Much ado has been made of President Bush's DUI many year's ago. Yet, very little, at least on here, has been made of Senator Kerry's arrest. While I think it was a bogus arrest as we do have the right to civil disobedience and protest in this country, he was, nonetheless, arrested and no one seems to care. A lawbreaker is a lawbreaker is a lawbreaker!
I do not know whether Kerry broke the law or not (was he convicted?), but your post reminded me of a really intersting discussion I heard when I was in Utah a few weks ago. Before the Declaration of Independance apparantly there was a lot of discussion between the "founding fathers" and their associates on whether it was moral to break the law. We all know their conclusions.
Oh brother. One guy is out doing what he feels is best for his country. The other is out doing what is worst for his liver and nasal passages. There are degrees of breaking the law. You may have heard about the thing called the court system. It makes the distinction.
Wow. You completely contradict yourself in consecutive sentences. First, I don't think that someone who was arrested on what you call "bogus" charges, and never convicted, could be considered a lawbreaker. Moreover, as I'm sure you understand, MLK broke the law intentionally. He believed that he had a moral obligation to break an unjust law. That is civil disobedience, which you claim you support. Yet you also claim "A lawbreaker is a lawbreaker is a lawbreaker!" So I guess MLK was no different from Mohammad Atta. Why do you feel the need to spew such nonsensical hatred?
I remember those days when the insanity of our involvement in Viet Nam was getting clearer everyday to everyone except the Congress. Even the President seemed to sense that the whole thing was a horrible mistake. But we were caught, just like we're now caught in Iraq. The parallel with Iraq is not perfect but it is inescapable. The President (Johnson, a Democrat) misrepresented the danger and provocation in order to manipulate the Congress and public opinion into supporting an unnecessary and bloody conflict. We created and supported a puppet government that enjoyed little support and less credibility among its own people and we commenced to fight a war without clear battle lines against an enemy that seemed to appear and disappear. It was a war that our military wasn't particularly well equipped or trained to fight. And it grew and grew and grew, becoming an all consuming monster that tore our country apart. Polarization? You BET we were polarized in those days! My draft number was 336. I decided to stay in school and enlist later, which in fact I did, four years after the evacuation of Saigon. Who knows? I might easily have been a name on the Long Black Wall had I been born the day before, or the day after...
My opinion on civil disobedience is this: That while it may sometimes be justified, nobody gets a political exemption from the law just because their cause is popular or idealistic. I think that if you are going to occupy buildings, block streets or charge police lines, you need to do jail time. While in some cases one could persuasively argue that protest is a moral obligation, one could argue just as persuasively that protecting the integrity of the law itself is also a moral obligation. Violating the social compact has to carry a cost. Every law breaker can justify his or her actions (it's just a matter of ingeneous rationalization). Justice demands that the law be applied uniformly, without regards to whether the proffered rationalizations happen to be politically popular. So while activists may feel a responsibility to protest, they should also feel the responsibility to pay the necessary price.
C'mon, Jimmy. No one cares for a reason. I agree with Bill that even morally just protest should carry a price. When one blocks traffic, for example, there is always the possibility that someone else is placed in peril. Perhaps an ambulance can't get to the hospital quickly etc. Kerry did pay a price. He was arrested. I suspect he looks at the incident with pride.
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. -"Letter from Birmingham Jail," MLK To suggest that civil disobedience is the equivalent of drunk driving is simply amoral.
Good thing dissertation plagiarism isn't a crime. Do add the Jr when referring to MLK. Daddy King wrote his own stuff.
I suppose that would depend on the nature of the civil disobedience and on what its impact was on other people's rights. At the low end, political protest includes things like prayer vigils. At the high end, you have Mohammed Atta. One moral aspect where civil disobedience is arguably worse than DUI is the element of intent. Most drunk drivers didn't set out to drive drunk, they just wanted to party. They weren't thinking, and subsequently engaged in something that resembles reckless endangerment and criminal negligence. But many protesters plan their protests meticulously. They choose sites where they will cause maximum disruption and get the maximum news exposure for their cause. Obviously one can argue that collectively, en masse, drunk driving is far more widespread than political protest and that it carries far higher total social costs. Hospitals and cemetaries are filled with the victims of drunk driving. So it makes perfect sense for society to punish it severely and to direct lots of social disapproval at its perpetrators as a deterrent. But just morally, I'm not sure that I'm willing to call somebody pulled over for DUI morally worse than a political protestor who carefully plans out how to disrupt other people's lives. Probably sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. One problem is that morality is very similar to religion, in that there is no objective evidence of good or bad (just as there is no objective evidence of divinity) and everything kind of devolves into matters of personal intuition and/or faith. But violations of the law tend to be much more clear cut. We know that X was speeding, when pulled over had beer on his breath, and failed a drunk test. We know that Y was blocking traffic downtown, jumping up and down on the roofs of cars and breaking store windows. What's a lot harder to accurately measure is the good and evil aspect of any of that. It's kind of a matter of taste, actually. Individual moral intuitions can obviously deviate. Witness Mohammed Atta, who probably went to his God with his conscience clear, believing that he had struck a giant blow for good. But if we accept the community's aggregate intuitions as the norm, then we create problems for those individuals and groups who seek to morally criticise the majority. Dissenters become evil simply because they are deviant. And if we try to avoid these problems by citing revealed higher moral authority, we have the problem of getting everybody on the same page and justifying the authority of the authorities. So, bottom line, I guess that I probably am kind of amoral. That's because morality is so vaporous and so intangible. Certainly my gut speaks as loudly as anyone's and I have a highly developed sense of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness. I just don't know what to do with my intuitions philosophically. (Technically, I guess that I tend somewhat towards act-utilitarianism for personal choice and rule-utilitarianism for public policy. The occasional conflict between those two is where civil disobedience fits and why it's problematic.) I imagine that everyone ultimately goes with their gut and in a democracy, the law hopefully reflects a consensus of the collective intestines. But there's no necessity that the consensus must coincide with absolute moral good, assuming that good is something more than an ideal terminus for our strivings, the blessed state when everyone finally agrees and no more dissatisfaction remains. But until that heavenly day, minorities can and inevitably will continue to defy the majority on moral grounds.
Re: Re: Kerry arrested! No contradiction at all. What I think and what is the law are two completely different animals.
