Obedience and Disobediance to the State
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The most reasonable conclusion to a study of the individual's obedience or disobedience to the state is that the individual has a moral duty to disobey the state if the state is itself immoral, but that individual also must be willing to pay the legal price for that disobedience. There is, of course, the more extreme view which would give the individual a moral right to disobey the state and to evade paying the legal price if possible. This extreme view would be an anarchic one, and the individual would remain true to his view if he were totally against any government whatsoever. The anarchist would have to be willing to do for himself what non-anarchists have done for them by the government. None of the writers/activists considered here---Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.---can be considered anarchists. They all believe in government, and, as a result, they believe in relating to that government as a force which can be both positive and negative. They all believe in the right of the individual to disobey the state, but they also believe that there are consequences which they must be willing to pay as willing citizens of the state. My own position coincides with the views of the five writers. I do believe that the individual has a moral duty to the truth, to God, to a higher authority than the state, and that when the state runs counter to that higher authority, the individual has the right and the duty to disobey. At the
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ht not to weigh with us at all in comparison with the risk of doing what is wrong" (588).
The basic point of a state or a society is to provide a place and a means whereby human beings can live and work together for the benefit of all. Socrates presents the state's side of the argument eloquently and persuades himself that he should do the right thing, which is to submit to the law and the punishment set forth by the law, for to do otherwise would be to do wrong---to break the contract he had entered into with the state and, in fact, to try to destroy the state and its laws. Socrates puts these words into the mouth of the state:
Now, Socrates, what are you proposing to do [by considering running away]? Can you deny that by this act which you are contemplating you intend, so far as you have the power, to destroy us, the Laws, and the whole State as well? Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons? (Plato 590).
Socrates concludes that the state is right and that he would be wrong to flee his punishment.
In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," King answers the religious leaders who
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Approximate Word count = 1748
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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