[INGELRII]

It's not mutually exclusive.

* Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.

* Just because one is breaking the law for common good, civil servants can't and should not be expected to stop enforcing the law. If you allow that, it's the end of the rule of law based society. The whole idea of just society is that you restrict what individuals in the government can do.

If you decide that civil disobedience is the way and you break the law, you should not ask to be treated differently under the law. Political pardons exist for a reason.

(I'm not taking position on the legality of actions Assage took, or justification of his actions. I'm arguing general principle.)

[samatman]

Civil disobedience is breaking a law because you believe the law itself is wrong. As invented by Thoreau, and practiced by Gandhi and MLK.

Breaking a law you otherwise believe in, in the service of some broader goal, is called direct action, riot, or terrorism, depending on the severity of the law broken, and/or the sympathies of the person describing it.

[jessriedel]

Yes, civil disobedience means you believe the specific law itself is wrong, but not the law-making process. The justness of the law-making process is why the classic method of practicing civil disobedience involves accepting the punishment. MLK:

> In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

[dragonwriter]

> Yes, civil disobedience means you believe the specific law itself is wrong, but not the law-making process.

The US Civil Rights movement generally practiced civil disobedience because the views the laws, the law making process, and the process of selecting who could even participate in the law making process as unacceptable.

The key assumption was that enough of the people who could participate in that process were nevertheless moral enough to reform all of those aspecta given a vivid enough demonstration that they could not turn away from of the top-to-bottom injustice of the system.

I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.

[jessriedel]

> The US Civil Rights movement generally practiced civil disobedience because the views the laws, the law making process, and the process of selecting who could even participate in the law making process as unacceptable.

This is conflating two aspects of the civil rights movement. It's of course true that there were also objections to the law-making process. But the segregationist laws would be unjust (and hence require violating under MLK's civil disobedience) even if the law-making process perfectly reflected the majority will of the people. It's this latter point that is relevant to INGELRII's comment.

> I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.

If the law-making process is illegitimate (e.g., if there is a dictator), then no one thinks you have a moral duty (in the deontological sense) to obey the laws, nor to accept the consequences for breaking them. It's only the situation where the law-making process is legitimate -- reflecting the immoral will of the majority -- where the question comes up of whether (1) you can morally violate the unjust law and (2) whether you are duty-bound to accept the resulting punishment.

[wolfgke]

> Breaking a law you otherwise believe in

You won't consciously break a law that you believe in. "otherwise believe" means that you don't believe in the law.

[INGELRII]

In both cases, if you believe in society based on laws, what I said stands. Agreed?

[samatman]

I was speaking to your first point, namely:

> Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.

Which is not a complete description of civil disobedience. It is accurate, but not precise.

Civil disobedience implies the actor wishes the law to be changed. They might expect not just a pardon for themselves, but a pardon for everyone who broke the unjust law. It's a distinction with a difference.

We agree that its effectiveness depends on accepting the punishment, sure.

[buckminster]

And this is why there were hundreds of prosecutions in both America and the UK of the perpetrators of America's post-9/11 kidnap, torture and murder program.

Except there weren't. The attachment of authoritarians to the rule of law is merely a posture. They set it aside whenever it suits them to. They could set it aside in this case.

[tehjoker]

There was an interesting case in Katherine Gun, who was a GCHQ employee that leaked that the US was conspiring to manipulate the US security council vote on the Iraq war by coercing other members. She attempted to use a legal defense that it was necessary to break the law in order to prevent war crimes. The prosecution appears to have stood down in order to prevent memos getting out that would have confirmed that invading Iraq was considered illegal by Downing St. at the time she made the leak.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/03/katharine-gun-...

[dependenttypes]

Civil disobedience, along with civil servants that stopped enforcing an unjust law is the reason that my grandmother was able to escape from Germany in 1938. Saving people by stopping the enforcement of an unjust law is more important than trying to defend the abstract concept of the rule of law. To me this seems like yet another collectivist (where it is ok to sacrifice innocents for the "greater good" - depending on your ruler's definition of greater good) vs individualist (where the rights and freedom of a single person is more important than defending an abstract concept) argument.

[dragonwriter]

> civil servants can't and should not be expected to stop enforcing the law

In general, criminal law permits but does not mandate prosecution and every prosecution is a judgement about not only the law but policy priorities. This argument is almost completely vacuous where it concerns offenses primarily against the state (it has some weight in equal protection terms when there are victims besides the state and the issue is whether the state is discriminating among victims on improper grounds in the manner in which it chooses to prosecute or not prosecute offenses against them.)

[selfishgene]

Exactly. A judge not too long ago was observed on camera stealing a gold watch from an airport security checkpoint bin at Login Airport in Boston MA and was never charged with the crime.

A group of judges met behind closed doors to discuss the incident involving Judge Patricia Curtin and concluded that she "intended eventually to give it back."

This is apparently part of a much larger pattern of "unequal protection under the law" in Massachusetts:

https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/secret-courts/