In the same vein of thinking, what would civil rights sit-ins in the 50s and 60s be classified as. There they actively occupied seats for paying customers, instead of a strongly worded letter.
The sit-in protesters WERE paying customers. Or at least they were trying to be.
mythago on
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In the same vein of thinking, what would civil rights sit-ins in the 50s and 60s be classified as. There they actively occupied seats for paying customers, instead of a strongly worded letter.
The sit-ins could be classified as trespassing and/or loitering. MLK would have had no problem with the sit-in protesters being arrested, if they hadn't been brutalized by police in the process. He never argued that civil disobedience was legal, or that people who broke the law should be immunized from the consequences of doing so - even if the law being violated was unjust.
Letters to a law firm saying "If you represent this client, I will think you're a big meanie" don't really fall into the same category, starting with the most obvious difference of the letters being legal and the sit-ins not.
Being arrested is the point of civil disobedience. You sit there in jail, and people see that a dude was put behind bars just for sitting at a counter, and ask themselves "Is that really justice?"
So the case being immoral is not enough of a reason to refuse a client?
But the client having no money is of course a perfectly good reason?
Yeah I mean, I am only a lawyer in the Greater Realms beyond human ken, but I was totally under the impression that if you decide a client has no case and don't want to represent them, you're under no obligation to.
I mean I didn't think you could force a law firm in particular to represent someone, even if everyone has a right to a lawyer.
Yeah, civil disobedience is only ethically right if you fully and publicly accept punishment for breaking the law while demonstrating for the repeal of an immoral law or laws.
There's no need to be condescending, especially when it's apparent you haven't read any of the half-dozen or so links I offered, or else just disregarded them.
That doesn't make it right, and a race to the bottom helps no one, which brings me to my alternative - some measure of restraint. That you can do something does not mean you should do it!
It sort of does.
Barring some compelling reason to avoid in exercising their first amendment rights, any political group is within their rights to discourage or boycott activities they dislike.
It sort of doesn't. You went right back to whether it's within their rights, which no one is arguing about...
I think it's good that attorneys are given a "test of faith" about the person/idea they're advocating for. K&S didn't really believe in DOMA, so if you believe that DOMA should be vigorously defended, it's better that K&S drops out and is replaced by someone who actually does believe in the cause they're advocating. That leads to what you're looking for - a more vigorous defense of DOMA.
If K&S stayed on but didn't believe in the cause they were advocating for, how can we know if they were really doing the best possible job they were capable of? How would we know they weren't, even subconsciously, taking a dive?
Even on something as simple as an internet message board, a person who truly believes in Idea X will defend it more stridently than someone who's just playing devil's advocate.
Yeah, civil disobedience is only ethically right if you fully and publicly accept punishment for breaking the law while demonstrating for the repeal of an immoral law or laws.
I recognize that this is a common opinion, but I disagree. Simplistically speaking: if a law is immoral, then refusing to uphold it is a morally-acceptable and admirable option. In other words, if a police officer refrained from arresting a pot smoker, or if a district attorney refrained from prosecuting a pot smoker, because laws against marijuana possession are wrong, then I would respect that police officer and that district attorney. If a law is unjust, then the ultimate moral ideal is to repeal it; but if repealing it is not an immediate option, then the penultimate moral ideal is to ignore it.
(By the way, don't extrapolate from this that I expect law enforcement to ignore every unjust law. I recognize that a police officer has a responsibility to his duties, and that the police officer must confront a difficult moral decision of weighing his responsibilities against the consequences of his actions, and it will be necessary in most cases for his responsibility to his job to take priority.)
Consequently, if the pot smoker tries to avoid punishment for an unjust law - for example, if he uses whatever legal means he has at his disposal to avoid arrest or get the charges dropped - I don't feel that he's done anything ethically wrong. Now, you may argue that this does not qualify as true 'civil disobedience' in the Thoreau sense, and that's fair. But I'll be honest that I don't really care for Thoreau, I think he's very overrated, and not everybody has the luxury of passively accepting a night in jail for whatever unjust law they broke. Some people have jobs or families to worry about; some people are breaking unjust laws for which the punishment is far more severe.
The gist of this, by the way, is that I think that even though there is a general duty of every citizen to uphold the law and to fulfill their legal responsibilities, I do think that any just moral framework would give allowance for people to shirk their legal duty when their legal duty would result in a moral ill. Likewise, if lawyers fail to uphold a morally reprehensible law, then even though they may have shirked their responsibility as lawyers, they have upheld a more primary responsibility to be good human beings. A moral framework in which your duty to your profession or the law or your country always, without exception, trumps the consequences of your actions on other human beings, is a moral framework in which the banality of evil reigns.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
Not really no.
We can agree that social stability is a highly desirable moral value. We can also agree that social stability is undermined when the law is broken. A simple consequentialist calculus would weigh the benefits of breaking the law against the price to social stability.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Yeah I mean, I am only a lawyer in the Greater Realms beyond human ken, but I was totally under the impression that if you decide a client has no case and don't want to represent them, you're under no obligation to.
I mean I didn't think you could force a law firm in particular to represent someone, even if everyone has a right to a lawyer.
Correct. "A lawyer is not a bus", as the legal ethics people say. (Meaning, unlike a bus, you don't have to give a ride to anyone who shows up at the door with the fare in hand.)
I volunteer for a county bar association's pro bono program, helping poor people not get evicted. Every so often the coordinating type people will send around an email to the volunteers, saying "Hey, we have these cases, we hope you will volunteer to take one." I DON'T HAVE ANY OBLIGATION TO TAKE ONE. Even if somebody really needs the help, even if they are unpopular, even if the volunteer coordinator calls me up personally to ask me to pack for a guilt trip.
And if I took on a pro bono case without checking, and that case turned out to be one that would affect the firm very negatively, my firm would be absolutely within its rights to say "hey, why didn't you run this by us first?"
mythago on
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While there's difference in specifics and even semantics with the current conversation, I do find it interesting that the OP, who was vigorously defending the issue of vigorous defense of issues seems to have quietly backed out of the conversation.
Now, perhaps he had work, family or school to attend to.
Or maybe, just maybe, a conglomorate of forumers and/or mods convinced him through inuendo and/or coercion to abandon his personal views in the face of a pogrom of negative attention at him and his firm.
:P
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
By the way, don't extrapolate from this that I expect law enforcement to ignore every unjust law. I recognize that a police officer has a responsibility to his duties, and that the police officer must confront a difficult moral decision of weighing his responsibilities against the consequences of his actions, and it will be necessary in most cases for his responsibility to his job to take priority.).
Except that the standard you're really arguing for is "laws that I, Feral, consider to be unjust", which is no standard at all. Either it's OK for police officers/DAs/etc to ignore laws they consider unjust, or it's not. If it is, then you really have no business saying that some unjust laws are more unjust than others, or that it's OK to ignore laws you think are unjust (e.g., pot laws) but not laws that Snidely Whiplash over there thinks are unjust (e.g., marital rape laws). There is also a big difference between a civilian's actions and a government agent's actions.
I do agree with you that the person who breaks unjust laws has a right to engage in whatever lawful means are available to him or her to avoid the consequences of those laws. That is not civil disobedience though; civil disobedience doesn't require arrest, but it kind of does imply open protest and a recognition that law itself is appropriate even if the particular law is stupid.
And I would note that while I agree pot laws are stupid, I find it very tiresome that there is all this focus on FIJA and civil disobedience when the problem is that THE LAWS ARE POPULAR. Plenty of people are just fine with pot laws because only dirty lib'ruls smoke pot or Think About The Children or whatever dumbass issue motivates them.
mythago on
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But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
Not really no.
We can agree that social stability is a highly desirable moral value. We can also agree that social stability is undermined when the law is broken. A simple consequentialist calculus would weigh the benefits of breaking the law against the price to social stability.
People calculating the value of social stability against the moral righteousness of their cause have produced civil wars all over the world. They tend not to view the value of their own morals objectively (not that they even could anyways).
By the way, don't extrapolate from this that I expect law enforcement to ignore every unjust law. I recognize that a police officer has a responsibility to his duties, and that the police officer must confront a difficult moral decision of weighing his responsibilities against the consequences of his actions, and it will be necessary in most cases for his responsibility to his job to take priority.).
Except that the standard you're really arguing for is "laws that [strike]I, Feral,[/strike] the police and DA consider to be unjust", which is no standard at all. Either it's OK for police officers/DAs/etc to ignore laws they consider unjust, or it's not. If it is, then you really have no business saying that some unjust laws are more unjust than others, or that it's OK to ignore laws you think are unjust (e.g., pot laws) but not laws that Snidely Whiplash over there thinks are unjust (e.g., marital rape laws). There is also a big difference between a civilian's actions and a government agent's actions.
Fixed that for you.
I'm wondering here if you think that police and DAs don't have any discretion over enforcement because they kinda do.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
While there's difference in specifics and even semantics, I do find it interesting that the OP, who was vigorously defending the issue of vigorous defense of issues seems to have quietly backed out of the conversation.
Now, perhaps he had work, family or school to attend to.
Or maybe, just maybe, a conglomorate of forumers and/or mods convinced him through inuendo and/or coercion to abandon his personal views in the face of a pogrom of negative attention at him and his firm.
I'm reading and processing. There are kernels of wheat amidst the chaff, and I want to give my opinion the best defense I can muster, and try to have enough clarity that I don't get attacked and misrepresented a dozen (more) times.
I do have a family and bacon to bring home, but I'm no K&S.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
Not really no.
We can agree that social stability is a highly desirable moral value. We can also agree that social stability is undermined when the law is broken. A simple consequentialist calculus would weigh the benefits of breaking the law against the price to social stability.
People calculating the value of social stability against the moral righteousness of their cause have produced civil wars all over the world. They tend not to view the value of their own morals objectively (not that they even could anyways).
Sure, and I'd be the first to say that (most of) those people were wrong.
But I would say they're wrong through a similar moral calculus that I would choose to judge the law in the first place. In other words, when killing somebody in a civil war is wrong, it is because killing people is (generally) wrong, not because killing somebody is illegal. The law extends from morality, not the other way around. An action does not suddenly and unavoidably become immoral simply because it is illegal; that's an authoritarian position that, frankly, I don't believe that anybody here actually believes as a moral principle. If you truly believe that, then Socrates, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi are villains rather than heroes.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
Not really no.
We can agree that social stability is a highly desirable moral value. We can also agree that social stability is undermined when the law is broken. A simple consequentialist calculus would weigh the benefits of breaking the law against the price to social stability.
People calculating the value of social stability against the moral righteousness of their cause have produced civil wars all over the world. They tend not to view the value of their own morals objectively (not that they even could anyways).
Sure, and I'd be the first to say that (most of) those people were wrong.
But I would say they're wrong through a similar moral calculus that I would choose to judge the law in the first place. In other words, when killing somebody in a civil war is wrong, it is because killing people is (generally) wrong, not because killing somebody is illegal. The law extends from morality, not the other way around. An action does not suddenly and unavoidably become immoral simply because it is illegal; that's an authoritarian position that, frankly, I don't believe that anybody here actually believes as a moral principle. If you truly believe that, then Socrates, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi are villains rather than heroes.
Where did MLK, Gandhi, Mandela, or Socrates insist they had the right to make up their own rules? They recognized the social contract they had entered into.
Socrates died upholding the law of Athens. He refused Crito's offer to help him escape from jail, out of respect for the rule of law.
Then will they not say: "You, Socrates, are breaking the covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any haste or under any compulsion or deception, but having had seventy years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to be unfair. You had your choice, and might have gone either to Lacedaemon or Crete, which you often praise for their good government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign State. Whereas you, above all other Athenians, seemed to be so fond of the State, or, in other words, of us her laws (for who would like a State that has no laws?), that you never stirred out of her: the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not more stationary in her than you were. And now you run away and forsake your agreements. Not so, Socrates, if you will take our advice; do not make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the city."
Mandela spent years in prison in accordance with the law.
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.
But by participating in and being a member of our civil society, you implicitly give up your right to make your own rules, and accept the ones that have been agreed upon by the previous members, in exchange for the benefits of belonging. In your scenario, you're taking all of the privileges and few of the responsibilities.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
Not really no.
We can agree that social stability is a highly desirable moral value. We can also agree that social stability is undermined when the law is broken. A simple consequentialist calculus would weigh the benefits of breaking the law against the price to social stability.
People calculating the value of social stability against the moral righteousness of their cause have produced civil wars all over the world. They tend not to view the value of their own morals objectively (not that they even could anyways).
Sure, and I'd be the first to say that (most of) those people were wrong.
But I would say they're wrong through a similar moral calculus that I would choose to judge the law in the first place. In other words, when killing somebody in a civil war is wrong, it is because killing people is (generally) wrong, not because killing somebody is illegal. The law extends from morality, not the other way around. An action does not suddenly and unavoidably become immoral simply because it is illegal; that's an authoritarian position that, frankly, I don't believe that anybody here actually believes as a moral principle. If you truly believe that, then Socrates, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi are villains rather than heroes.
Where did MLK, Gandhi, Mandela, or Socrates insist they had the right to make up their own rules? They recognized the social contract they had entered into.
Socrates died upholding the law of Athens. He refused Crito's offer to help him escape from jail, out of respect for the rule of law.
Then will they not say: "You, Socrates, are breaking the covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any haste or under any compulsion or deception, but having had seventy years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to be unfair. You had your choice, and might have gone either to Lacedaemon or Crete, which you often praise for their good government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign State. Whereas you, above all other Athenians, seemed to be so fond of the State, or, in other words, of us her laws (for who would like a State that has no laws?), that you never stirred out of her: the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not more stationary in her than you were. And now you run away and forsake your agreements. Not so, Socrates, if you will take our advice; do not make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the city."
Mandela spent years in prison in accordance with the law.
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.
They all broke the law. All of them.
How does that show respect for the law?
They broke the law because they felt the law was immoral, but since they were non-violent, the next step was being punished by the law.
But whether they think so themselves or not, breaking the law doesn't show respect for it.
Where did MLK, Gandhi, Mandela, or Socrates insist they had the right to make up their own rules? They recognized the social contract they had entered into.
I didn't say anything about MLK.
And you're also dancing around my argument rather than addressing it directly. Must the law always be followed, or might it be morally permissible to break the law when the law is direly unjust?
They broke one specific law, and went to jail because they respected the institution of law, the rule of law.
MLK, Mandela and Gandhi broke lots of laws.
Socrates respected the (proto) social contract but was executed for a crime he didn't commit. The whole thing is thought-provoking, but it's Plato's ideas really, and it's always seemed less direct than many take it to be. Was Socrates right in his actions at trial? That's not a simple question.
Personally I've long thought Socrates was being a bit of an idiot for not properly defending himself. And what respect for rule of law does being executed for a trumped-up charge because you sulk in court show?
The primary function of the law isn't to funnel people into jail... it's to prevent the undesirable, illegal behaviors.
In other words, if we found that lots of people were speeding because the fines were low, we wouldn't keep slapping them with the same fines, we'd increase the fines until fewer people were speeding.
So to break an unjust law and then accept the punishment does not really uphold the social contract. You're doing the very thing the social contract has demanded that you not do. You've gone against the goal of the law; you've undermined the purpose of the social contract. At that point, accepting the punishment and going to jail is an admirable action if your purpose is to change popular opinion, but that is not the only valid purpose for breaking an unjust law. If the lawbreaker is going to be gravely harmed by an unjust law - again, I'm not talking about pot smoking here, I'm talking about things like slavery, getting stoned for being a lesbian, committing treason against a brutal dictator - then insisting that it is his moral duty to accept whatever punishment might befall him is tantamount to supporting that unjust law.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Anyway, that's still just a secondary argument. I meant it to give perspective.
Fundamentally, the question is: does the law extend from morality, or does morality extend from the law? Morality must have primacy or else the justification for the law is incoherent. It makes no sense for the law to be above morality. That means that when the law is imperfect, and it comes into conflict with morality, then breaking it may be justified.
But because the law does serve a moral purpose, it is not forfeit. To disregard the law entirely because of specific unjust laws is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
BTW, I'm not really swayed by "who decides?" arguments. We decide, as citizens. All of us, every single day. The judgment of the individual is always in tension - though not necessarily conflict - with the judgment of the community. If you cannot accept the possibility that rational actors may come to differing conclusions about what is good and just, and that these conflicts may unfortunately result in injustices being done, then I submit that you risk committing even greater injustices of your own. Somebody always decides. The question isn't who decides - but how we know that the decision reached is just. We know that through logic and reason, through the very moral calculus we must perform for every difficult ethical issue. We don't accept the judgments of authority simply because they are authority, they must also be compatible with our own faculties of reason.
And frankly, I am shocked - staggered, stunned, dismayed - that this notion is at all controversial. What you guys are arguing for, even though you obviously don't see it, is fascism. It's authority for the sake of authority.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The primary function of the law isn't to funnel people into jail... it's to prevent the undesirable, illegal behaviors.
In other words, if we found that lots of people were speeding because the fines were low, we wouldn't keep slapping them with the same fines, we'd increase the fines until fewer people were speeding.
I would argue that the primary function of law isn't even to prevent undesirable, illegal behaviors. It is to reduce undesirable results.
Speeding is a behavior that is bad. Deaths, injuries and accidents are the results which are bad. A truly just law would look at all possible solutions and go with what provided the greatest total utility to all members of society.
Increasing fines for speeding could be one possible solution. Another could also involve increasing social loss (make speeding stigmatized) or other loss (loss of time via community service, loss of privilege due to restricted rights to drive, etc.). You could also achieve the same goal by increasing people's perception's; putting up cardboard cutouts of cop cars on the side of the road can reduce road speed dramatically.
Another way to reduce accidents and death would be to raise the speed limit (if it is safe), do roadwork to allow for a faster/safer drive (such as the autobahn), installing competitive mass transit, or training people to better time management skills (so they don't need to make marginal time gains by speeding).
Increasing fines is a heavy handed and short sighted solution to the problem. Sadly it is the solution our politicians understand best. Too many laws look at curbing undesirable behaviors instead of curbing undesirable results. Although I suspect I'm getting way off topic here.
The primary function of the law isn't to funnel people into jail... it's to prevent the undesirable, illegal behaviors.
In other words, if we found that lots of people were speeding because the fines were low, we wouldn't keep slapping them with the same fines, we'd increase the fines until fewer people were speeding.
I would argue that the primary function of law isn't even to prevent undesirable, illegal behaviors. It is to reduce undesirable results.
Speeding is a behavior that is bad. Deaths, injuries and accidents are the results which are bad. A truly just law would look at all possible solutions and go with what provided the greatest total utility to all members of society.
You're right. If there's a way of allowing the behavior while eliminating the harmful effects, we should consider doing so. (Hence legalizing drugs, prostitution, needle exchange, etc.) Ultimately I think we're on the same page.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Posts
The sit-in protesters WERE paying customers. Or at least they were trying to be.
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So the case being immoral is not enough of a reason to refuse a client?
But the client having no money is of course a perfectly good reason?
The sit-ins could be classified as trespassing and/or loitering. MLK would have had no problem with the sit-in protesters being arrested, if they hadn't been brutalized by police in the process. He never argued that civil disobedience was legal, or that people who broke the law should be immunized from the consequences of doing so - even if the law being violated was unjust.
Letters to a law firm saying "If you represent this client, I will think you're a big meanie" don't really fall into the same category, starting with the most obvious difference of the letters being legal and the sit-ins not.
I mean I didn't think you could force a law firm in particular to represent someone, even if everyone has a right to a lawyer.
I think it's good that attorneys are given a "test of faith" about the person/idea they're advocating for. K&S didn't really believe in DOMA, so if you believe that DOMA should be vigorously defended, it's better that K&S drops out and is replaced by someone who actually does believe in the cause they're advocating. That leads to what you're looking for - a more vigorous defense of DOMA.
If K&S stayed on but didn't believe in the cause they were advocating for, how can we know if they were really doing the best possible job they were capable of? How would we know they weren't, even subconsciously, taking a dive?
Even on something as simple as an internet message board, a person who truly believes in Idea X will defend it more stridently than someone who's just playing devil's advocate.
I recognize that this is a common opinion, but I disagree. Simplistically speaking: if a law is immoral, then refusing to uphold it is a morally-acceptable and admirable option. In other words, if a police officer refrained from arresting a pot smoker, or if a district attorney refrained from prosecuting a pot smoker, because laws against marijuana possession are wrong, then I would respect that police officer and that district attorney. If a law is unjust, then the ultimate moral ideal is to repeal it; but if repealing it is not an immediate option, then the penultimate moral ideal is to ignore it.
(By the way, don't extrapolate from this that I expect law enforcement to ignore every unjust law. I recognize that a police officer has a responsibility to his duties, and that the police officer must confront a difficult moral decision of weighing his responsibilities against the consequences of his actions, and it will be necessary in most cases for his responsibility to his job to take priority.)
Consequently, if the pot smoker tries to avoid punishment for an unjust law - for example, if he uses whatever legal means he has at his disposal to avoid arrest or get the charges dropped - I don't feel that he's done anything ethically wrong. Now, you may argue that this does not qualify as true 'civil disobedience' in the Thoreau sense, and that's fair. But I'll be honest that I don't really care for Thoreau, I think he's very overrated, and not everybody has the luxury of passively accepting a night in jail for whatever unjust law they broke. Some people have jobs or families to worry about; some people are breaking unjust laws for which the punishment is far more severe.
The gist of this, by the way, is that I think that even though there is a general duty of every citizen to uphold the law and to fulfill their legal responsibilities, I do think that any just moral framework would give allowance for people to shirk their legal duty when their legal duty would result in a moral ill. Likewise, if lawyers fail to uphold a morally reprehensible law, then even though they may have shirked their responsibility as lawyers, they have upheld a more primary responsibility to be good human beings. A moral framework in which your duty to your profession or the law or your country always, without exception, trumps the consequences of your actions on other human beings, is a moral framework in which the banality of evil reigns.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This conversation has reached an intersection where Godwin is holding a signpost pointed straight at Hannah Arendt. Do you really want to go down that road?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The cross street is Anarchy Blvd. Looks like both come to dead ends.
Not really no.
We can agree that social stability is a highly desirable moral value. We can also agree that social stability is undermined when the law is broken. A simple consequentialist calculus would weigh the benefits of breaking the law against the price to social stability.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Correct. "A lawyer is not a bus", as the legal ethics people say. (Meaning, unlike a bus, you don't have to give a ride to anyone who shows up at the door with the fare in hand.)
I volunteer for a county bar association's pro bono program, helping poor people not get evicted. Every so often the coordinating type people will send around an email to the volunteers, saying "Hey, we have these cases, we hope you will volunteer to take one." I DON'T HAVE ANY OBLIGATION TO TAKE ONE. Even if somebody really needs the help, even if they are unpopular, even if the volunteer coordinator calls me up personally to ask me to pack for a guilt trip.
And if I took on a pro bono case without checking, and that case turned out to be one that would affect the firm very negatively, my firm would be absolutely within its rights to say "hey, why didn't you run this by us first?"
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Now, perhaps he had work, family or school to attend to.
Or maybe, just maybe, a conglomorate of forumers and/or mods convinced him through inuendo and/or coercion to abandon his personal views in the face of a pogrom of negative attention at him and his firm.
Except that the standard you're really arguing for is "laws that I, Feral, consider to be unjust", which is no standard at all. Either it's OK for police officers/DAs/etc to ignore laws they consider unjust, or it's not. If it is, then you really have no business saying that some unjust laws are more unjust than others, or that it's OK to ignore laws you think are unjust (e.g., pot laws) but not laws that Snidely Whiplash over there thinks are unjust (e.g., marital rape laws). There is also a big difference between a civilian's actions and a government agent's actions.
I do agree with you that the person who breaks unjust laws has a right to engage in whatever lawful means are available to him or her to avoid the consequences of those laws. That is not civil disobedience though; civil disobedience doesn't require arrest, but it kind of does imply open protest and a recognition that law itself is appropriate even if the particular law is stupid.
And I would note that while I agree pot laws are stupid, I find it very tiresome that there is all this focus on FIJA and civil disobedience when the problem is that THE LAWS ARE POPULAR. Plenty of people are just fine with pot laws because only dirty lib'ruls smoke pot or Think About The Children or whatever dumbass issue motivates them.
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People calculating the value of social stability against the moral righteousness of their cause have produced civil wars all over the world. They tend not to view the value of their own morals objectively (not that they even could anyways).
Fixed that for you.
I'm wondering here if you think that police and DAs don't have any discretion over enforcement because they kinda do.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm reading and processing. There are kernels of wheat amidst the chaff, and I want to give my opinion the best defense I can muster, and try to have enough clarity that I don't get attacked and misrepresented a dozen (more) times.
I do have a family and bacon to bring home, but I'm no K&S.
Sure, and I'd be the first to say that (most of) those people were wrong.
But I would say they're wrong through a similar moral calculus that I would choose to judge the law in the first place. In other words, when killing somebody in a civil war is wrong, it is because killing people is (generally) wrong, not because killing somebody is illegal. The law extends from morality, not the other way around. An action does not suddenly and unavoidably become immoral simply because it is illegal; that's an authoritarian position that, frankly, I don't believe that anybody here actually believes as a moral principle. If you truly believe that, then Socrates, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi are villains rather than heroes.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think this will backfire on them.
Where did MLK, Gandhi, Mandela, or Socrates insist they had the right to make up their own rules? They recognized the social contract they had entered into.
Socrates died upholding the law of Athens. He refused Crito's offer to help him escape from jail, out of respect for the rule of law.
Mandela spent years in prison in accordance with the law.
And
They all broke the law. All of them.
How does that show respect for the law?
They broke the law because they felt the law was immoral, but since they were non-violent, the next step was being punished by the law.
But whether they think so themselves or not, breaking the law doesn't show respect for it.
I didn't say anything about MLK.
And you're also dancing around my argument rather than addressing it directly. Must the law always be followed, or might it be morally permissible to break the law when the law is direly unjust?
Harriet Tubman never went to jail. Do you find that unfortunate?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Respect for the institution of law does not mean you have to believe that breaking a law you disagree with should land you in jail.
MLK, Mandela and Gandhi broke lots of laws.
Socrates respected the (proto) social contract but was executed for a crime he didn't commit. The whole thing is thought-provoking, but it's Plato's ideas really, and it's always seemed less direct than many take it to be. Was Socrates right in his actions at trial? That's not a simple question.
Personally I've long thought Socrates was being a bit of an idiot for not properly defending himself. And what respect for rule of law does being executed for a trumped-up charge because you sulk in court show?
In other words, if we found that lots of people were speeding because the fines were low, we wouldn't keep slapping them with the same fines, we'd increase the fines until fewer people were speeding.
So to break an unjust law and then accept the punishment does not really uphold the social contract. You're doing the very thing the social contract has demanded that you not do. You've gone against the goal of the law; you've undermined the purpose of the social contract. At that point, accepting the punishment and going to jail is an admirable action if your purpose is to change popular opinion, but that is not the only valid purpose for breaking an unjust law. If the lawbreaker is going to be gravely harmed by an unjust law - again, I'm not talking about pot smoking here, I'm talking about things like slavery, getting stoned for being a lesbian, committing treason against a brutal dictator - then insisting that it is his moral duty to accept whatever punishment might befall him is tantamount to supporting that unjust law.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Fundamentally, the question is: does the law extend from morality, or does morality extend from the law? Morality must have primacy or else the justification for the law is incoherent. It makes no sense for the law to be above morality. That means that when the law is imperfect, and it comes into conflict with morality, then breaking it may be justified.
But because the law does serve a moral purpose, it is not forfeit. To disregard the law entirely because of specific unjust laws is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
BTW, I'm not really swayed by "who decides?" arguments. We decide, as citizens. All of us, every single day. The judgment of the individual is always in tension - though not necessarily conflict - with the judgment of the community. If you cannot accept the possibility that rational actors may come to differing conclusions about what is good and just, and that these conflicts may unfortunately result in injustices being done, then I submit that you risk committing even greater injustices of your own. Somebody always decides. The question isn't who decides - but how we know that the decision reached is just. We know that through logic and reason, through the very moral calculus we must perform for every difficult ethical issue. We don't accept the judgments of authority simply because they are authority, they must also be compatible with our own faculties of reason.
And frankly, I am shocked - staggered, stunned, dismayed - that this notion is at all controversial. What you guys are arguing for, even though you obviously don't see it, is fascism. It's authority for the sake of authority.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Speeding is a behavior that is bad. Deaths, injuries and accidents are the results which are bad. A truly just law would look at all possible solutions and go with what provided the greatest total utility to all members of society.
Increasing fines for speeding could be one possible solution. Another could also involve increasing social loss (make speeding stigmatized) or other loss (loss of time via community service, loss of privilege due to restricted rights to drive, etc.). You could also achieve the same goal by increasing people's perception's; putting up cardboard cutouts of cop cars on the side of the road can reduce road speed dramatically.
Another way to reduce accidents and death would be to raise the speed limit (if it is safe), do roadwork to allow for a faster/safer drive (such as the autobahn), installing competitive mass transit, or training people to better time management skills (so they don't need to make marginal time gains by speeding).
Increasing fines is a heavy handed and short sighted solution to the problem. Sadly it is the solution our politicians understand best. Too many laws look at curbing undesirable behaviors instead of curbing undesirable results. Although I suspect I'm getting way off topic here.
You're right.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.