Philosophy grad here, so bear with me. Byrne's point about "where one draws the line with 'higher morality' used as a justification for breaking the law" is dee

Philosophy grad here, so bear with me. Byrne's point about "where one draws the line with 'higher morality' used as a justification for breaking the law" is deeply fucked up. He seems to be saying that civil disobedience is right if and only if the public sees an act of disobedience as a good cause. Quoth David Byrne: "In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that they have done good, not harm." That's messed up, yo, for a few reasons. But mostly: The public is a multi-faceted organism. Is 'the public' meant to be the majority? A consensus? The intelligentsia? Whatever answer you come up with, you end up with this: morality is dictated by 'the public.' Laws and actions therefore don't have any moral standing outside of the social context they're in. Morality isn't objective. That sends us down the path to moral relativism, which you may or may not have a problem with. However, if you're someone who supports the idea of civil disobedience, like David Byrne says he is, you should worry. If it turns out that what is moral is dependent on what is accepted by the public, then different groups have different moralities. You have no way of adjudicating between which group is right - you just say: "shit, you believe different things. I guess your beliefs are just as morally right as mine." That means that the South of 1830, where slavery was popular, was a fine and dandy and moral place. See how this looks like a load of shit now? The project of civil disobedience, then, stops being about actually doing what's right. It's about changing group attitudes towards X. Like gay marriage: if you want gay marriage to be moral, you change the beliefs of 'the public.' You stop fighting for what's moral - instead, you end up fighting for what your group says is moral. No one has the moral high ground; the winning group just ends up yelling louder. But that's completely backwards. People fight for gay marriage (or to stop abortion) because they believe those things are right. If they are right - that is to say, they're moral actions or whatever - then their rightness is what supports your beliefs. It may even turn out that you're wrong: you may have believed something because you thought it was moral, when in reality it was not. That happens. But what we should shrink from saying is that the public determines rightness. Because then there's no real way to be civilly disobedient. There's no point. You're not fighting for a good cause. You're just fighting, and there will never be a day when you can say that we now live in a more moral world.