The Role of Civility in Political Disobedience

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION

In modern liberal democracies, politically motivated disobedience of the law is generally tolerated as a way of challenging and changing social and legal practices. This paper concerns the role of civility in such political disobedience.1

In his seminal work on political disobedience, John Rawls identified three characteristics that many philosophers now take to be the crux of civility: openness, acceptance of legal consequences, and nonviolence. While Rawls and others thought that these features play an essential role in the internal logic of political disobedience, today civility faces increasing skepticism from both practitioners of political disobedience and philosophers who theorize about it. Many of the recent examples of political disobedience that have done the most to capture the public's attention, including Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, Extinction Rebellion's road blockades, Le mouvement des Gilets jaunes in France, and the trucker convoys in Canada, have all been decidedly uncivil in some way or another. Mirroring these real-life trends, many philosophers working on political disobedience have also become increasingly skeptical of civility and increasingly supportive of incivility. As Candice Delmas urges, “It is thus time to start thinking about uncivil disobedience—to wit, disobedient acts that are principled yet also deliberately offensive, covert, anonymous, more than minimally destructive, not respectful of their targets, or which do not aim to communicate to an audience the need to reform laws, policies or institutions.”2

To evaluate this shift in attitude toward civility, we first need to better understand what civility contributes to political disobedience. This, in turn, requires a detailed analysis of the mechanisms by which political disobedience is intended to influence the reasons of others. Philosophers who write on political disobedience have tended to focus on two of these mechanisms, which I will label “drawing attention” and “triggering conditional reasons,” and I will grant that civility is largely unimportant for these mechanisms. However, I will also argue that political disobedience often proceeds by other mechanisms, including the expression of speech acts like demands, requests, and testimony, and that civility is much more important in these mechanisms.

In Section II, I describe the formal characteristics of civility identified by Rawls (openness, nonviolence, and the acceptance of legal consequences), and argue that his account fails to identify a clear mechanism by which political disobedience affects the reasons of its audience. In Section III, I distinguish five mechanisms through which it might affect those reasons: drawing attention, giving testimony, triggering conditional reasons, making demands, and making requests. In Sections IV–IX, IV–IX, I discuss these mechanisms in detail and explore the role that civility plays in each of them.