Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Stephen L. Carter's Integrity (@1996 by Stephen L. Carter).

Martin Luther King, Jr., the principal exponent of nonviolent resistance to unjust law during the American civil rights movement, held that the individual whose integrity moved her to disobey the law had a moral obligation to stand punishment. His reasons are instructive and, for people who consider the state essentially just, they are to my mind unrefuted as well.

King laid out his thesis squarely in an address that he gave in 1961: "I submit that the individual who disobeys the law, whose conscience tells him it is unjust and who is willing to accept the penalty by staying in jail until that law is altered, is expressing at the moment the very highest respect for law." The thesis over the years has been the subject of much criticism and debate. But its ringing, aspirational justification squares better than the alternatives with the faith that most of us share in the essential justice of our society, a faith that, among people of integrity, may generate a presumptive obligation to obey the society's laws.

It is no accident that King was a man of the cloth, for the religions are natural centers of dissent. A religion fully lived denies the authority of the rest of the world over the aspects of life that are, to the religionist, of central importance. "Above all," as the theologian David Tracy has pointed out, "the religions are exercises in resistance." And so they have been in American history. Sometimes these resisting voices are right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. But we are always a stronger and better nation for their presence.

For King, disobedience had one purpose: change. And for a citizen who believes her society is essentially just, change is necessarily the reason for action, because her faith in society's justice carries with it an optimism about the society's capacity to undo its acts of injustice. This is why King's disobedience was relentlessly optimistic, why he premised his justification for disobedience on the supposition that the hearts of others could be moved by the spectacle of the state's oppression, In this sense, he believed in the essential justice of the state, which is why he was able to say, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964: "I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality." King believed in a state comprising essentially decent people who would finally be willing to change its laws.

King's optimism, his sense that dialogue. once joined, can lead to change, is illustrated by his most famous writing on the topic of disobedience, the Letter from Birmingham City Jail, in which he wrote: "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create. . .a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." The idea was to change the system by changing the minds and hearts of the people who ran it.

King's argument is entirely persuasive for those individuals whose goal in disobedience is change. But even in a just society, there may be other goals that prompt disobedience. The principal "other goal" is circumvention—not so much changing the law as avoiding its effect. To the circumventer, avoiding punishment is the point of the strategy. I recognize that the judgment on whether morality counsels disobedience must ultimately be left to each individual. But as a student of integrity, I must confess to a skepticism on circumvention: if one truly believes that the society is essentially just, then, following King's argument, one should be trying to change it for the better. If one feels free to disobey the law, then perhaps one does not after all consider the society just.

Having said that, I must concede that in American society, circumvention is surely the most common form of disobedience. Examples involve such actions as exceeding the speed limit or making a U-turn in the wee hours of the morning or trespassing on private land far from anyone's sight. These are examples of personal convenience, of putting self-interest ahead of community judgment on legal norms. In this sense, the individuals in the examples are not civil disobedients at all, at least not in the traditional sense, and they are displaying no integrity—they are simple, humdrum lawbreakers.