Abstract
Acts of civil disobedience are undertaken in defense of a variety of causes ranging from banning GMO crops and prohibiting abortion to fighting inequality and saving the environment. Recently, Brownlee has argued that the merit of a cause is not relevant to the establishment of a moral right to civil disobedience. Instead, it is the fact that a dissenter believes his cause for protest to be morally right that is salient. We may term her and similar such theories belief-relative theories of civil disobedience. In this paper, I first argue that Brownlee’s important argument from conscientious conviction fails in its aim to establish a belief-relative moral right to civil disobedience. I then provide a more general argument that no purely belief-relative theory of civil disobedience grounded in a basic moral value will be tenable. Any moral warrant of civil disobedience that is derived from a value must be limited by the value from which it is derived, as well as by other similarly weighty values. If the moral warrant of civil disobedience is derived from the value of autonomy, then the warrant does not extend to acts of civil disobedience that violate the autonomy of others, or other similarly weighty values. Furthermore, granting a right to disobey in promotion of a grossly unjust view is problematic because civil disobedience ought to serve the role of promoting justice.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
These categories are familiar from other areas of philosophy. For example, in his On What Matters, Parfit distinguishes between different senses in which an act can be wrong or right: an act can be wrong or right in the belief-relative, evidence-relative and fact-relative sense. It is the distinction between belief- and fact-relativity that is relevant to my argument here. First, an act is wrong in a belief-relative sense when, say, a doctor gives you medicine he believes will kill you, but it is in fact likely to save you and you survive. Conversely, a doctor acts rightly in a belief-relative sense when she gives you medicine she believes will save you, but as it turns out, she is not a very practiced doctor: the medicine is in fact likely to kill you and so it does. Second, an act is wrong in a fact-relative sense when a doctor gives you medicine he believes will save you, while it actually turns out to be lethal. Conversely, an act is right in the fact-relative sense, when a doctor gives you medicine she believes will kill you, although taking the medicine ultimately saves your life (Parfit 2011, pp. 151–152). Parfit’s examples concern morally relevant non-normative facts, and beliefs and evidence concerning such facts. Yet, I will define belief-relativity and fact-relativity with respect to moral facts and beliefs about moral facts.
I use the term moral warrant to cover both moral justification as well as moral right.
Brownlee also provides a moral justification of acts of CD motivated by conscience, where conscience refers to a set of moral skills that make us sensitive to an objective and plural morality (Brownlee 2012, p. 50). Her conscience-based normative defense of dissent then more resembles a fact-relative theory of CD.
I am thankful to Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen for bringing this formulation of a posssible hybrid theory to my attention.
It should be noted that it is not clear from Rawls’s writings whether he intends to speak of a right to CD or a justification of CD, as he uses these terms interchangeably (Rawls 1991, pp. 108–113).
I am thankful to David Estlund for pointing out to me that much will depend on whether Rawls meant for the condition that the dissenter’s opinion be’considered and reasonable’ to be only a neccessary condition. If it is only a neccessary condition, Rawls’s position may not be belief-relative.
Note that these constraints on the method of protest do not exclude the use of violence (Brownlee 2012, pp. 21–23).
Numerous scholars have argued that CD has this role of serving society as a whole. Rawls, for example, claims that civil disobedience makes institutions more just and keeps them from deteriorating. Engaging in CD when the right to equal liberties is infringed upon, he says, secures equal liberties to a greater extent than if people did not engage in civil disobedience (Rawls 1991, pp. 115). However, by contrast with Brownlee, Rawls speaks of dissenters who have merited causes, in which case the argument seems to be sound given the further empirical premise that dissent is an effective mode of political participation.
In contrast to Raz, Lefkowitz contends that a right to political participation does entail a right to CD in a liberal, democratic state.
Or oppose injustice as Rawls would say (Rawls 1991, p. 103).
References
Brownlee, Kimberley. 2012. Conscience and Conviction. The Case for Civil Disobedience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1997 [1977]. Taking Rights Seriously. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Estlund, David. 2008. Democratic Authority. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Feinberg, Joel. 1985. Offense to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fish, Stanley. 1994. There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…and it’s a good thing too. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horder, Jeremy. 2004. Excusing Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kappel, K., et al. 2017. Freedom of Expression, Diversity, and Truth. In The Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy, vol. 147, ed. Kimberley Brownlee, David Coady, and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Langton, Rae. 1990. Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers. Philosophy and Public Affairs 19: 311–359.
Lefkowitz, David. 2007. On a Moral Right to Civil Disobedience. Ethics 117: 202–233.
Mill, John Stuart. 1991 [1859]. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John. 1991. Definition and Justification of Civil Disobedience. In Civil Disobedience in Focus, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau. London: Routledge.
Rawls, John. 2005 [1993]. Political Liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Raz, Joseph. 1979. The Authority of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raz, Joseph. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, William. 2014. The Burdens of Conviction: Brownlee on Civil Disobedience. Criminal Law and Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9336-z.
Acknowledgements
For their valuable comments and for interesting discussions on this paper, I am very grateful to Klemens Kappel, Andreas Christiansen, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, David Estlund, Bjørn Hallson, Sune Holm, Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen, two anonymous reviewers for this journal, the practical philosophy research group at University of Copenhagen, the OZSW spring school in Ethical Theory and Applied Ethics and the audiences of the 7th Meeting On Ethics And Political Philosophy at University of Minho and the University of Copenhagen Analytic Philosophy platform colloquium.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hindkjaer Madsen, T. On a Belief-Relative Moral Right to Civil Disobedience. Res Publica 25, 335–351 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9404-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9404-7