Civil Disobedience and Punishment
| Author | Nicholas Buttle |
| Date | 01 December 1985 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1985.tb01587.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1985 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political
Studies
(1989,
XXXIII,
649-656
Civil Disobedience and Punishment
NICHOLAS
BUTTLE*
Bristol
Polytechnic
The renaissance of the protest movement against nuclear weapons in Europe
has witnessed
a
renaissance in civil disobedience as a form
of
political action.
Peace protesters trespass
on
Ministry of Defence property, damage fencing,
obstruct traffic. Trade unionists and local councillors, meanwhile, contemplate
campaigns of civil disobedience as a response to industrial relations and local
government legislation. Civil servants, even, embark
on
civil disobedience
when they leak government documents to the press or Members of Parliament.'
Such instances as these raise again important questions concerning the nature
and justification of civil disobedience. One issue, in particular, which will be
considered here concerns the relationship between civil disobedience and
punishment:
if
an agent is prepared to engage in acts of civil disobedience
should he also be prepared to accept punishment for his disobedience and,
further, is punishment for disobedience morally justified?2
1
The obligation
on
the part of the disobedient to accept punishment for his
conduct may be defended
on
either logical or ethical grounds. Logically, the
obligation may be seen as part of the nature of civil disobedience itself,
so
that it
is meaningless to ask whether civil disobedients ought to possess such an obliga-
tion. Ethically, the obligation may arise from moral commitments which the
disobedient acknowledges or ought to acknowledge.
*
I
would like to thank Jack Lively and two anonymous referees for
Political Studies
for their
useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
I
Whether all
or
some
or
any
of
these examples are accepted as genuine instances of civil
disobedience will, of course, depend on one's definition of civil disobedience. Since
I
am concerned
with ethical issues in this paper
I
do not wish this concern
to
be unnecessarily foreclosed by too
restrictive a definition.
I
will assume, therefore, a broad definition of civil disobedience such that all
the instances mentioned may be regarded as acts
of
civil disobedience. Jeffrie Murphy, with certain
restrictions, offers such a broad definition-'An act
A
is properly called an act
of
civil disobedience
only
if
(1)
there
is
some law
L
according
to
which
A
is illegal, (2)
L
is believed by the agent to be
immoral, unconstitutional, irreligious,
or
ideologically objectionable, and (3) this belief about
L
motivates
or
explains
A
.'
J.
G.
Murphy (ed),
Civil Disobedience and Violence
(California,
Wadsworth, 1971), p.
1.
It should be noted, however, that the law disobeyed need not be the law
objected to.
Also
the disobedience is directed toward particular laws
or
policies rather than the
system as a whole.
2
As John Rawls points out, whether punishment
for
civil disobedience is right is a different
matter from whether
it
is right that the disobedient be prepared to accept the legal consequences
of
his conduct.
J.
Rawls,
A
Theory ofJustice
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 366, fn. 2.
0032-3217/85/04/0649-08/$03.00
0
1985
Political Studies
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