A belated thought on Morreall

It doesn't take much mental effort to hit someone. It's generally all instinctual.
It takes more mental effort to pressure them, make them uncomfortable, make them feel violated, while doing nothing to them physically.

Perhaps the alleged psychological violence of CD is preferable to physical violence simply because it forces us to use our brains.

Pray see this precis

I feel no remorse for the title of this post.

1. The concept of nomos encompasses both literal law and conventions -- i.e. the proper conduct for citizens
2. The nomoi of America do not include planting oneself in a public space and remaining there for months.
3. Therefore, Occupy protesters are civilly disobedient even when they do not technically violate any laws.

It's probably apparent now that I think about nomoi a lot.
Please feel free to beat the tar out of this argument with your critiquing.

Another potential target for CD

There's presently a rather terrifying piece of legislation slithering its way to the Supreme Court. Essentially, if it should pass, consumers would have virtually no right to resell goods; if any part of said goods was made abroad, they would need to obtain explicit permission from any and all copyright holders involved -- whether directly or peripherally -- in its manufacture.

This presents, I think, an interesting hypothetical scenario for civil disobedience. Continuing to sell used goods online regardless of the law, even if one makes no attempt to hide one's identity, still has too great a sense of anonymity. I'm imagining groups of people buying products, or taking products they already own, gathering in a public space, and selling them there, like a giant civil disobedience garage sale.

What do you all think of this?

(Incidentally, for those interested, there is also a petition opposing the legislation.)

νόμος, or, Everything Makes More Sense In Athens

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how Socrates' concept of Athenian law (legal codes + proper way of living) applies to the other argument's we've been perusing.  Up until now, however, I'd only been applying it in individual instances where I thought it would give me an interesting extra perspective.

After Zach mentioned Rawls' statement about showing "fidelity to the law" by accepting the punishment for conscientiously breaking a law, I realized that use of the term "fidelity" in that context is just a little odd.  In my experience, when discussing the law, it seems more common to use terms like "adherence" and so forth.  That got me thinking that perhaps, when dealing with civil disobedience, one ought to think in terms of  Athenian law/nomos all of the time.

Returning to Storing for a moment -- I had a bit of trouble with his analogy on page 93:

"An open refusal to obey an unjust law [with a willingness to accept the punishment for doing so] shows the highest respect for law in the same way that an open insult to a degraded woman, with a willingness to be slapped for the insult, shows the highest respect for womanhood."

I initially found the analogy both compelling and problematic, though I couldn't pin down what exactly the problem was. Given the idea of nomos, however, the problem would be that Storing is referring to legal codes both times he mentions law.

Let us assume that an unjust legal code is unjust because it is contrary to the proper way of living. By that definition, the willingness to accept the punishment for breaking an unjust law does still show highest respect for the proper way of living, and by extension, the just laws that align with it.

At this point, I will tentatively hypothesize that nomos is a necessary condition for an adequate theory of civil disobedience.

I hope this all made sense.

Thoughts?

I found this passage from Storing interesting, but not quite enough to motivate me to write a SLAP about it:

"Is the problem simply that whites have power and blacks do not? Or is there some fundamental and ineradicable injustice in the American system? If the latter, is that injustice essentially the 'racism' now officially acknowledged, or is it a deeper defect, such as a preoccupation with material comfort and a lessening of concern for the 'human values'?" (90)

It seems to me that Storing is insinuating that the racism that the Civil Rights activists were fighting against was actually only a side-effect of a greater problem, thereby implying that struggling against racism is ultimately futile, since they're treating the symptom rather than the root of the disease. Given that racial discrimination survives in various subtler forms today, he may have had a point.

On the other hand, the "American system" will only change when the people who define that system change as a whole, which can't happen unless they are aware of the severity of the issue. And what better way to point out a problem than by highlighting its effects?

What do you think?

Truth in Religion, or lack thereof

The following is a response to Zach's post.

Perhaps Gandhi spurned the religions he investigated because he did not feel any of them contained enough truth to satisfy him. Perhaps that's what your neighbor was trying to get at -- not that no religion contains any truth, but that none of them are the whole truth. Given Gandhi's views about God, this seems to explain why he rejected established religions, hypocritical actions of their adherents aside.

Rights vs. Duties

I've been thinking over the weekend about a question Joel raised on his blog -- in an entirely just society, is civil disobedience a right, or a duty?

Part of me wants to say that in a truly just society, civil disobedience would be unnecessary and leave it at that, but that approach seems a bit simplistic.

The question I would add to Joel's is this: Are rights and duties necessarily exclusive?

In the case of some other rights, I would say no. For instance, I believe that voting is both a right and a duty for any citizen who cares about the state of their country. On the other hand, there are rights for which this is not true -- I certainly would not say that we have a duty to bear arms, or to remain silent while being arrested.

In short, my response to Joel is that, in a just society -- or even a society that strives to be just -- citizens have both the right and the responsibility to civilly disobey if the society ever leans towards injustice.