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The Justifiability of Violent Civil Disobedience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

John Morreall
John Morreall*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

In most discussions of civil disobedience, certain characteristics are offered as essential to an act of justifiable civil disobedience, or sometimes to any act of civil disobedience. Among these one of the most frequently mentioned is nonviolence. Some thinkers, like Bedau and Wasserstrom, require an act to be nonviolent before they will even count it as an act of civil disobedience; the very concept for them includes the notion of nonviolence. Others, like Stuart Brown, Rex Martin and Michael Bayles, admit the possibility of a violent act of civil disobedience; but hold that, though nonviolent civil disobedience is justifiable, violent civil disobedience is not justifiable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 35 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 Though, curiously, Bedau admits that taking “civil” disobedience as nonviolent disobedience involves a pun. See Bedau, Hugo Adam “On Civil Disobedience,” journal of Philosophy, LVII (1961), p. 656.Google Scholar Also Richard Wasserstrom, in Freeman, H.A. et al., Civil Disobedience (Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1966), p. 18.Google Scholar

2 Brown, Stuart M. Jr. “Civil Disobedience,” journal of Philosophy, LVII (1961), p. 678;Google Scholar Martin, Rex “Civil Disobedience,” Ethics, LXXX (January, 1970);Google Scholar Bayles, Michael “The Justifiability of Civil Disobedience,” Review of Metaphysics, XXIV, No. 1 (1970), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

3 We should mention that Bedau cannot claim anything near universal agreement on his calling only nonviolent acts, acts of civil disobedience. See, for example, Lang, Berel “Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence: A Distinction with a Difference,” Ethics, LXXX (January, 1970);Google Scholar Bay, Christian “Civil Disobedience: Prerequisite for Democracy in Mass Society,” in Spitz, David ed. Political Theory and Social Change (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), p. 169;Google Scholar and the articles by Brown, Martin and Bayles. Nor could Bedau claim that nonviolence was analytically tied to the notion of civil disobedience by the most outstanding proponents of civil disobedience; for as he admits on p. 656, Thoreau, the man who coined the term “civil disobedience,” did not consider nonviolence a necessary part of what he meant by that term. A reasonable case can be made, moreover, for saying that Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King saw nonviolence as one tactic of civil disobedience, but not necessarily the only one.

4 Bedau, ibid., p. 656.

5 See, e.g., Miller, Ronald B. “Violence, Force, and Coercion,” in Shaffer, Jerome A. ed. Violence (New York: David McKay, 1971), pp. 11–26.Google Scholar

6 Holmes, Robert L. “Violence and Nonviolence,” in Shaffer, ibid., pp. 110–113;Google Scholar and Garver, Newton “What Violence Is,” The Nation (June 24, 1968), p. 819.Google Scholar

7 Holmes, ibid., p. 110.

8 Garver, ibid., p. 820.

9 Consider, e.g., the basic and universal activities of gathering food and building shelters.

10 We are leaving aside here, as outside the scope of political philosophy, a consideration of whether any “respect” is due to animals or even to plants merely in virtue of what they are, and not as the property of persons.

11 E.g. laws against making loud noise at night, laws against harassment, laws against blackmail.

12 “Limits to the Moral Claim in Civil Disobedience,” Ethics, LXXV (1965), pp. 104–105.Google Scholar

13 “On the Meaning and Justification of Violence,” in Shaffer, ibid., p. 94.

14 Brown, ibid., pp. 678-679.

15 Ibid., p. 679.

16 MacFarlane, Leslie in “Justifying Political Disobedience,” Ethics, LXXIX (1968)Google Scholar, considers the case of the railway clerks who arranged the transit of Jews to the Nazi extermination camps. These men not only had the negative duty of not participating in such evil acts, he argues: they had “a positive duty to resist, sabotage, and frustrate the evil.” p. 44.

17 Martin, ibid., p. 132.

18 On this latter non-entailment see Schiller, Marvin “On the Logic of Being a Democrat,” Philosophy, XLIV (1969).Google Scholar

19 Brown, ibid., p. 679.

20 Ibid., p. 678, emphasis mine.

21 Ibid., p. 677.

22 Bayles, ibid., p. 5.

23 Ibid., p. 4.

24 Even if we were to stretch the notion of civil disobedience to cover certain physically nonviolent acts used to start off a revolution, the selected and limited nature of those acts would still distinguish them from the acts of a full-scale revolution.

25 Brown, ibid., p. 680.