stir the conscience of society. I think sometimes that’s a necessary course in the face of injustice.
For some reason, though, I don’t see the actoins of the SFO city administration as being an example of civil disobedience. I’m not certain I can articulate why off the top of my head.
As to the rest, blame my never having taken any philosophy classes for having the right language to express what I’m trying to (or for clearly understanding what you’re trying to express). 🙂
oops. I went a bit overboard on the philosophy jargon in my last response. Sorry.
I didn’t mean to suggest that what SFO was doing was civil disobedience, only that we need some kind of middle ground between strict enforcement of the law and lax enforecement of the law. Neither is really going to serve our best interests or justice.
regarding our mutual lack of understanding: no worries, I think I’ve just proved my point about my pedantry and my interlocutor’s frustration.
>>Dave
I am hardly one to be in a good moral position to criticize jargon. 🙂