Introduction to Political Theory

Chapter 19 Civil disobedience Introduction Civil disobedience is the non-violent breaking of a law on moral grounds. While there ...

Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement T he Civil Rights Movement in the Southern states of the United States in the 1 ...

Civil disobedience and lawbreaking In this chapter we are concerned with justifications for civil disobedience, and naturally it ...

1.Individual self-interestA law is not in the individual’s interests. 2.Group interestA law is not in the interests of a particu ...

Civil disobedience and democracy Democracy and obedience Civil disobedience plays a special role in democracy, because it not on ...

taken away. One day, it is decided that the common room should take a new paper, The News. One member of the Association – the D ...

break at night. A fair compromise would be to alternate duties. An unfair compromise would be for the wife to do weekday nights, ...

has not had its interests communicated then Singer’s participation argument is invalidated. (b) Most voting systems do not take ...

Rawls: civil disobedience and conscientious refusal Rawls’s discussion of civil disobedience has been highly influential among w ...

and the following of rules by citizens. The possibility of injustice arises at this fourth stage (and, in the more realistic mod ...

of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This involves the nature and limits of majority rule. F ...

6.The civilly disobedient accept the penalties for lawbreaking Once again, the reasoning behind this point is that the civilly d ...

maintenance of nuclear weapons. It is possible that most people are ‘nuclear pacifists’ while they might believe that a just wa ...

3.Rawls’s conditions If civil disobedience can be intended to disable the state from carrying out its policies then some of Rawl ...

slave states. When the balance tipped in favour of anti-slavery, the now-minority slave states asserted their rights to maintain ...

Repeatedly, the federal level attempted to force desegregation on the South. Here are some key examples (federal level in bold): ...

drivers had been charging 10 cents – the price of a bus ticket; the pro-boycott organisation, the Montgomery Improvement Associa ...

Electoral registration campaigns The biggest flashpoint was over voter registration. In principle, blacks could vote, but the So ...

the ‘whites only’ and ‘no coloreds’ signs in shops, the segregated restaurants, and the deliberate negligence of the police in i ...

Christian to recognise the injustice I describe’. Insofar as we interpret King’s argument for civil disobedience to be based on ...