3 ms·

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 submiss

by kijin 13y ago

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.)

jessriedel 13y ago
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.
- kijin 13y ago
  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.
  - foldr 13y ago
    >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.
    - kijin 13y ago
      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.

by kijin 13y ago

jessriedel 13y ago

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.

kijin 13y ago
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.
- foldr 13y ago
  >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.
  - kijin 13y ago
    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.