Injustice calls for civil discord

In face of injustice, all people have right and moral obligation to peacefully disobey unjust laws

From time to time, civil disobedience or temporary anarchy is necessary because some laws are inevitably unjust, even in an almost perfect world where the constitution is just and the legislative process fair.

The issue becomes: When does an injustice within a well-ordered society permit individuals to suspend their obligations to follow the law and should the suspension of one’s obligations be civil or anarchical?

Injustice is a moving target

Of course, there are some forms of injustice so wicked and immoral that universal condemnation is dispensed with haste. Other times, there are the more innocuous forms of injustice wrapped in their proverbial all-organic free-range sheep’s clothing like the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, otherwise known as the Patriot act, which led to allegations of warrantless wiretapping, torture and widespread surveillance of innocent Americans.

The precedent for civil disobedience and temporary anarchy was set by our founders so many years ago when they declared, “[Whenever] any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

For our founders and the philosophers who influenced them – Locke and Rousseau – this selfproclaimed natural right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” ultimately meant the right to disobey the most absolute of governments: a divine monarchy with a self-proclaimed right to rule based on the Divine Right of Kings, the idea that kings or queens derive their authority from God, not from their subjects.

Founding fathers acted in civil disobedience

If the founders hadn’t argued that individuals have natural rights and that God does not grant rights to kings or queens to then rule their subjects, they would have had little authority or basis to overturn Great Britain’s rule of law and the monarchy’s similarly selfproclaimed divine right to rule.

For the founders, government is always subservient to the natural rights of individuals, cannot possess natural rights because it is a non-natural institution, and only possesses its authority to rule from the consent of the governed.

Thus, the founders’ signing of the Declaration of Independence was an assertion of their natural rights to suspend their civil obligations to Great Britain. It was also an act of civil disobedience that gave rise to seven years of temporary anarchy during the Revolutionary War.

While the founders set a precedent for civil disobedience and temporary anarchy, the former should always be preferential to the latter for two reasons.

First, civil disobedience respects the natural rights of individuals over their destruction.

Second, civil disobedience provides the space necessary for consensus to develop.

To the first point, anarchy, however temporary, is always dangerous to people’s lives, property, and everything they hold dear. It is also dangerous because it can lead to permanent anarchy, thus civil disobedience while requiring great sacrifice and patience respects the natural rights of individuals over their destruction.

For these reasons, hypermoralized cries from alleged social reformers to overturn the bourgeoisie are suspect. Second, practitioners of civil disobedience are exercising enormous self-restraint to provide the space for stakeholders sitting on the sidelines to decide whether they will join in solidarity. Growing consensus is necessary to render an unjust law moot.

History is replete with governments claiming classes of people as threats to its survival and legislating morality to condemn or disenfranchise the other. Often, this force is applied arbitrarily, or even worse than arbitrarily because it is political. History, however, is also replete with instances of individuals practicing civil disobedience to suspend the misapplication of power, including the Nashville sit-ins or Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March.

Ultimately, these heroes only had their internal convictions of injustice when the inherent righteousness and force of governments militate against them.

In the face of injustice, all people have the right and moral obligation to peacefully disobey unjust laws. When depends on whether the level of immorality, oppression, and violence is untenable.

Dean Balaes is a 2019 graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School and Law School. He works for a law firm in New York City.