Civil Disobedience Debate
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” (Wendell Phillips), and requires every citizen to act as a watchdog for their government. As demonstrated in the past, sometimes morally abhorrent legislation is passed and action is taken in opposition to the will of the people. In these instances, civil disobedience positively impacts a free society, but should be used a “last resource” (qtd. in Mirkin “Rebellion, Revolution, and the Constitution”), less one endangers the rule of law.
Civil disobedience —with varying civility— has been apart of the American tradition predating the War for Independence and starting with refusal to obey the Townshend and the Intolerable Acts. This civil disobedience precipitated a revolution of mind, a revolution
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The lines between morally justifiable and morally culpable are blurred, and judgment varies from individual to individual. In the present, no one’s actions have had such a variance in public perception as those of Edward Snowden. Whether his release of NSA documents revealing a worldwide, U.S. based collection of electronic data is a massive breach in security or a courageous crusade to protect the privacy of Americans has been the subject of much debate. More recently partisan protests have dotted the country for innumerable reasons. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out several qualifications that necessitated civil disobedience, aware that “[i]n any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action” (King “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”). If any on these conditions are not met, or if the disobedience is handled uncivilly, the group is not a positive force for legislative change, but a force of destruction, as the entire point of civil disobedience is to “forc[e] a moral decision [that] should benefit the lawbreakers” (Mirkin “Rebellion, Revolution, and the Constitution”) as the law or action is already “counter to the expressed and felt moral demands of society”
Compare And Contrast Letter From Birmingham Jail And Antigone
1117 Words | 5 PagesIn the world that we live in today, civil disobedience is a subject that has been and continues to be an extremely relevant issue in life. But even though it is a relevant topic, it is one that brings much disagreement when conversed about. The topic that is widely debated to what is the most effective way that civil disobedience can be used by citizens against unjust laws and rulings by those in power, using words or in the most extreme cases getting violent. There is a wide range of ways that civil disobedience is used, in Sophocles Antigone and Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail two different methods can be seen. King uses the power of his words to unite a nation against the unjustness of a country, while Antigone uses the power of
Letter From Birmingham Jail Rhetorical Analysis
1268 Words | 6 Pages“Unjust laws exist: Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them” (Thoreau 945, par.16). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had written about resisting an unjust government in his piece, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. In his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau also discusses the right and responsibility to resist an unjust government. Since King and Thoreau both use current events in their time as examples of injustice, use historical and biblical references, how they can’t wait any longer to make a change, both provide strong arguments on how important it is to stand up against the injustice put upon American people by the government; however, King and Thoreau were inspired to write by different causes
Comparison Of Civil Disobedience And Letter From Birmingham Jail
699 Words | 3 PagesIn his essay “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau asserts that the government is not needed and must be disobeyed for the sake of the people. Over a hundred years later after Thoreau published his essay, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” similarly shows the need for the disobeyment of the government. Thoreau asserts that governments are not necessary, and must be dissolved. While King follows a similar ideal, he believes that the government is inherently good, but that some of the laws passed by the government are cruel to people. While they are both appealing emotionally and ethically, King’s is more sound in argument and portrays a more practical way of civil disobedience.
Henry Chavez Disobedience
234 Words | 1 PagesHenry David Thoreau, an American philosopher and abolitionist, once stated, “ Disobedience is the true foundation of Liberty. The obedient must be slaves”. Thoreau asserted that disobedience is the reason America claimed it 's Liberty and those who are obedient are the Government 's slaves who don 't realize what 's around them. I acquire that Disobedience is a very important act and helps us progress and achieve goals people said were impossible, but good people didn 't listen In the 1960’s, California witnessed an unexpected Civil Rights movement inspired by Cesar Chavez.
Letters From A Birmingham Jail By Martin Luther King Jr.
781 Words | 4 PagesAs Martin Luther King Jr. observes in his "Letters From a Birmingham Jail," it is a sad thing when people condemn the effects of civil disobedience without considering the conditions which festered and led to such a nonviolent protest. As Thoreau writes in his "Civil Disobedience," too much respect for the law can lead people to blindly to terrible things. Consider the Germans who, out of fear of the law, committed the atrocities of the Holocaust; or, the participants of the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures, in which men were instructed to continuously 'shock' a hidden person, and which, goaded on by the authority figure, continued even until the subject of the punishment (in actuality an actor) 'died.' Those who choose to take action to take down laws that do not uphold the morals of the people as a whole work instead towards a society based on considered values that respect all of its
Cliven Bundy's Civil Disobedience
751 Words | 4 PagesSome wonder what Civil Disobedience is and what it is all about. Civil Disobedience is an effective, selfacknowledged denial to obey certain laws, requirements and orders of the government or an occupying worldwide power. Around in 1846 a man named Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay over Civil Disobedience. He wrote this while he sent the night in jail because he had failed to pay 6 years worth of delinquent poll taxes(Resistance to Civil Government) . He would bicker with the people saying he couldn’t pay the funds that helped to assist the US government 's war with Mexico, nor could he pay a government that still allowed slavery in its Southern states.
Civil Disobedience Dbq
705 Words | 3 PagesI consider civil disobedience to be an easily-ignored pillar upon which our democracy was founded. In fact we are only established as a nation now because our founding fathers engaged in civil disobedience themselves. We were in a “social contract” of sorts with Great Britain and when we felt that they had not upheld their part of the contract (they did not allow us to create courts to maintain order, or to create a navy to defend ourselves, or to sustain our economy due to an inability to trade with any other countries), Thomas Jefferson concluded that it was our not only our right, but also our duty to break away. And it was Thomas Jefferson that combined all of the works of the great thinkers before him such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke
Thoreau And Martin Luther King Comparison
678 Words | 3 PagesCivil Disobedience In the dictionary civil disobedience is the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest, but Thoreau and Martin Luther King have their own beliefs to civil disobedience. In Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” he writes about the need to prioritize one’s conscience over the dictates of laws. Martin Luther King uses civil disobedience as something that effectuates change in the government. Both Thoreau and Martin Luther King has similar yet different perspectives on civil disobedience.
Comparing Civil Disobedience And Letter From Birmingham Jail
1182 Words | 5 PagesTwo different writers. Two different issues. Two different time periods. Two different races. One hundred years can make Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” seem widely different from each other.
Examples Of Civil Disobedience In Antigone
1005 Words | 5 PagesToday we are all called to enact on our own civil disobedience when we are faced with injustice and unfair laws, we are called to make a stand and a declaration to stand up for what we believe
Summary: The Case Against Civil Disobedience
1290 Words | 6 PagesHerbert J. Storing, an Associate Professor of Political Science, in “The Case Against Civil Disobedience,” writes, “One of the practical consequences of this institution [civil disobedience] is to divert disobedience and even revolution into the channel of law” (97). What Storing is saying is that civil disobedience will encourage people to break the laws and they will hide under civil disobedience to avoid the law. Also, civil disobedience might split society by creating disagreements with the people, and it could create a political instability. However, Storing fails to see that those who break an unjust law, as discussed above, do not avoid the law, in fact they show respect to the law as they willingly accept the consequences. By accepting the consequences, they show that they are not acting for their own interests but for society’s.
Bounds Of Disobedience
251 Words | 2 PagesUnderstanding the bounds of disobedience as a beneficial tool for human progress would require total comprehension of the minutiae of every situation which allows for disobedience. Currently, this understanding is something we simply cannot have, and as such, any attempts of insubordination will have incalculable risks to them. However, there are some rough approximations we can make to determine whether an act of disobedience is truly worth the effort. If disobedience is done only for its own sake and does not earn the support of others, it is probable that the disobedience will be silenced and punished, and the message it carries will remain unnoticed.
Civil Disobedience Definition
695 Words | 3 PagesThroughout decades, most of citizens cannot grasp the concept of the purpose and the importance of Civil Disobedience. According to John Rawls, an American moral and political philosopher, he (1971) states that “civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. On this account, people who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as this shows their fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of fidelity to law, is said to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and conscientious refusal, revolutionary action, militant protest and organized forcible resistance, on the other hand.” Therefore,
Essay On Civil Disobedience
536 Words | 3 PagesThe trigger event was the decision of four Greensboro, North Carolina, Negro students to bring their books to a segregated Woolworth lunch counter and simply stay there and study when they were refused service. Another type of civil disobedience relating to peace and war issues is the refusal to pay all or a part of the income tax, unless or until the government abandons a particular policy. Following Thoreau’s example, diverse Americans have attempted this type of protest, but if they have significant income or property the U.S. government usually can extract the tax money one way or another eventually, with fines and possible litigation costs added. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire.
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