Category: Civil Disobedience

One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws – Martin Luther King Jr. Background information strategy used during the 1950-1965, strategy used in North Carolina, and Alabama. Strategy used to get more rights that the black people should have.…

Extinction Rebellion is an activist group that pushes for change across the globe through nonviolent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King and Thomas Hobbes both believed that rules should be followed, but believed in two different sets of rules. On the one hand, Martin Luther King argued that if you break an unjust law, you must…

Developed in the early nineteenth century, transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that arose to pose objections to the general state of spirituality and intellectualism. As fathers of the transcendentalist movement, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson endorsed principles of morality predicated upon higher spiritual laws. They argued that in order to experience personal liberty,…

The refusal to abide by certain laws or to pay taxes, as a nonviolent form of political protesting, is civil disobedience. These types of protests were very common during the 18th century or the Romanticism period of literature. Many civil disobedience acts powered pieces of literature still known to us today, for instance, On Civil…

Many people still argue whether the Umbrella Movement is a civil disobedience protest or a riot. The nature of them is different, the former is to fight for the rights and interests of society but the latter is to fight for self-interest and violence is involved. Therefore, seeking the nature of the umbrella movement is…

What are the conditions, if any, that would justify the use of violence to oppose an unjust legal system? Introduction Political resistance continues to manifest in different forms and to varying degrees throughout the modern age. Despite its critics, civil disobedience has generally come to be considered a permissible mode of resistance. The philosophical debate…

Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis American transcendentalist and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, wrote the essay Civil Disobedience in response to slavery and Americans’ involvement in the Mexican-American War. Thoreau practiced what he preached, spending the night in jail for non-payment of taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War. Throughout his essay, he shares his idea, which…