On Civil Disobedience - Hugo Bedau Flashcards
What is the purpose of On Civil Disobedience?
Bedau aims to provide an analysis of what civil disobeidence and its role in turning dissent into resistance.
Dissenters perform an act of civil disobedience if they…
(1) How does Bedau write about civil disobedience and the law?
If they act illegally, so acts of protest in which no law is violated are not civil CD is ‘committed’ not just done.
Positive acts are doing something proscirbed by law eg trespassing. Negative acts are refusing to do something proscribed by law such as refusal of the draft. This is almost always more likely to be justified as the consequences are seen as less disruptive, but Bedau is not convinced and uses the argument of widespread refusal of the draft having a greater impact on defence than trespassing on a military base.
He also doesn’t see how acting allegally not doing something is more justified than acting illegally doing something. There are acts that are classed as illegal dissent but are believed to be within the dissenter’s legal rights through the ‘fundamental law’, and those commited without any belief in their ‘judicial vindication’ where the dissenter may not think they are committing cd.
As long as an authorityis permitted to define what is legal, then defying any of those laws can qualify as cd even if the legislation is seen to be illegitimate. Bedau discusses the possibility of a legal protection/right of civil disobedience if it is technically all illegal, but recognises that no government would consider such a provision where laws have an exception if violated on conscientious grounds.
(2, 3, 4) What three other things does Bedau think is essential to Civil Disobedience?
- Usually essential that the government and public know what the dissenter wishes to do, especially if they want to change policy as a result. Dissenter’s usually view cd as a civic act and drawing attention to something they think the community should consider.
- Not all illegal acts of public resistance to the government are cd, as if the dissenter resists by deliberately destroying property or inciting a riot then they have not committed civil disobedience. Cd must be non-violent and not trying to accomplish aims by initiating or threatening it. Violence in response to their act doesn’t negate the civility of it.
- Cd is typically directed against the government, not just because of objectionable policy or to frustrate that law, but is so designed that the act itself does frustrate the law.
(4) What is the difference between ‘direct resistance’ and ‘direct action’?
How do direct and indirect resistance differ?
Direct resistance directly violates the objectionable law, while indirect resistance violates another law and is only aimed at the objectionable law indirectly eg Thoreau not paying tax to affect the defence fund. Only through acts of indirect resistance is it possible for everyone to commit cd with the aim of affecting government laws.
Direct action is where the dissenter ‘uses their own body as the lever with which to pry loose the government’s policy’. It can either be non-violent obstruction which involves passive physical coercion like climbing onto construction equipment, or non-violent interjection which is placing one’s body between a person and the objective of their work or activity and is generally recognised to constitute the paradigm of every aspect of cd, eg Tank Man.
(4) What else does Bedau write about targeting the objectionable law?
Not all illegal non-violent public resistance to government constitutes ‘even token frustration of the objectionable law that occasions the resistance’, and many acts are undertaken in its name byt are nothing more than a nuisance, even if they encourage other acts that frustrate the OL. Bedau sees them as harassment and inane. There can’t be a remote connection between the act and the OL as it opens the civil disobedience up to the charge of absurdity.
Not all cd is aimed at replacing the OL with a better one, and at the other extreme it could be undertaken with the intention of entire government collapse. The latter is an unwillingness to acknowledge allegiance to the government and accepts the legal consequence. This would be ‘what Thoreau called ‘peaceable revolution’’ and a time where cd involves disloyal and rebellious intent.
Resisting an OL doesn’t mean an inate resistance to all laws, but cd may tend to encourage anarchism because respect for law might be weakened in the public at large.
(5) What does Bedau say about conscientiousness and civil disobedience?
Cd is a conscientious act as the dissenter proposes to justify their disobedience and they usually have to be convinced that it would be worse for everyone to suffer the consequences of the OL than of their CD.
Not every conscientious act is justified or the right thing for the dissenter to do - ‘probably no one holds moral convictions that would rule out civil disobedience for them in every conceivable situation’.
(6) How does he look at the discussion around which type of resistance is justified when?
He is unsure whether there are specifiable political circumstances where one for of cd or resistance is justified, or none at all etc. He talks about the other legal devices in a state that could be utilised to oppose OL such as courts, and that whether they obtain or isn’t what justifies resistance, no determines what kind it should be.
(7) Anyone commits an act of civil disobedience if…
Anyone commits an act of cd if and only if they act illegally, publicly, non-violently and conscientiously with the intent to frustrate (one of) the laws, policies, or decisions of their government.
(8, 9) How does Bedau write about the potential need to resist government, and the government retaliating?
There is the possibility that whenever someone is confronted by a law they ought to disobey it. It is not enough that someone should obey a certain law if all they know of it is that it is legally valid. ‘This must be so, since ‘I ought to do x’ cannot be deduced from ‘There is a valid law that applies to me and prescribes the doing of x.’
It is possible a govenment is sometimes right in ‘having its way against the will of those who conscientiously disobey’. But there are a set of ‘amiable but nevertheless false suppositions’ that make this argument so difficult.
What does Bedau write about looking for a civil disobedience principle?
The insufficiency of a law for obedience forces use to look elsewhere for a specific principle that would outline all the necessary conditions and situations where obedience or disobedience is justified, but Bedau sees no way in which this could be produced. There is also no compelling reason for anyone to adopt the principle in advance of knowing what is required of them by it. And so anyone who searches for such a principle or thinks they have one is only disguising from themselves the fact that you could just describe a principle/situation differently to cover a situation or the other way round.
