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Jun 18th, 2018
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  1. The main issue with Rawl's characterization of how social change is achieved is that it is dependent primarily on individuals or groups doing their best to enact social change in accordance to the theory of justice. In other words, civil disobedience is not something in which there's some cosmic objective formula to follow and you'll get a righteous movement on your hands. It's dependent on individuals coming together to recognize that something needs to be done, and then using their own means to create disruption so people will see that there's something wrong.
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  3. This can be done on a personal level (the ICE officer looking away) or on a group level (King leading protests or sit ins at white only spaces). Here's where I think Rawls goes wrong. It's all very well and good to spread the message of "if you see something wrong, stand up against it" when it comes to things like the civil rights movement. However, not everyone is going to be as legitimate as those movements.
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  5. For example, the alt right is a group that feels extremely alienated from modern society. They're generally made up of violent, usually misogynistic men who are generally unsuccessful and antisocial. They feel betrayed by society. If Rawls' principles were followed by them, what's stopping the alt right from saying "well, we think that society is unjust because we alt-righters and bigots don't get enough of a say in the political process. We're going to take action to try to stand up for ourselves because we feel that's wrong"?
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  7. We get things like the Charlottesville Nazi march or the tiki torch raising. (Actually probably worse, since even those marches still didn't fall under the category of violating the law.) Technically civil, yes, if you don't count the part where a protester gets run down, but it's also stuff that we don't want in our society - that ends up being extremely destructive, divisive and ultimately detrimental to our society. It has to be disruptive because again, that's the point of such civil disobedience campaigns. Where is the justice created by these alt right marches? There is none.
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  9. Now I know what you're thinking. "Obviously some civil disobedience campaigns are justified, and others are not. You can't expect Rawls to cape for every civil disobedience campaign out there just because he thinks it's a great way to stand up for the rights of people who have been actually oppressed." But here lies the problem. When Rawls goes around telling people they have a responsibility to do their best and create a just society, he also empowers everyone who would use this principle in a very destructive way while not helping things at all.
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  11. This lies at the heart of my concern about this principle. Either everyone accepts this principle and stands up for what they believe in, including Nazis, and disrupts society based on false pretenses (and there are many more false pretenses than just causes), or we have some kind of overriding arbiter to determine which causes are worthy of performing that tradeoff between order and justice, to measure when someone has broken the principles of justice, in which case the nation is only as just as the arbiter is and the whole point of using civil disobedience to effect justice for oppressed groups gets disrupted if the arbiter is themselves racist or whatever.
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  13. I must emphasize this again. Any endorsement of the principles underlying civil disobedience will lead to people abusing it - the chaos I spoke about.
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  15. What, then, is the cure for this? The answer is to provide a second principle: that nobody is above the law and that all laws must be obeyed regardless of how much you disagree with them. When you do this, it's true that you'll make it very hard (not impossible, gay marriage etc. has shown that you can achieve change without civil disobedience, but I'll agree that it's far harder) to enact change when someone's being stripped of their liberties. But in terms of the tradeoff, what you get is a society that works rather than a society fractured by constant protests and fighting from people who all think they're standing up for their own liberty and justice. It's the exact same principle as the reason we don't allow vigilante justice.
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