Questions: Civil Disobedience: Theory and Justification

Question 1

In Rawls's account, why must practitioners of civil disobedience accept legal consequences (arrest and punishment) rather than fleeing or evading them?

• A. To demonstrate suffering, which proves the sincerity of their conviction
• B. Because accepting consequences signals that the appeal is to shared principles of justice within the legal framework, not a rejection of law's authority as such
• C. Because fleeing would make the act indistinguishable from ordinary cowardice
• D. Rawls believed all laws, including unjust ones, must ultimately be obeyed

Answer: (B)

The requirement of accepting consequences is not about suffering or sincerity — it is about communicative content. By submitting to punishment, the disobedient says: 'I acknowledge your authority to enforce this law, and in accepting punishment I demonstrate that I am appealing to the conscience of the majority through your shared framework of justice, not rejecting that framework.' This is what distinguishes civil disobedience from lawlessness: it works within the system while contesting a specific injustice.

Question 2

A student argues that civil disobedience is justified whenever a person's individual moral conscience determines that a law is unjust, since conscience should take precedence over positive law. What is the main problem with this position?

• A. It is correct — individual moral conscience is always the highest authority
• B. It licenses general lawlessness: since virtually everyone disagrees with some law, this standard provides no limiting principle and collapses the distinction between civil disobedience and ordinary self-interested lawbreaking
• C. Individual moral conscience has no legitimate role in political philosophy
• D. This standard would only be problematic in non-democratic political systems

Answer: (B)

This is the central challenge that any theory of civil disobedience must address: how to carve out a justified exception to political obligation without collapsing into a general license to break any law you personally disagree with. Rawls's conditions (serious injustice, exhausted normal channels, accepted consequences) are precisely designed to limit the exception. The conscience-based view lacks these constraints and would justify lawbreaking for trivial policy disagreements — destroying the normative distinction civil disobedience depends on.

Question 3

Rawls's theory of civil disobedience applies equally in a deeply unjust authoritarian state as in a nearly just democratic society, since injustice is wrong everywhere.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Rawls explicitly frames his account around 'nearly just' societies — ones with a mostly well-functioning democratic system that contain persistent injustices. In such societies, there is a baseline obligation to obey law because the system is broadly just and cooperative. Civil disobedience is a targeted appeal within that framework. In a deeply unjust or authoritarian regime, the framework of shared justice that Rawls's appeal depends on may not exist, and more radical forms of resistance — potentially including violence — may require different justificatory arguments.

Question 4

The requirement that civil disobedience be nonviolent serves both an instrumental purpose (increasing the likelihood of winning over the majority) and an expressive purpose (signaling that the appeal is to shared principles of justice, not to force).

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Rawls and most civil disobedience theorists recognize both dimensions. Instrumentally, nonviolence avoids hardening opposition and justifying crackdowns, making the appeal more likely to succeed. Expressively, nonviolence communicates that the disobedients are making a moral argument within the shared framework of justice — an appeal to conscience, not a demonstration of power. Whether property destruction disrupts this expressive logic remains a live debate.

Question 5

How does Rawls's account carve out a justified exception to political obligation without collapsing into general permission to break any law one disagrees with?

Model answer: By requiring three conditions that jointly limit the exception: (1) the targeted injustice must be serious — a substantial violation of justice, not mere policy disagreement; (2) normal political channels must have been tried in good faith and failed; and (3) disobedients must accept legal consequences, demonstrating the appeal is within the shared framework rather than a rejection of it. These conditions narrow the permissible cases significantly, preserving the general obligation to obey law while making room for principled defiance of serious, persistent injustice.

The key move is that accepting consequences keeps civil disobedience inside the legal-political framework rather than repudiating it. A person who breaks a law and accepts punishment is saying: 'This law is unjust and I will violate it, but I acknowledge your authority to punish me.' This preserves the cooperative structure of law while contesting one part of it — very different from the general lawlessness that would follow from unconstrained conscience-based lawbreaking.