Civil Disobedience: A Breach Of Law

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Background
Since Thoreau introduced the term ‘civil disobedience’, it has been the guideline of many resistance movements and an important mechanism for social change (Brownlee, Kimberley 2013). According to John Rawls, ‘civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law…’ (Rawls 1971). But this definition raises many questions. Given that ‘civil disobedience’ is defined as ‘a breach of law’, how can we tell acts of civil disobedience from ‘ordinary’ illegal acts, if not impossible? Will there be ‘grey areas’ and what problems will be raised?
This essay will focus on these questions. It will examine the definitions and features of civil disobedience carefully in order to differentiate it from ordinary breaches of law …show more content…
Determined by its purpose as bringing about a change in laws or government policies, civil disobedience should be communicative. Civil disobedients need to communicate with both the authority and the public. A ‘civil disobedience’ which refuses to communicate with government or other authorities that it is dissenting to is not self-consistent. Civil disobedients also need to communicate with the public because they want to draw public attention. But ordinary criminals, unlike civil disobedients, don’t need to communicate with anyone, except for their accomplices.
Acceptance of Punishment: Another feature that justifies civil disobedience is that civil disobedients should not escape from the punishment enforced to them because of their disobeying the law. “An individual who breaks a 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 the law” (Martin Luther King Jr.).
Objective …show more content…
The general problem regarding these distinctions is that in real world, civil disobedience actually can overlap with ordinary crimes. Because there are more than one distinction, and a real-world-case might just partly match the criteria. This kind of cases falls in a ‘grey area’. For example, should a violent action with a conscientious purpose be forgiven? Generally, we can say that if one defines civil disobedience simply by applying all the distinctions, the definition is both too narrow and too wide. In order to understand this, we are now going to examine problems in detailed
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