Author: Henry Krahn
Categories: Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law, Ethics, Philosophy of Race, Philosophy of Sex and Gender
Word Count: 999
Sometimes people break the law to try to change a law or policy that they see as unjust. For example, during the American Civil Rights Movement, Black activists sat at “whites-only” lunch counters to protest racial segregation.[1] During the 1980s and 1990s, members of the group ACT UP staged ‘die-ins’ where they lay as if dead in public spaces to protest the U.S. government’s neglect of the AIDS crisis ravaging the LGBTQ community.[2] More recently, environmental advocacy groups have blockaded roads to protest government inaction on climate change.[3]
These are cases of civil disobedience. But what exactly is civil disobedience? Can it be justified? If so, under what conditions? And what should happen to people who engage in civil disobedience? Should they be punished? Or should they be praised?
This essay reviews some important philosophical answers to these questions.
1. What is Civil Disobedience?
Civil disobedience is a form of protest that involves breaking the law to try to change a law or policy that protestors believe is unjust.[4] It is commonly understood to be:
- illegal;[5]
- conscientious: civil disobedients—people who engage in civil disobedience—are motivated by a sincere belief that a law or policy is unjust;
- nonviolent;
- public: civil disobedience is not anonymous or covert;
- persuasive: civil disobedients aim to change a law or policy by convincing the public that it is unjust through words and actions that express their moral convictions;
- non-evasive: civil disobedients do not try to escape punishment.[6]
This definition is controversial, however. Some think that illegal actions can be civil disobedience even if activists make no attempt to convince the public of anything: e.g., using physical coercion to prevent a decision from taking effect, such as activists chaining themselves to logging machinery to prevent deforestation.[7] Some think that illegal protest can be civil disobedience even if protestors evade punishment, as the whistleblower Edward Snowden did after leaking information about U.S. government surveillance.[8] Some even think that violent illegal actions can be a part of civil disobedience, such as smashing windows in a protest.[9]
2. What Justifies Civil Disobedience?
Many people think we are usually morally obligated to obey the law.[10] But few people think we must obey all laws, no matter how unjust: e.g., it was not morally wrong to help enslaved people seek freedom because slavery was unjust and laws prohibiting helping people escape slavery were also unjust.
To say civil disobedience is ‘justified’ means that it is a morally acceptable way to protest. Some argue that civil disobedience can be justified because we have a duty to make society just. This duty requires us to obey just laws which help to protect our individual rights and promote fairness and equality.[11] However, when the law is sufficiently unjust, we may be morally justified in using civil disobedience to try to make it more just.[12]
Some argue that civil disobedience might also be justified because we have a moral right to engage in it. On this argument, the right to civil disobedience is part of a more general moral right, such as the right to express ourselves freely.[13] Some argue that this right includes actions that express our deepest moral beliefs, like a pacifist refusing to be drafted into the army.[14] In the same way, they argue that we have a right to express our deepest moral convictions through civil disobedience.[15]
3. When is Civil Disobedience Justified?
Just as almost nobody argues that all laws must be obeyed, few people argue that all civil disobedience is wrong.[16] So when might civil disobedience be morally justified?
Here there are again controversies. First, civil disobedients must believe they are responding to injustice. Whether they must respond to actual injustice[17]—or whether they can merely reasonably, but perhaps mistakenly, believe they are protesting injustice—is debated.[18]
Second, it’s sometimes argued that for civil disobedience to be justified, disobedients must have tried yet failed to change the law or policy through lawful means, like voting and speaking up publicly. Whether this condition is met, however, depends on whether disobedients have tried all lawful options. But it’s always possible to keep trying the same thing,[19] and additional lawful measures, like letter-writing campaigns and public assemblies, can be tried too even if they seem unlikely to succeed.[20] So, some argue that civil disobedience can be justified when all lawful attempts to change the law seem unlikely to succeed.[21]
Some philosophers argue for further conditions, such as that justified civil disobedience must limit negative side effects. This includes not encouraging broader disrespect for the law[22] and minimizing harms to anyone not immediately involved in the protests.[23]
4. Should Civil Disobedience be Punished?
It is common to think that people should be punished when they break the law.[24] But some philosophers argue that to punish a crime is to express that it is morally wrong, and since justified civil disobedience is not morally wrong, it should not be punished.[25]
Others argue that all civil disobedience should be punished, even when it’s morally justified. They reason that if the government did not punish justified civil disobedience, that would encourage people to engage in civil disobedience whenever they think it is justified. Since everyone tends to think that their own actions are justified, there would likely be an increase in unjustified disobedience, threatening the stability of society. Punishing all civil disobedience equally would avoid setting a bad precedent.[26]
Finally, some distinguish legal penalties from punishment: penalties and punishments both discourage illegal conduct, but punishments also condemn the punished act as morally wrong. So, some argue that civil disobedience shouldn’t ever be punished but instead should be penalized by, e.g., minor fines or other penalties that don’t suggest that disobedients did anything wrong.[27]
4. Conclusion
In a world with so much injustice, it’s not surprising that people engage in civil disobedience: indeed, it may be their moral duty. Examining the complexities of civil disobedience—what it is, when it’s justified, and how disobedients should be treated—is as important today as it’s ever been.
Notes
[1] The most famous of these protests was staged in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. Four Black students from North Carolina A&T College sat at a lunch counter in a Woolworth department store, violating local segregation policies. The students were asked to leave but they stayed until the store closed. Over several days, more and more students came to sit at the same lunch counter. Afterwards, the Greensboro sit-ins inspired similar protests across the United States. The Library of Congress (1998) and the King Institute discuss the history of these protests in References and Further Readings below.
[2] ACT UP stands for ‘AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power.’ By the end of the 1980s, AIDS had killed thousands of Americans, including many members of the LGBTQ community. ACT UP staged many die-ins, including one at the vacation home of then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush. To read more about ACT UP, see ACT UP (2025) in References and Further Readings below.
[3] For example, since 2018 the environmental advocacy group “Extinction Rebellion” has blockaded many roads. These blockades have happened all over the world. One 2024 blockade was in the Netherlands: about 500 activists blocked a highway in The Hague, the seat of Dutch government. For details, see Reuters (2024). For more on this group, see the Extinction Rebellion Homepage (2025) in References and Further Readings below. This case suggests that civil disobedience can be used to seek justice for any “morally considerable” beings or entities, like animals and ecosystems, not just human-focused issues: see Theories of Moral Considerability: Who and What Matters Morally? by Jonathan Spelman.
[4] For introductions to leading contemporary theories of justice, see John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ by Ben Davies, Robert Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain” Argument for Libertarianism by Daniel Weltman, and Distributive Justice: How Should Resources be Allocated? By Dick Timmer and Tim Meijers.
These introductions concern just laws and policies, and governments that generally promote justice. However, we can also ask why we might want to have a government at all. Typical answers to that question involve thinking about what life would be like if we had no government whatsoever. See Social Contract Theory by David Antonini and “Nasty, Brutish, and Short”: Thomas Hobbes on Life in the State of Nature by Daniel Weltman for discussion.
[5] In some cases, civil disobedients may believe that their actions are in line with a higher law, such as the constitution or moral law, but not the law that is enforced. Civil disobedience can be contrasted with uncivil obedience, sometimes called malicious compliance, in which people obey the letter of the law but violate its spirit. For more on uncivil obedience, see Kling (2025).
[6] Rawls (1999, 319-323) offers the most widely accepted definition of civil disobedience, which includes these features. Rawls’s account is adapted from Bedau (1961, 661).
[7] Dworkin (1985, 109) discusses what he calls “nonpersuasive” civil disobedience. In his view, persuasive civil disobedience involves trying to convince people that there is an injustice by making arguments and demands, but nonpersuasive civil disobedience involves activists forcing people to do what they want, without much concern for what those people think about the matter. Physical coercion is one kind of nonpersuasive civil disobedience.
[8] Scheuerman (2014) argues that Snowden’s actions were civil disobedience.
[9] Brownlee (2012) uses the example of firing a gun in the air or catapulting stuffed animals at the police example to illustrate that violence of some types is compatible with civil disobedience.
[10] Rawls (1999, 319) and Lefkowitz (2007, 202-204) think that we usually have a duty to obey the law and argue that there is an exception for civil disobedience. Waldron (1993), Stilz (2009, 85-110), and Christiano (2008, 249-256) argue for a duty to obey the law without focusing on civil disobedience. Some philosophers, namely philosophical anarchists, argue that we do not usually have a duty to obey the law: see Wolff (1970) and Simmons (2001, 106-107). Relatedly, some argue that there could be a duty to obey the law, but that current societies are so unjust that there probably is no such duty: see Lyons (1998, 46).
[11] For example, laws against fraud and discrimination are designed to prevent people from treating each other unfairly.
[12] Rawls (1999, 319) writes that the problem of civil disobedience is a conflict between the duty to obey the law and the duty to oppose injustice. Civil disobedience is justified, he thinks, when there is a law or policy that is sufficiently unjust. Similarly, King (1963) writes that people have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
[13] For discussion related to the right to free expression, see Free Speech by Mark Satta.
[14] On this argument, not all actions that express our deepest moral beliefs are covered by the right. The right does not allow people to violate other people’s rights. For example, someone who believed that the existence of bike lanes was unjust would not be justified to drive in the bike lane and hit cyclists with their car. See Brownlee (2012, 141).
[15] Brownlee (2012, 140-141) thinks that the right to free expression includes civil disobedience, though she uses the term ‘justified’ to mean civil disobedience supported by a balance of reasons. Similarly, Lefkowitz (2007, 203) argues that we have a right to political participation, which gives us a right to vote and support different political causes. On Lefkowitz’s view, the right to political participation also includes civil disobedience, which can make it justified.
[16] Storing (1991, 86) is an example of an opponent of civil disobedience. He argues that civil disobedience is a failed attempt to combine legal political action with revolution, and that disobedients are people who fail to take up the duties of a citizen.
[17] Rawls (1999, 326-327) argues that civil disobedience is justified only when it responds to actual violations of objective principles of justice.
[18] Reasonable beliefs about justice might be beliefs that do not rely on major factual errors or self-serving and clearly unfair principles of justice. But they are not necessarily true: reasonable or justified but false beliefs are possible, even about ethical issues: this is an application of falliblism—the view that we can be justified in holding beliefs that are, unbeknownst to us, false, if our evidence best supports believing them—applied to beliefs about ethics and justice: see section “3.3. Fallible Justification” in Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long. Lefkowitz (2007, 204) argues that civil disobedience is justified when disobedients reasonably believe that the law is unjust, in a way that is free of these errors. Bryan (2023) argues that civil disobedience can be justified when disobedients take steps to make sure that their disobedience is for a just cause.
[19] Rawls (1999, 328) notes that repeating lawful efforts to change a law or policy, and using free speech, is always possible.
[20] Rawls (1999, 327-328) and Greenawalt (1991, 173-174) both think that civil disobedience is justified only once it is clear that the public will not respond to lawful protest or political campaigning. In contrast, Cohen (1971, 125) seems to think that disobedients must have tried extraordinary lawful means like the ones listed here.
[21] These conditions were first set out in Rawls (1999, 326-331). Similar conditions are found in Greenawalt (1991, 173-181) and Cohen (1971, 124-125). Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963) justified his civil disobedience by emphasizing that he responded to a deeply unjust law, and resorted to civil disobedience only after trying to negotiate with his opponents. See also Lefkowitz (2007).
[22] Rawls (1999 328-329), for example, argues that when there are multiple groups planning civil disobedience, they must coordinate so that the combined effect of their disobedience does not undermine respect for the law and the constitution. Cohen (1971, 126) claims that the justification of civil disobedience may depend on whether it decreases respect for the law in the community.
[23] Greenawalt (1991, 183-185) and Cohen (1971, 126) argue that civil disobedience is less likely to be justified when it causes harm, especially physical injury, and when causing this harm is unlikely to lead to a good outcome. For Cohen, this is relevant to one of the two justifications he considers for civil disobedience. Although Rawls (1999, 330) does not discuss it in detail, he seems to think justification might partly depend on the extent to which uninvolved parties are injured.
[24] On the topic of when punishment is justified, see Theories of Punishment by Travis Joseph Rodgers. On the relation of law to morality, see Philosophy of Law: An Overview by Mark Satta.
[25] Delmas (2019, 173-175) discusses several arguments that civil disobedience should not be punished. For example, some argue that justified civil disobedience can fix injustices and help stabilize society. In these cases, Delmas suggests, it might even seem that civil disobedience should be celebrated, not punished. Bennett and Brownlee (2021, 287) discuss the idea that civil disobedience is not wrong, and only things that are wrong should be punished. For a broader discussion of issues in this section, see Delmas and Brownlee (2021).
[26] Greenawalt (1987, 273) argues that justified and unjustified civil disobedience should be punished equally.
[27] Lefkowitz (2007, 218) argues that civil disobedience should be penalized, but not punished.
References
Bedau, H. A. (1961). On Civil Disobedience. The Journal of Philosophy, 58 (21), 653-665.
Bennett, C. and Brownlee, K. (2021). Punishment and Civil Disobedience. In W. E. Scheuerman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brownlee, K. (2012). Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bryan, A. (2023). The Epistemic Dimensions of Civil Disobedience. The Journal of Political Philosophy, forthcoming.
Christiano, T. (2008). The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Cohen, C. (1971). Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law. Ann Arbor: MPublishing.
Delmas, C. (2019). Civil Disobedience, Punishment, and Injustice. In L. Alexander and K. K. Ferzan (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.Delmas, C. and Brownlee, K. (2021). Civil Disobedience. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Dworkin, R. (1985). Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest. In A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Greenawalt, K. (1987). Conflicts of Law and Morality. New York: Oxford University Press.
King, M. L. (1963). Letter From a Birmingham City Jail. University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center.
Kling, J. (2025). The Nature, Ethics, and Politics of Uncivil Obedience. Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence, 3 (1), 1-31.
Lefkowitz, D. (2007). On a Moral Right to Civil Disobedience. Ethics, 117 (2), 202-233.
Lyons, D. (1998). Moral Judgment, Historical Reality, and Civil Disobedience. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 27 (1), 31-49.
Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Reuters (2024). Climate Protesters Block Dutch Highway While Police Strike. Reuters, September 15th, 2024.
Scheuerman, W. (2014). Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 40 (7), 609-628.
Simmons, A. J. (2000). Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stilz, A. (2009). Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Storing, H. J. (1991). The Case Against Civil Disobedience. In H. A. Bedau (ed.) Civil Disobedience in Focus. London: Routledge.
Waldron, J. (1993). Special Ties and Natural Duties. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (1), 3-30.
Wolff, R. P. (1970). In Defense of Philosophical Anarchism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
For Further Reading
ACT UP (2025). ACT UP Accomplishments – 1987-2012. ACT UP.
Extinction Rebellion (2025). Extinction Rebellion Homepage. Extinction Rebellion.
Library of Congress (1998). Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. Library of Congress.
Raz, J. (1991). Civil Disobedience. In H. A. Bedau (ed.) Civil Disobedience in Focus. London: Routledge.
Scheuerman, W. (2019). Why Not Uncivil Disobedience? Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 25(7), 980-999.
Thoreau, H. D. (1991). Civil Disobedience. In H. A. Bedau (ed.) Civil Disobedience in Focus. London: Routledge.
Acknowledgements
This essay was completed while in residence as a Global Fellow in the Hauser Global Law School Program at the New York University School of Law. I would like to thank Zain Raza, as well as the editors of 1000-Word Philosophy for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
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About the Author
Henry Krahn is a Hauser Post-doctoral Global Fellow at the New York University School of Law where he works on moral, legal, and political philosophy. He has written on civil disobedience, protest more generally, and the way moral accountability figures into these practices. His current project examines the relationship between social movements and moral change. HenryKrahn.ca
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