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 think you are precisely correct about the distinction between legal codes and nomos. Though, I wonder then, if you have not strayed from the "proper way of living", have you in fact broken the law, and do you then have the same obligation to accept the punishment for your actions that you would have if you had made a legitimate transgression against the proper way of living?
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