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Why do we have to abuse terminology so much? Snowden's actions and sacrifices stand on their own without having to apply the label of "Civil Disobedience". It
Why do we have to abuse terminology so much? Snowden's actions and sacrifices stand on their own without having to apply the label of "Civil Disobedience". It does not diminish or tarnish his actions to omit that label; but it does diminish them to apply it incorrectly.
Fundamentally, he did not protest an unjust law by publicly and openly defying it, thus showing to the world the injustice of enforcing it. Rather, he brought unjust actions to light by violating a law, namely that of government secrecy, that is not really central to the issues raised.
If he were protesting government secrecy in an of itself, then without standing up to face the punishment of the offence his protest would be ineffectual. But violating that secrecy is not what he is protesting, so staying to confront the legal consequences buys him nothing.
You don't need to get bogged down in semantics if you just address the core issue: were Snowden's actions justified? Previous practitioners of civil disobedience clearly thought that submission to punishment was necessary for their actions to be justified.
You seem to be arguing that submission to punishment is not necessary if the disobedience is indirect rather than direct (i.e. if the injustice which is to be exposed is not the actual law broken). But I don't see why that's important. If MLK decided to break a traffic law in order to speak out against segregation, he surely would accepted the punishment for this violation of the law. If anything, submition to the punishment is even more important for indirect civil disobedience, since the punishment itself is just.
The masochistic "disobedience = submission to punishment from those you're disobeying" idea is not only bizarre, it's a blatant distraction. The point of punishment is to scare people from further disobedience, and project an image of overwhelming dominance.
It's an interesting case study on how terms like "civil disobedience" get coopted by those in power, to convince people that disobeying them should be hilariously self-defeating. (Imagine the US government submitting to punishment and reparations when it breaks international law.)
As with all things, you choose actions based on their predictable consequences. ("Let myself get destroyed? Hmm, what could go wrong..?")
I'm not sure what you mean by "necessary" in "... submission to punishment is not necessary ...". Do you mean "necessary to be considered civil disobedience"? In that case, yes, I agree with you.
To state that baldly, my whole point is that what Snowden is doing is _not_ Civil Disobedience, and that calling it that cheapens his actions. Talking about "previous practitioners of civil disobedience" seems to imply that he is practicing civil disobedience, which I clearly (at least, I thought clearly) stated that he was _not_ doing.
A significant part of civil disobedience is that by standing up and violating an unjust law (or the unjust enforcement of a just law), and being subjected to punishment for it, makes people (who are fundamentally good and decent) see that it does not make sense to punish people for doing something that shouldn't be illegal. This is an attempt to compensate for people's natural instinct to meekly obey unjust laws, and to bring out societal and eventually legal change.
Snowden is not saying that government secrecy laws are unjust. If he were to do so, he might find that he has very little support (from those good and decent people). Many people feel that the government has an obligation to keep some things secret. What he appears to be protesting is the specific government program that he leaked, not secrecy laws.
> Do you mean "necessary to be considered civil disobedience"?
No, I mean necessary to be justified. As I've tried to make clear, I'm not interested in arguing about the semantics.
I think practitioners of civil disobedience stress that acceptance of punishment is necessary to justify disobedience because (1) the laws passed by democratic governments are valid (even if unjust) and (2) because acceptance of suffering for your cause calls the public's attention. I've never heard it argued that the mere fact that you are technically being punished for a just law (in the case of indirect disobedience) gets you off the hook for accepting the punishment. Hence my MLK traffic example.
Personally, I would add that acceptance of punishment reduces your ability to deceive yourself into thinking you're disobeying for the greater good, rather than just for your own personal gain or fame.
Being a conscientious objectors during the Vietnam war is justified if you accepted the alternate role upon being drafted, or if you accept imprisonment. But do you think fleeing to Canada is justified? After all, most people agree that the government has a right to draft soldiers in times of national emergency.
"Previous practitioners of civil disobedience clearly thought that submission to punishment was necessary for their actions to be justified."
I never got this sense, let alone thought of it as clear. Can you explain?
"If MLK decided to break a traffic law in order to speak out against segregation, he surely would accepted the punishment for this violation of the law."
Would he? And even so, would he do it because he thought otherwise his actions would be unjustified?
I'll do my best to explain as I see it, but I'm highly unqualified. I hope you don't mind if I mostly just quote. From MLK's letter from Birmingham Jail:
> In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that 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 law.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...
Basically, as I understand it, the idea is that the law is valid. It has been passed according to a democratic process. (Here, democracy might not be as important as the plain need for government to ensure law and order. I'm not sure.) If you were threatened by a random robber, MLK would not say you would not be obligated to give up your belongings or accept that the robber shoots you. But the government is different, because it is valid/necessary/whatever. Breaking the law and fleeing is wrong, but breaking the law and accepting the punishment for just ends is respectful of the rule of law.
I understand Gandhi even less. He was pretty fanatical about non-violence, going so far as to say the Jews should have offered to kill themselves in the holocaust in order to catch the world and the German's people's attention. (To be fair, at this point he was pretty old and maybe going crazy.) But he definitely urged Indians to break the British law and accept the punishment. The British rule certainly wasn't valid according to democratic ideals. I'm pretty sure Gandhi would say you should allow the robber to shoot you.
> Previous practitioners of civil disobedience clearly thought that submission to punishment was necessary for their actions to be justified.
No, a subset of prior civil disobedients willingly submitted to punishment to allow their disobedience to remain justified in the public view so they could continue their civil disobedience after punishment. This has not been a rule among civil disobedients, but a feature common to some.
However, submission to punishment is often especially helpful in cases of indirect civil disobedience, not only because the punishment is just, but because it absolves the disobedient of accusations of infidelity to the legal system in which s/he acts. Still not a requirement, though, as it can be detrimental to continued disobedience and successful initiation of change.
I disagree. The US government says "these programs should be secret". Snowden says "these programs should not be secret. I am going to break the law and make them public".
How is that not protesting an unjust law by publicly and openly defying it?
Abuse terminology? Apply the label of civil disobedience incorrectly?
I'm unsure if you read the post or not, but I specifically address this. There is a long-standing recognition of indirect civil disobedience--e.g., violating law A to bring attention to the unjust nature of law B because you cannot, or choose not to, directly violate law B. You're thinking inside the box of only direct civil disobedience--e.g., refusing to give up your seat on the bus to a white man even though the law requires you to do so.
It is still civil disobedience, and I think far more civil disobedience than whistleblowing, yet another label that has been used to label Snowden.
Fair enough -- I did miss that comment about indirect civil disobedience. I don't really have a perspective on that, because I can't think of any examples of it, but it seems like a stretch to apply that specific label; thereby diluting (in my mind) the meaning of the term Civil Disobedience. If we add the qualifier of "indirect", then it seems that the scope becomes unnecessarily large. But I think I would need more examples of this to that aren't similar to whistleblowing to understand why we need to introduce the term "direct civil disobedience" where "civil disobedience" seems to suit fine. You give a concrete example for "direct" civil disobedience, but not one for "indirect".
Why don't we like "whistleblowing"? It seems that this exactly describes what he did. Is there a connotation associated with whistleblowing that I'm not aware of? I thought whistleblowing was considered an admirable thing in and of itself. I mean, you have to acknowledge that what he did was _at least_ whistleblowing, even if it was more than "just" whistleblowing.
Please, update your notions of civil disobedience in history. MLK and Gandhi drew on historical predecessors who, despite not being called civil disobedients, were very much that and are considered and referenced by philosophers and political theorists as such. MLK and Gandhi were not the "original practitioners". Moreover, even if they were the first civil disobedients, there is nothing about the status of first that indicates greater authority to defining or adequately justifying disobedient acts.
I've been enjoying your comments throughout this thread a good deal, because you raise a lot of great points of discussion. But it appears that, in total, you're very distracted by the likes of MLK and Gandhi, and it's somewhat preventing considering things from a higher, more abstract level where you can reason about civil disobedience itself, pulled apart from the particulars of how some disobedients have practiced it.
Those are good reasons for some practitioners of civil disobedience (CD) to submit to punishment, but I don't think your reasons support the thesis that submission to punishment is a necessary condition for CD to be justified. Your reasons are mere strategies for CD practitioners to maximize publicity and minimize self-deception. Submission to punishment may be a good strategy for avoiding violence, increasing publicity, and overcoming personal weakness, but that's all there is to it.
The most effect strategy depends on the circumstances. If Snowden can maximize publicity by playing cat-and-mouse with the U.S. government for weeks, maybe that's a good enough reason for him to resist being arrested by U.S. authorities. The implications of personal conscience also depends on the small print. People might agree with your general argument for the draft, but at the same time deny that the Communist takeover of Vietnam was anything close to a national emergency. After all, the eventual defeat in Vietnam did not cause the U.S. to cease to exist.
Many contemporary political philosophers seem to take Gandhi and MLK as examples, but I'll take Hobbes and Locke any day over them: as soon as the state steps over the limits of its strictly circumscribed powers, you are under absolutely no obligation to obey the parts of its law that exceed the limit. You may voluntarily choose to obey the punishment part for one reason or another, but that's just your choice and it's irrelevant to the legitimacy of your cause. (Hobbes said that death row inmates have the right to try to escape from prison, because in his theory, the state was never authorized to execute people.)
Note that my reason (1) is not a strategy. Also, taking reasonable steps to prevent self-deception is a moral imperative, not (in this case) a strategy for accomplishing a goal. To not take such steps is to be complicit with the self-deception, which is wrong.
> If Snowden can maximize publicity by playing cat-and-mouse with the U.S. government for weeks
That's a completely different claim than the one being discussed (that Snowden is justified to avoid punishment per se), and hinges on a question about Snowden's motivations which for which there's no evidence.
Your points about MLK and Gandhi possibly being wrong are fine. Arguing about that is way beyond the scope of this thread.
EDIT (resonse to kijin): Snowden's motivations are obviously relevant if you're justifying his avoiding of punishment because of the publicity issue. If Snowden think going to trial would maximize publicity but is still avoiding punishment because he's a wimp, and it just so happens that avoiding punishment ends up giving him more publicity, the latter fact does not justify his actions.
It's not a requirement for promoting justice that you are sinless. But I would claim it is a requirement that take reasonable steps to prevent self-deception during the particular justice-promoting act. If someone steals a loaf of bread to feed their family, and also takes a nice watch for themselves along the way, I am prepared to say that that theft was not justified. I don't need to look into the family situation.
Also, most people doesn't dispute that the espionage law is just, they dispute whether PRISM is just and whether Snowden was justified in violating the (just) espionage law to expose PRISM.
I don't think it's possible for unjust laws to be "valid" (as you can probably guess from my endorsement of Hobbes & Locke). Why should I care what 51% of other people think, if I'm sure they're wrong? If I still choose to abide by an unjust law, that might be because I think maintaining peace is preferable to pissing off the 51%. But in that case, I'm just making a morally neutral choice of strategy. If circumstances were such that the risk of piss-off was low, my strategy might change. So in my dictionary, (1) is also a matter of strategy.
As for taking reasonable steps to prevent self-deception, I still think it's a separate issue from whether an instance of disobedience is justified. There are two moral imperatives at issue: an obligation to protest an injustice and an obligation to be honest about your motivations. A person can technically fulfill one without fulfilling the other. If everyone had to have a spotless conscience in order for them to do something right, nobody would ever do anything right. I therefore don't care what Snowden's personal motivations are. It's tangential to the issue of whether his act of disobedience is justified, which I think it is, for reasons that have nothing to do with the contents of his psyche and everything to do with the (lack of) objective merits of the espionage law that requires his arrest.
>Why should I care what 51% of other people think, if I'm sure they're wrong?
Because you want them to care what you think when you're in the 51%. That's the basis of a lawful society. If everyone feels that they can do whatever they like regardless of what anyone else thinks, you just have anarchy. It seems that you decide to obey laws on a case-by-case basis on purely pragmatic grounds, but if everyone acted that way we'd in effect have no laws at all.
No, I don't want anybody to give a damn about what percentage I belong to, just as I don't give a damn about what percentage they belong to.
The basis of a lawful society is that the law gives people incentive to obey it, by punishing people who disobey. It makes the individually pragmatic coincide with the greater good. I never said that disobedient individuals will not be punished. I only said that they have the right to try not to be punished (as in Hobbes's example of the death penalty). But in the end, what they want might not matter because the state is vastly more powerful than any single individual. An important feature of a lawful society is that the law tends to win. But might doesn't make right. The Mafia always tends to find you in the end.
What happens when everyone willingly defies the law and gains the power to evade punishment? Anarchy? No, just a momentary revolution and then back to order. For most people, extreme disorder just isn't a rational choice. Political instability causes stock prices to go down, right? Who wants that? So there will always be a (more or less) lawful society, regardless what anyone thinks about its legitimacy. Anarchy is a fictitious threat that friends of the establishment tend to wave in the air when they feel threatened, that's all.
You're saying that you're not arguing about semantics, but that's the entire content of your argument. The talk of "practitioners of civil disobedience" taints any arguments that follow. I could just as easily say "other practitioners of yoga feel that actions needed to be guided by energy to be considered justified", and say that Snowden's actions are unjusitifed for that reason (hearty apologies to any yogis out there).
So strip the labels entirely before applying them ruthlessly.
That said, let me talk to the heart of your argument, which is more about whether his actions are justified, rather than what they are called. I would say that Snowden's goals are twofold, in my mind. One goal is to expose a secretive and possibly illegal operation perpetrated by a government that is supposed to represent the will of its people, that was being kept secret despite the fact that publicly acknowledging it arguably does not compromise it as a means of stopping the organizations that it is purportedly targeting, and thus the secrecy was not essential to the operation, but rather was to keep people ignorant of the violation of their privacy.
The second goals is to encourage other people to come forward with information that they feel satisfies these criteria.
The third goal, which is really, in my mind, a non-goal, is to expose the government's harsh treatment of people who reveal government secrets.
Facing trial and potentially being incarcerated furthers only the third of these goals, which is not really even a goal. It hurts the second goal significantly. And it is largely irrelevant to the first goal, which is accomplished whether or not he is penalized. Successfully fleeing prosecution advances the second goal significantly, and only hurts the third goal. I don't see how the fleeing prosecution affects the first goal in either direction, which is the most important one.
So are his actions justified? I think, as do many others on this site, that the first two goals here are very important ones, and the third is not important, so in my opinion, yes, justified. I hope his conscience is clear. The other question, whether they are effective, is separate, and remains to be seen. I am not optimistic; violations of privacy cause no real substantial harm until they do, and at that point it is too late to protest. I haven't even switched away from google, and my parents don't even know who Edward Snowden is.
> You're saying that you're not arguing about semantics, but that's the entire content of your argument.
> That said, let me talk to the heart of your argument
So first, those statements are clearly in conflict.
Second, I purposefully haven't been arguing from first principles about the general question of whether his actions were justified. That's just way, way beyond the scope of this thread.
I have consistently only been discussing whether practitioners of civil disobedience would find his actions justified (modulo my one interjection that starts "Personally,..."). That doesn't make my argument about semantics, it means I am only discussing what how the arguments of those thinkers would be applied to this situation. Saying "but it's not civil disobedience" does not avoid the charge, according to those arguments, that the acts were unjustified.
Entire content of your argument referred to the means by which you were making the argument, not the ... forget it, let's not keep going into that hole.
Talking about what the practitioners of civil disobedience think is entirely irrelevant to justification. A boy helps an old woman carry her groceries across the street. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exclaims, "why would he do that! That's not civil disobedience! It is unjustified!"
People can do good things, that are justified, without it being civil disobedience. If one calls it civil disobedience, then viewed in that light, it gets complicated. But since it is not civil disobedience (I assert), why do we have to justify it against the standards applied to civil disobedience? It's also not "rule by divine right of Kings" -- is it therefore unjustified by that standard? It's not "because it helps the children", is it therefore unjustified? We can go over all the ways that it does not meet how various people justify actions, and still come no closer to looking at his actions for what they are.
Clearly, in my mind, this is a case of "whistleblowing", where someone reveals information that is hurtful to an organization but helpful to the public. A mafia informant doesn't stick around to get whacked, and nobody faults him, because receiving the punishment for violating the secrecy does not help the cause that he is trying to advance.
Suppose someone very smart argues that X is justified when condition Y holds, but X is not justified when Y doesn't hold. Furthermore, this argument is well regarded by many smart people, who find that it is applicable in many places. That doesn't make it right, but it does mean when you assert something that conflicts with the argument, you better either acknowledge that you reject the widely-regarded argument, or explain why the argument doesn't apply in this case.
Now, you assert Z is justified, which a lot of people say looks a lot like X. In fact, Z = X + delta_X. Furthermore, it is agreed by everyone that Y does not hold in this case. So some people say, "Z is effectively X, and Y doesn't hold, so Z is unjustified." You say, "but Z != X. Therefore this argument breaks down. Here's my new argument for justification". But someone replies "but delta_X is small, and I claim that it doesn't change the outcome of the original argument".
You can't respond "But Z is not the same thing as X, so we should use completely different arguments to judge justified-ness." You either need to claim that delta_X is large enough to break the original argument, or acknowledge that you disagree with that argument.
I believe you're misinterpreted me to be saying "Snowden's actions are trying to be civil disobedience, but they don't have all the qualities of justified civil disobedience, therefore it's unjustified". Hence your thinking that my argument was composed of semantics. But this is not at all what I argued, and I think you'll agree if you re-read my comments.
Not to single out your post, because the sentiment seems quite common, but your post is the first I see it directly asserting that what the NSA is doing is legal because it was passed via democratic process, which is not technically true.
There are reams of paper that could be easily filled by 'laws' that were passed in a 'lawful' fashion, but that were contradictory to the Constitution of the United States, thereby making their effect a nullity at best. The Constitution is there to uphold the rights of the citizenry, but also to empower the government to uphold the law, while at the same time restraining the government such that it cannot violate the citizens' rights in doing so. See recently, Prop 8, DOMA, et al.
American Jurisprudence[1] tells us that laws in violation of the Constitution are not laws at all, and further, that no one is obligated to obey them, nor are any courts obligated to uphold them just because they were otherwise lawfully passed.
The assertion here is that the collection of private data by our government is in violation of said Constitution, and the legality of that law will likely hinge on the Supreme Court's decision on whether or not that data is indeed private or not. Thus far, we know that at least parts of the program in play have been deemed unconstitutional, and it seems that the NSA is performing them anyway. But as the government is empowered to govern through the consent of the governed, how can we have consented to a program we know nothing about? If its only discussion is done in secret?
In that regard, if we assume good faith on all parties, then we can say that at the very least, somebody needed to bring it to the attention of the public, and that person could also reasonably concede that the government in violation would have no subsequent authority to imprison or punish them, except falsely - for which I can't see even the most ardent civilly disobedient person willing to subject themselves to.
In summary though, I agree that civil disobedience is a term faultily applied here, but for perhaps the polar opposite of your reasoning.
[1] - http://constitution.org/uslaw/16amjur2nd.htm http://constitution.org/uslaw/16amjur2nd.htm