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Abstract

Civil disobedience is deﬁned, and the several necessary elements in its deﬁnition are explained. Historic instances of civil disobedience are brieﬂy noted. Civil disobedience is contrasted with revolution. The punishment of civil disobedience – its nature and necessity – is discussed. Two great kinds of civil disobedience are distinguished and examples given from around the globe. The higher law justiﬁcation of civil disobedience is explained and criticized. A framework for the utilitarian justiﬁcation of civil disobedience is provided. The moral justiﬁability of civil disobedience, always difﬁcult but sometimes possible, is distinguished from the moral judgment of the disobedient.

Introduction

An act of civil disobedience is an act of protest, deliberately unlawful, conscientiously and publicly performed. Each of the essential features of civil disobedience is more fully explicated below.

First, an act of civil disobedience breaks the law. Lawful protest, however vigorous or unwise, is not disobedience. The actor’s violation of the law is knowing and deliberate. The civil disobedient may deliberately do what the law forbids or deliberately refuse to do what the law commands; but unless the law is broken, the act is not one of civil disobedience. When violations of the law are accidental or incidental to some other activity, we will not say that they are instances of civil disobedience. The civilly disobedient act is one that aims to be a violation and is designed to be that. The legal violation is part of the essence of the act. The disobedient may contend that the law broken ought never to have been enacted or never had legitimacy because of its origins. But the act is one of civil disobedience only if, at the time it was done, it was a deliberate violation in the eyes of the actor and the public.

Second, an act of civil disobedience is an act of conscientious protest. Whatever the object of that protest, and whether the complaint be wise or justiﬁable or neither, there must be some such object. The violation of the law is the actor’s instrument in expressing intense dissatisfaction with some policy of government. Illegal acts not speciﬁcally intended as protests are not cases of civil disobedience. Protest is not normally disobedient. Even when noisy and unruly, protest may be a legitimate and lawful part of the democratic process. But some protest deliberately goes beyond the normal, taking the form of deliberate disobedience to exhibit its moral intensity. An act of civil disobedience is essentially conscientious. It always makes some moral claim, and making such a claim is an element of that act.

Third, an act of civil disobedience must be public. The actor’s violation of the law aims to effect some change in the public life of his community. It is not hidden but is designed to be widely witnessed and to be understood as a form of protest. Public authorities are often notiﬁed in advance of proposed acts of civil disobedience. Clandestine acts cannot qualify as civil disobedience.

The moral nature of the violation, its genuine conscientiousness, normally requires that the act be done in public. Such protestors expect and hope to be seen to have broken the law; they proudly identify themselves as engaged in deliberate disobedience. There are exceptions to this requirement of publicity when the violations, committed as a service on behalf of others, are to be repeated and can be repeated only if the actors evade detection – as when civil disobedient repeatedly rescued slaves in what was called the Underground Railroad (Blight 2004). But the disobedient acts, even then, must be such that the actors would be openly proud of them when publicity no longer interferes with the well-being of others.

Whether nonviolence is an essential feature of civil disobedience is a matter of dispute. Some hold that a violent act cannot, for that reason, qualify as civil disobedience. Others hold that any case of civil disobedience involving violence would be for that reason much harder to justify but might be civil disobedience nevertheless. Either position might be consistently maintained, the issue being essentially terminological. It is probably wise to adopt the former course, using the expression “civil disobedience” in such a way that every true case of it is necessarily nonviolent. Satyagraha, the movement developed and applied by Mahatma Gandhi utilizing deliberate disobedience in the Indian independence movement and also earlier in South Africa for Indian rights, was strictly nonviolent (Majmudar 2005).

It is important to distinguish between the criteria by which we identify a case of civil disobedience and the criteria by which we may justify it. An act may be a paradigm case of civil disobedience (e.g., deliberately sailing a ship into an area restricted for the testing of nuclear devices to protest that testing) and yet prove to be unjustiﬁable. On the other hand, acts thought to be not clear cases to which the term applies (e.g., unruly and raucous public gatherings) may prove clearly justiﬁable. The recognition of cases of civil disobedience is one thing; the evaluation of them is another.

In sum, an act of civil disobedience is an act of protest, deliberately unlawful, conscientiously and publicly performed.

Some Historic Illustrations Of Civil Disobedience

Although the term “civil disobedience” has come into general use only since the publication of the famous essay of Henry David Thoreau, originally entitled “Resistance to civil government” but renamed “Civil disobedience” (Thoreau 1849) in 1849, there are famous instances of it throughout history. Perhaps the oldest is to be found in Exodus 1:15–21, in which is reported the deliberate disobedience by the Hebrew midwives of the command of the king of Egypt and their reasons for that disobedience. “And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the second was Puah: And he said, “When you give the service of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them on the stools, if it be a son then you shall kill him, but if it be a daughter than she shall live.” But the midwives feared God, and did not do as they had been commanded, but kept the boys alive.”

In American history, the Boston Tea Party, a civil disobedient protest on 16 December 1773, became the symbol of the American Revolution to which it led (Labaree 1996). That protest was against the Tea Act, adopted by the British Parliament in 1773, believed by the protesters to violate their rights as Englishmen to “no taxation without representation.” Ships of the East India Company bringing tea to Boston were boarded by a group called the Sons of Liberty, who threw the chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The British government responded harshly.

The Freedom Riders of the 1950s, in which blacks and whites together publicly violated the segregation statutes of some states in the American south, were an outstanding example of effective civil disobedience in recent years, stinging the conscience of the nation and leading to monumental cultural and legal changes (Arsenault 2006). That same spirit demanding racial justice has inspired, as reported by the New York Times in 2014, recurring waves of civil disobedience.

Another example in the ﬁeld of global bioethics in the twenty-ﬁrst century is the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) launched in South Africa in 1998 (NY Times 2014). Combining a variety of actions including civil disobedience, TAC aimed to put pressure on the government to implement the right to health as included in the Constitution of South Africa and make access to treatment available to all citizens with HIV/AIDS.

Civil Disobedience And Revolution Distinguished

Civil disobedience is not revolution. Revolution seeks the overthrow of constituted authority or at least repudiates that authority in some sphere; civil disobedience does neither. The civil disobedient accepts while the revolutionary rejects the frame of established authority and the general legitimacy of the system of laws.

Henry Thoreau is often thought to be an example of a civil disobedient. He refused to pay taxes lawfully imposed and submitted to his ensuing arrest without resistance. This appears to be the conduct of a civil disobedient, but Thoreau’s famous essay of 1849, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” makes it clear that he intended a complete repudiation of governmental authority. He wanted the government to “treat him as a neighbor” and to recognize the individual as a “higher and independent power.” He wrote:

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. . . .I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. (Thoreau 1849)

Thoreau’s act may have been noble, but in seeking to place himself above the law or outside of its jurisdiction, he acted as a rebel, not as one engaged in civil disobedience.

Distinguishing civil disobedience from revolution is essential in determining the justiﬁability of the conduct in question. Some revolutions prove justiﬁable in view of their extraordinary circumstances. The American Revolution of 1776 we think is justiﬁable, probably the French Revolution of 1789 also, and perhaps the Mexican Revolution of 1912, or the Cuban Revolution of 1959, or all of them, or others. But revolution commonly involves the destruction of property, personal injury and death for many, and the complete disruption of community life. To justify revolution is always difﬁcult, the moral responsibility of the revolutionary heavy. Deliberate disobedience of the law as a form of protest is also a serious matter, but the burden of justiﬁcation on the civil disobedient, who is prepared to accept punishment for his act, does not approach that of the revolutionary. To impose upon the civil disobedient the moral burdens of the revolutionary is mistaken and unfair.

Two Kinds Of Civil Disobedience

All acts of civil disobedience fall into one of two kinds: direct disobedience and indirect disobedience.

When the law disobeyed is the very law against which protest is being made, the disobedience is direct. In the United States, the deliberate violation of state segregation statutes was one form of the protest against those statutes. In Russia, to protest the oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic Ocean, protesters occupied the drilling rigs of the state-owned petroleum enterprise, blocking the conduct that was the object of their protest. In many countries, laws ordering men to report for military service have been protested by the deliberate refusal to obey those conscription laws.

Indirect disobedience is the violation of some law other than – although more or less closely related to – the target of the protest. Protests in Great Britain against the development of nuclear weapons, famously led by Bertrand Russell, took the form of blocking automobile trafﬁc in important municipal arteries. All around the globe, to protest against government policies that cannot themselves be violated, sit-ins and violating trespass or loitering laws have been a widely practiced device.

Indirect disobedience will normally be harder to justify than direct disobedience. Its effectiveness will be much affected by the clarity of the relationship between the object of protest and the law disobeyed. As the law disobeyed bears a more distant or more uncertain relation to the object of protest, the effectiveness of the protest, and with it the justiﬁability of the protest, drops sharply. It is incorrect, however, to maintain that indirect disobedience cannot be justiﬁed because the law broken is not the object of protest. There may be cases in which intense protest is justiﬁable while direct disobedience is simply out of the question. If the object of protest is the conduct of a war, for example, or some other policy of a national government, it may be impossible for protesters to exhibit the intensity of their repudiation of that policy directly. Similarly, if the object of protest is not a law but the absence of a law or other administrative nonfeasance, direct disobedience cannot be employed, but the message intended might take the form of disobedience to a carefully selected statute whose symbolic connection to the change sought has been well publicized.

The relation between the object of protest and the law disobeyed is unavoidably somewhat arbitrary when disobedience is indirect. Some widely understood relation between the two must be established if the protest is to be effective, and its effectiveness will be critical for its justiﬁcation. This symbolic relationship may arise from the location of the disobedient act (e.g., trespass in the Selective Service Ofﬁce to protest conscription) or arise from the time of the disobedience (e.g., deliberately blocking trafﬁc on the anniversary of some historical event) or in other way that can associate the disobedient act with the object of protest. The relation may be altogether contrived, established only for the purpose of that protest. It is essential, for the success of the protest, that the connection be widely understood by members of the community in which the protest takes place. If it is not understood, the indirect civil disobedience could not be justiﬁed. Even if well understood, however, it is by no means sufﬁcient to achieve that justiﬁcation. Whether disobedience as protest is justiﬁable in fact remains to be determined.

The Punishment Of Civil Disobedience

One who deliberately breaks the law should be punished for that disobedience. The civil disobedient is no exception. He is properly subject to the normal punishment imposed for the offense he knowingly commits. Disobedient protesters usually understand this and accept it fully. They break the law expecting to be arrested and to be found guilty of a minor crime. Often, they plan to plead guilty when charged, using that plea to amplify their concerns. They expect to be punished by ﬁne or jail sentence. Since they are usually acting within a framework of laws whose legitimacy they do not question, this punishment is the natural and proper culmination of their act. Submission to public punishment – indeed, invitation to punishment – is vital in exhibiting the intensity of the protesters’ concern over the issue at hand. Punishment increases the publicity of the act and gives open proof of commitment to the cause for which the protest is undertaken. It is a demonstration of the willingness to sacriﬁce comfort or freedom in behalf of that cause. Seeking to avoid punishment by pleading innocence undermines the protest and is inconsistent with its spirit. Punishment for the infraction cannot be bypassed. It is because the act is known to be punishable that it serves as a dramatic form of protest.

It is for this reason unjust to accuse the disobedient of treating the law with contempt. The reverse is usually the case. Whether ultimately justiﬁed or not, the protester is sufﬁciently concerned with the justice of the laws to sacriﬁce himself/herself in the effort to improve them. He takes himself to be calling attention to a wrong he thinks far greater than the one he commits.

It is also wrong to suppose that disobedients “reserve to themselves the right to break any law they please,” as critics often complain. The protesters are as free to break laws as any citizen is and no freer. The common criticism that they “take the law into their own hands” tacitly supposes that they hope to disobey without punishment. The self-sacriﬁcial element in civil disobedience renders such criticism inappropriate and superﬁcial. In cases of indirect disobedience, the violation of the laws brings no ensuing beneﬁt to the disobedient. He is not acting for his own advantage. Direct disobedience – for example, of conscription laws – may appear to beneﬁt the protester, which makes it all the more important, for the effectiveness of the protest, that the punishment be real and be public.

What punishment ought civil disobedients receive? The crime committed is the crime resulting from the transgression of the law violated. There is no crime of “civil disobedience.” The gravity of the infraction should determine the punishment imposed. It is unjust to discriminate in favor of disobedients because they are conscientious or against them because the violation is knowing and deliberate. They should be treated as others are treated who break the law they break. For minor infractions, the sentence of a ﬁrst offender is often a light ﬁne. If that is the normal practice of a court, it is wrong to treat the civil disobedient otherwise.

In determining sentence, the trial court may wish to consider the circumstances of the disobedient. It does not speak well for civil disobedients that they break the law deliberately, perhaps in some instances with deﬁance. But so also do others whose motives are altogether selﬁsh. If attitudes and character are to be weighed in ﬁxing sentence, it is just to weigh also the honorable motivation of the act. Good motives cannot cancel guilt but can affect the response of the community to it. It is reasonable to treat cases of civil disobedience as infractions simply, without attending to special circumstances. If circumstances are to affect punishment, all circumstances – those in the protesters’ favor as well as those not – should be weighed.

Civil Disobedience Cannot Be Justified By The Law

It follows from the nature of civil disobedience that it cannot be given a legal justiﬁcation. The law cannot justify the violation of the law. Laws do sometimes conﬂict or appear to do so. Such conﬂicts are ultimately resolved by determining which of the conﬂicting elements is controlling in the given case or by invoking some higher legal principle. Some laws provide legal avenues for those whose conscience or religion forbids their compliance, as in the case of provision for conscientious objectors in conscription laws. The use of such provisions is not disobedience of any kind. Deliberate disobedience to the law can never receive a legal justiﬁcation within that legal system.

Some persons may believe that certain laws deprive them of constitutionally guaranteed rights and are therefore invalid. If the law that is the object of their complaint is a statute not yet tested, the challenge of that law may be feasible only through its deliberate infraction. The legal system that encourages such challenges, one might argue, does thereby justify the infraction, but this argument misapplies the concept of justiﬁcation. The system may encourage deliberate challenge to the constitutionality of laws, but any such challenge goes forward at the risk of the challengers. If the law thus tested is ultimately held valid, the penalty imposed for disobedience to it is the price challengers pay for that challenge. Disobedience to a controversial law ultimately held valid is certainly not justiﬁed by the courts or the legal system. If, on the other hand, the challenge proves successful, the law in question held unconstitutional and invalid, the act of the challengers is lawful. But in that case, there is no ultimate disobedience. An unsuccessful challenge produces disobedience but not justiﬁcation; a successful challenge produces justiﬁcation of the conduct but no disobedience. The law cannot justify breaking the law.

In recent American history, many instances of direct civil disobedience are acts that the protesters believe right and justiﬁable – converting racially segregated public facilities into integrated facilities, for example. The laws broken deliberately were local statutes, ultimately held unconstitutional and invalid. But the deliberate violators of those laws were treated like criminals, tried, convicted, and punished. Were they not civil disobedients? Yes and no. The uncertainty arises from the conﬂict of principles at different levels of authority. In the smaller, local context, they were, of course, civil disobedients. In the larger, constitutional context, their acts were lawful. But in the same context, the act cannot be both unlawful and legally justiﬁed.

The Moral Justification Of Civil Disobedience

If there is any possible justiﬁcation of civil disobedience, it must come from outside the legal system. Extralegal reasons will be given for breaking the law, and if the acts are to be justiﬁed, these nonlegal considerations must be shown to override the normal obligation to obey the law in those circumstances. The disobedients will grant that the laws, if legitimately enacted, ought to be obeyed and grant also that this obligation applies to them as to others. But in these special circumstances, they will argue that they are under other moral obligations that outweigh those imposed by the legal system and that constrain them to disobey. Such claims are sometimes outrageous. Often, they are simply mistaken. The allegation, even in good faith, that one has a moral obligation to disobey may give reason to honor the disobedient, but it does not justify the disobedience.

The claim of moral obligation as justiﬁcation calls for careful scrutiny.

Some laws are grossly unjust. All legal systems are imperfect, and in an imperfect legal system, situations may arise in which moral agents justiﬁably claim that they ought to break the law. Even if they can make that case, their acts are punishable before the law. There are at least some circumstances in which the deliberate violation of a law is morally justiﬁed. That justiﬁcation, if sound, can apply only to particular disobedient acts whose circumstances are known. It is senseless to talk about the justiﬁcation of civil disobedience in general.

The moral justiﬁcation of particular disobedient acts may take one of two forms:

It may involve the recourse to some higher law, or it may rely upon some utilitarian calculation.

Higher Law Justification OF Civil Disobedience

What about International Human Rights Law, a higher form of law, as the TAC example illustrates.

Participants in civil disobedient protests often claim that their conduct is justiﬁed by some law that is above and more authoritative than any positive law. They may argue that there is a divine law or some overriding moral law so compelling that no human statute can stand against it. This is a venerable line of argument and has often served worthy purposes. Its roots lie deep in the history of western thought – in Cicero, and Aquinas, and Locke, and Jefferson who would justify conduct by virtue of its harmony with some antecedently established superhuman command, usually held to be of divine origin. In recent American history, Martin Luther King repeatedly presented that defense of deliberate disobedience. He wrote that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” and the mark of a just law is that it “squares with the moral law, or the law of God.” An unjust law is one that is “out of harmony” with the moral law, “not rooted in eternal and natural law.” Statutes enforcing racial segregation held “degrade human personality, are plainly unjust, and therefore must be disobeyed.”

Arguments of this kind, some expressly theological and others metaphysical, are appealing to many. They are simple, forceful, and direct. On the whole, however, they prove unsatisfactory, persuading only those who had been earlier of the same conviction. They rely upon claims to knowledge about the content of the “law of nature” or the “divine code” that are not subject to public veriﬁcation. The moral judgment of the disobedient conduct is thus dependent upon that person’s understanding and application of that higher law. Assertions about the content of divine law or about how that content is to be ascertained are never generally agreed upon. Any individual’s claim about the supreme authority of such laws is difﬁcult to defend rationally and is impossible to prove. There is no good reply to critics who believe themselves also governed by divine law but claim a different and more accurate understanding of it with different consequences. All too soon, we arrive at the impasse at which we are forced to say, “Here ends the argument and begins the ﬁght.”

Higher law justiﬁcations have another serious shortcoming. They can serve to justify, if any, only direct civil disobedience. The divine code, whatever its particular content, will oblige disobedience only to morally offensive legal commands. Indirect civil disobedience usually involves the violation of statutes that are themselves entirely wholesome in the effort to remedy an injustice in a different but symbolically related sphere. Just for this reason, the higher law advocate may contend that indirect civil disobedience is never justiﬁable. But whether there is some moral justiﬁcation that does not appeal to some higher law remains to be determined.

Utilitarian Justification Of Civil Disobedience

Protesters may argue that their deliberate disobedience of a particular law at a particular time, under known circumstances, is likely – because of the way in which it calls public attention to an existing injustice – to lead in the long run to a society that is better and more just than that produced by obedience to the law in question. This utilitarian claim only opens the argument; the claim needs defense, and that defense will never be easy. The burden cannot be light because the argument begins with the recognition that citizens do have a prima facie obligation to obey the laws.

The chief source of controversy between utilitarian defenders of civil disobedience and their critics is not usually the worth of the objectives sought. There is likely to be general agreement on the value of those objectives: racial justice, reduction of the risks of nuclear catastrophe, avoiding environmental degradation, and so on. But whether, in fact, the disobedience will advance these objectives raises factual questions of the most difﬁcult and controversial sort.

First, factual questions about the background of the disobedient acts: How vigorously have the worthy ends sought been pursued through normal or at least lawful channels? If those channels have not been explored fully enough, the resort to law-breaking is sure to prove unjustiﬁable. Critics will contend that disobedience cannot be justiﬁable if there are ways to achieve the desired results lawfully, even if more slowly. Even if that is true, however, delay may be costly, and the greater speed of action promised may render the resort to extraordinary means justiﬁable.

Second, factual questions concerning the negative effects of the deliberate disobedience: Will it encourage lawlessness or erode the general respect for the laws? Critics may hold that the unhappy consequences of deliberate deﬁance of the law are likely to outweigh whatever good results the disobedience might achieve. The fabric of a law-abiding society is precious; if deliberate disobedience undermines that fabric, it may be more damaging than productive. The issue is factual. Disobedients will deny that their conduct will tend to lessen respect for the law in general. Indeed, in accepting public punishment for their disobedience, they exhibit respect for the legal system. The values in question are intangible and perhaps not measurable. Determining the actual consequences of civil disobedience on the attitudes and dispositions of the community as whole is an empirical question, but one that is extremely difﬁcult to answer.

Inconvenience and expense to the community resulting from the disobedience are inevitable; this is an unavoidable handicap for any utilitarian defense. The gravity of this handicap will depend upon the nature of the law broken and the circumstances of its violation. The law to be broken – when the disobedience is indirect – will usually be selected so that the infraction will cause no injury to others, much publicity, and minimal inconvenience. In direct disobedience, the opportunity for such control is greatly reduced. In general, because disobedients seek publicity for their objectives and support from the community, they are likely to minimize the negative by-products of their protests as far as they can.

Third, factual questions concerning the beneﬁts of the disobedience are also difﬁcult. Supposing the change sought worthy, one can evaluate the disobedience only by estimating the likelihood of its success in achieving or at least in advancing that worthy end. Will it bring effective pressure to bear upon legislators or policy-making authorities? How intensely will it focus public attention on some injustice long in need of remedy? Might misunderstanding of the protesters or resentment of them do the worthy cause more harm than good? Estimating the reaction of the citizenry to a contemplated controversial event is largely guesswork, and yet some such estimate is entailed by the decision to engage in deliberate disobedience. Some factual matters can be largely controlled by the disobedient protesters. Among these are:

(a) The relation between the law broken and the object of protest. When the disobedience is indirect, the law to be broken can be of such a nature as to make abundantly clear to the public the reasons for the protest.

(b) The conduct of the demonstrators. Unruly or offensive conduct is likely to encounter widespread disapproval, obscuring the recognition of its objective. Sober and restrained conduct – the actual practice of civil disobedients in most cases – is far more likely to win consideration and respect.

(c) The public statement of the objective. If demonstrators are seen to have a reasonable objective, highlighting a matter for which practical remedy lies in the hands of the community, the effectiveness of their protest may be enhanced.

The Actual Justifiability Of Civil Disobedience

All the factual questions arising are exceedingly difﬁcult. But some set of answers to them – estimated or proposed – is the foundation of a utilitarian justiﬁcation of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience can be neither generally justiﬁed nor generally condemned. Legal justiﬁcations are not available in any case.

Moral justiﬁcations are sometimes possible and sometimes plausible. Each case must be examined separately, in its context, with careful regard for the moral principles relied upon. For each, there must be some effort to answer the factual questions raised. In a healthy democracy, most instances of civil disobedience will not prove justiﬁable, however honorably motivated they may have been. Yet there are times, even in a healthy democracy, when cruel but long-ensconced customs or patriotic but irrational emotions blind the majority of the citizens to the injustices they impose. An effective remedy for these wrongs may be unattainable through the normal political process, while the cumulative injustice is so pressing as to demand immediate attention. Deliberate disobedient protests may then merit our approbation and even our gratitude.

Rightness Of Conduct And Goodness Of Character Distinguished

Clear thinking about civil disobedience requires distinguishing the judgment of the act from the judgment of the actor. Whether conscientiously and publicly disobeying a law to advance some worthy objective is morally justiﬁed is the principal question to be confronted. This judgment of the act will guide our conduct and determine the response of the community to the act. But even if the act of deliberate disobedience proves morally unjustiﬁable, we may wish to recognize the good character of the citizens who do the act with honorable motivation.

Respect for the laws, and obedience to them, is a central virtue in every civilized community. Concern for justice, even when it conﬂicts with the laws, and courage to act in support of that justice even at the cost of punishment and humiliation are virtues equally worthy and much rarer. Deﬁance of the laws in pursuit of justice may lead to crimes that deserve legal punishment and even moral repudiation. But bad acts can be done by good actors. There are circumstances in which we ought to punish and repudiate the act, while recognizing the honesty and integrity of the actor. That is often the case when protestors engage in deliberate civil disobedience.

Conclusion

Although its moral justiﬁcation is always disputable, civil disobedience is often an effective technique to protest government policies or statutes believed to be unjust. The willingness of its practitioners to suffer punishment for their protest underscores the seriousness of their convictions. Even when disobedient protests are ultimately found unjustiﬁable or unwise, the moral intensity that gives rise to them is likely to win wide attention, and may succeed in stinging the conscience of an otherwise apathetic citizenry.

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