maintenance of nuclear weapons. It is possible that most people are ‘nuclear pacifists’- while they might believe that a just war with conventional weapons is possible,
the use of nuclear warheads represents a hugely disproportionate response to the
aggression of another country. But among nuclear pacifists a majority might judge
that the threatto use – rather than actual use of – nuclear weapons is better than
submission to a foreign power. Of course, a nuclear power has to convince the
putative enemy country that it really will use the weapons, and so there is an element
of subterfuge, as well as risk, behind deterrence theory which seems at odds with
the transparency one expects of a just society. Nonetheless, there can be reasonable
moral disagreement, such that the will of the majority should prevail.
Another important distinction between civil disobedience and conscientious
refusal is that the latter may entail a greater ‘introversion’ than the former: a
significant strand in conscientious refusal is the striving for moral integrity, that is,
a feeling that regardless of the consequencesyou cannot support a law or policy.
Insofar as conscientious refusal is a form of ‘moral purity’ it is in tension with civil
disobedience, which looks outwards towards the majority, and appeals to it to
change. The idea of moral purity is central to Gandhi’s satyagraha, which means
an ‘insistence on truth’. Because satyagrahais the moral basis of civil disobedience
it is often – erroneously – translated as civil disobedience. One final point:
conscientious refusal is not incompatible with civil disobedience because an
individual might be motivatedby their non-political moral beliefs, but still attempt
to communicate them in the language of justice to the majority.
Criticisms of Rawls
A number of criticisms of Rawls’s theory can be raised:
1.Inconveniencing Civil disobedience may be intended simply to make a law
unworkable. The tactic of one wave of people sitting down at segregated lunch
counters, being arrested and then replaced by a second wave had the result of
filling the jails until the process of justice ground to a halt. The majority may
calculate that it is not in their interests to continue to support unjust laws.
Certainly, this tactic entails no appeal to the moral sense of the majority and
Rawls may be concerned that motivating the majority through appeal to self-
interest – in effect, telling the majority that their lives are going to be made
uncomfortable – is a weak basis for long-term political stability. It is an empirical
question whether it works.
2.Piecewise just society Andrew Sabl argues that instead of ‘nearly just’ societies
it would be more accurate to talk of ‘piecewise just societies’: ‘people can have
a sense of justice and still, through prejudice or moral blindness, have a radically
deficient conception of justice or of what justice entails in the particular
circumstances’ (Sabl, 2001: 316). This allows for the possibility that the com -
municative act entailed in civil disobedience will in Rawlsian terms fail, but
that the inconveniencing of the majority will over time connect with a sense of
justice, such that the children and grandchildren of the (say) Ku Klux Klansmen
will come to recognise the injustice of the segregation that was abolished a
generation ago.434 Part 4 Contemporary ideas