Paper short abstract:

I argue that civil disobedience is best seen as political, not moral action because its principles are undecidable and therefore always subject to justificatory challenges. Principles underpinning obligations to obey or permission to disobey the law are thus political and subject to politicisation.

Paper long abstract:

Civil disobedience is generally agreed to be a permissible type of principled rule-breaking. But what kind of principles underpin civil disobedience? While both traditional and contemporary philosophical conceptions of civil disobedience typically stress the moral aspect of civil disobedience, in this paper I argue that civil disobedience is best seen as a political rather than moral type of action. To argue this, I first reverse the question: rather than asking under what conditions it is permissible to break the law, I ask why we typically think we ought to obey the law. A moral view, such as that classically offered by John Rawls, suggests that the moral principles purportedly embodied in the law specify when and why the law demands obedience. Based on a careful reading of Jacques Derrida’s seminal 1992 essay Force of Law, I argue that moral principles provide a particularly thin basis on which to construct an obligation of obedience. Such principles will either fail to attain consensus, or simply be too general and thin to supply an adequate basis for an entire political community. This is so because, as Derrida argues, any decision aiming at justice must go through what he calls the undecidable. Undecidability specifies decisions that lack any determinate ground to ascertain that no further justificatory questions could or need be asked after the decision, but which must nevertheless be decided. Ultimately, this suggests that any concept of justice is political because it must decide on the undecidable. Concretely, this means that any principle – moral or otherwise – which underpins either the obligation to obey the law or the permission to disobey it can always be subject to further politicisation by being challenged and contested. Civil disobedience, therefore, is best seen as a type of rule-breaking rooted in the political.