33 - Civil disobedience

Summary

Civil disobedience receives Rawls’s most careful and extended consideration in A Theory of Justice. It is there deined as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” (TJ 320). It “is engaged in openly with fair notice” (TJ 321) and involves a “willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct” (TJ 322).

This is as narrow a conception of civil disobedience as one might find, and Rawls acknowledges that it excludes some acts that have usually been regarded as civil disobedience. An example is Thoreau’s tax refusal, protesting his state’s complicity in unconscionable federal policies. Rawls classiies Thoreau’s act and many other kinds of principled disobedience as “conscientious refusal,” which he treats separately (TJ 323–326, 331–335).

Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience relates directly to the principal project of TJ, which is to identify “the principles of justice that would regulate a well-ordered society” (TJ 8). The basic institutions of such a society satisfy the principles of justice, its members knowingly share that conception of justice, and they are morally committed to maintain institutions that respect its principles. That is the setting for what Rawls terms “ideal theory” (TJ 397). One of Rawls’s central concerns is the stability of a well-ordered society.