Blackwell Reference Online

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“Civil disobedience” is the term coined by Henry David Thoreau, in his famous 1848 essay of the same name (in Bedau, 1991 ), to describe conduct such as his own refusal to pay his legally required poll tax, a refusal based on his moral objections to his government's support of slavery, abuse of Native Americans, and pursuit of an aggressive war with Mexico. The practice of civil disobedience is also famously associated with the writings of Tolstoy, with Gandhi's program of widespread passive resistance in India (see Gandhi in Murphy, 1971), with the American civil rights movement (and, in particular, with the thought and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr [see King in Bedau, 1991]), and with the anti-war movement against the American conduct of the Vietnam War. Philosophers have been especially interested in such principled disobedience, for it seems to most to be morally justifiable in a way that is not true of other kinds of illegal conduct. Deliberate conscientious or principled law-breaking, by virtue of its apparently laudable motive, appears to be itself laudable, or at least excusable (unlike law-breaking that is merely self-interested or malicious), particularly when its objective is to maintain the agent's moral integrity or to morally improve, rather than to overthrow, the existing social, political, or legal order. Philosophical discussions of civil disobedience have ... log in or subscribe to read full text