Is it ignoring unjust laws?
Would that include breaking unjust laws? Peacefully of course.
Is it ignoring unjust laws?
Would that include breaking unjust laws? Peacefully of course.
Civil disobedience is a form of protest where you simply break all laws in general, presumably peacefully or otherwise, because you feel the government has lost all moral authority when it does not follow its own laws.
That was, sort of, the logic behind Gandhi’s civil disobedience. He was a lawyer, and as young man, he was an Anglophile who admired British rule of law. When he was disillusioned by the fact that the British break their own laws to keep control, he abandoned his old notions and followed suit with breaking every law possible, from shattering British imported wine bottles to burning passports to breaking the royal salt monopoly.
Outside of Gandhi, Christian traditions, socialist philosophy, perhaps some strains of classical liberal thinking, and various other schools of thought oppose civil disobedience. The socialists say that civil disobedience is “inefficient” and does not bring results (some high level Bolsheviks always warned their supporters against breaking laws), the liberals say it betrays a character which shows one unfit for building and maintaining a free society (Edmund Burke on strong passions not allowing any peoples to ever become free), and Christians say that it is an insult to God to oppose the appointed protectors of law and order on earth. Today, it’s a very rare radical who’d still suggest civil disobedience,