Introduction

Philosophy and Social Criticism

1–5
Civil disobedience and ª The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:

conscientious objection sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0191453716659522
psc.sagepub.com

Maeve Cooke and Danielle Petherbridge

School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland

Abstract
The question of civil disobedience has preoccupied philosophical discourse at least since Thoreau’s
articulation of disobedience as a form of non-compliance and Rawls’ classic definition outlined in
the wake of the civil rights and student protest movements of the 1960s. It has become increasingly
clear, however, that these classic definitions are being challenged and rethought from a variety of
traditions in the wake of contemporary protests. These articles engage with the most recent
debates surrounding civil disobedience and conscientious objection, opening up original new paths
for thinking about forms of protest. They also reveal disagreements about how to understand civil
disobedience and about the place of conscience in political protest, inviting further discussion on
these questions and issues.

Keywords
civil disobedience, conscience, conscientious objection

The question of civil disobedience has preoccupied philosophical discourse at least since
Thoreau’s articulation of disobedience as a form of non-compliance and Rawls’ classic
definition outlined in the wake of the civil rights and student protest movements of the
1960s.1 It has become increasingly clear, however, that these classic definitions are
being challenged and rethought from a variety of traditions in the wake of contemporary
protests such as global anti-austerity movements, highly politicized acts of whistle-
blowing and cyber-disobedience. As a response to these new forms of objection, philo-
sophers and political theorists have sought to reconsider the classic analyses provided by
Rawls and others,2 and to renew discussion on the importance of civil disobedience for
contemporary democracies.

Corresponding authors:
Maeve Cooke and Danielle Petherbridge, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4,
Ireland.
Emails: maeve.cooke@ucd.ie; danielle.petherbridge@ucd.ie
2 Philosophy and Social Criticism

In Rawls’ classic definition, civil disobedience is understood as a conscientious

political act; however, he emphasizes fidelity to the law along with the requirements
of non-violence and publicity.3 One important consequence of his idea of fidelity to
the law is that civil disobedients must be prepared to accept criminal liability and
punishment for their actions. Furthermore, Rawls separates civil disobedience from
individual acts of conscientious objection. He argues that in contrast to civil disobe-
dience, conscientious objection is not a form of action aimed at the ‘sense of justice of
the majority’ nor is it an act undertaken in the public forum. In his view conscientious
objection is not aimed at changing laws or policies but is a form of subjective non-
compliance. In contrast to civil disobedience, conscience-based objection is seen as
appealing to non-publicly-shared moral or religious principles of conviction, which
are too subjective to constitute the basis for public political action (a concern reiter-
ated by several contributors to the discussion in this special section). Thus, Rawls
makes a clear distinction between private acts based on conscience, and public acts of
civil disobedience that are addressed to aspects of a particular legal and political
framework.
Many contemporary theorists argue that Rawls’ understanding of civil disobedience
cannot adequately account for recent examples of disobedience such as those that
transcend the boundaries of the nation-state or appeal to a transnational public sphere.
Moreover, for some, the sharp distinctions he draws between matters of individual
conscience, conscientious objection and civil disobedience do not adequately capture
either the nature of or the motivation for political protest under contemporary condi-
tions. Kimberley Brownlee maintains that Rawls’ definition is anachronistic and that it
also neglects the ways in which disobedience might be ‘animated by conscience’. In
her recent book Conscience and Conviction she makes a case for rethinking the
relation between conscience and civil disobedience, as well as contesting the condi-
tions of publicity and non-secrecy attached to the Rawlsian model.4 In her view, civil
disobedience should be understood as ‘a conscientious communicative breach of the
law motivated by steadfast, sincere, and serious, though possibly mistaken, moral
commitment’.5 Brownlee attempts to rethink the relation between conscience and civil
disobedience by arguing for what she terms a ‘communicative principle of conscien-
tiousness’, whereby among other conditions, civil disobedients must be prepared to
communicate their moral convictions to others and thereby partake in public debate
and discussion in regard to the merits of the convictions motivating their illegal acts.
In this manner, the conditions she outlines are intended to offer a means of distin-
guishing between justifiable and non-justifiable acts of both conscientious objection
and civil disobedience, based on principles of dialogue and communicability rather
than a legal framework.
The complexity of justifying action of this kind has been illustrated recently by the
case of Edward Snowden. The debate between William E. Scheuerman and Brownlee in
this special section shows that there are very different ways of interpreting Snowden’s
acts, depending on the definition of civil disobedience one adopts. In contrast to Brown-
lee, Scheuerman advocates a revised Rawlsian account according to which Snowden’s
whistle-blowing may be described as civil disobedience: that is, as a conscience-driven
breach of law that is both public and non-violent, and undertaken in cognizance of the
Cooke and Petherbridge 3

punishment attached to such acts of illegality. In a previous article Scheuerman argues

that acts of civil disobedience, paradigmatically those of Martin Luther King Jr, are best
understood as forms of protest undertaken explicitly within the parameters of the law for
the purposes of changing the law; moreover, that this ‘fidelity to the law’ should deter-
mine whether or not such acts are justifiable.6 In contrast, Brownlee rejects Scheuer-
man’s emphasis on legality and argues that a broader understanding of civil disobedience
is required if we are to justify Snowden’s actions as a legitimate form of protest. In her
view, in line with her principles of communicability and universalizability, Snowden’s
actions can be considered a form of civil disobedience for the simple reason that they
fulfil dialogic criteria, which stipulate sincerity and constancy of moral conviction as
well as a willingness to communicate and defend these convictions in public.7
However, these moral and legal approaches to civil disobedience are not uncontested.
The liberal-democratic definition offered by Rawls represents only one strand within the
political-philosophical literature, albeit a prominent one. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, Hannah Arendt made the case for an alternative model of civil disobedience that
was unreservedly critical of legal and moral approaches. As Danielle Petherbridge
demonstrates, Arendt’s work proposes a radical democratic approach based on what she
terms a principle of dissent at the heart of constitutional democracies. This leads her to
separate disobedience from individual claims of conscience as well as from the restric-
tions imposed by legalistic conceptions. In contrast to Rawls, Arendt argues against
understanding civil disobedience in legal terms and offers persuasive arguments for a
political model of disobedience as a particular form of collective action, pointing to the
constitutional ‘refounding’ that civil disobedience enables. In this way, Arendt distin-
guishes the vibrant political character of civil disobedience from the retaining and
conservative character of the law, showing how civil disobedience is aimed at engaging
political debate and action when political processes and institutions have lost their
legitimacy. As a consequence, she argues that acts of civil disobedience should not be
considered punishable by law but that instead a ‘constitutional niche’ should be opened
up so that such acts are considered in political rather than juridical terms.8 Thus, for
Arendt civil disobedience is not only vital for the well-being of democratic societies; it is
also the means by which constitutional legitimacy is created anew.
Robin Celikates draws directly on this radical democratic tradition to argue for a
political conception of civil disobedience that is neither restricted by the requirement of
fidelity to the law nor justified by appeals to individual conscience. He argues that main-
stream liberal approaches to civil disobedience fail to capture fully its characteristics as a
genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to either
ethical or legal action. Instead he argues for a political account of civil disobedience as
collective action aimed at the reinvigoration of political and democratic processes, thereby
addressing forms of deliberative inertia or deformations of existing political institutions,
which in his view are an inevitable feature of democratic life in modern complex societies.
In her contribution Maeve Cooke seeks to integrate the valuable insights she discerns
in the accounts offered by Brownlee, Scheuerman and Celikates within an alternative
account of civil disobedience. Her article provides a general framework for thinking
about civil disobedience as transformative political action. Positing authority as the
mode of power corresponding to obedience, and authority and freedom as internally
4 Philosophy and Social Criticism

related, she proposes a model of individual freedom and political authority as the basis
for this framework. The framework is sufficiently general to allow for context-dependent
variations – for example, as to whether publicity or non-violence is required – while
specifying a view of civil disobedience as transformative action driven by a constellation
of ethical, legal and political concerns. In other writings Cooke emphasizes the impor-
tance of (a reconfigured idea of) conscience for public life;9 in the present article,
however, she merely identifies conscience as an important element in the development
of individual freedom, drawing attention to its place in a normative account of civil
disobedience. Moreover, like Brownlee, she refrains from stipulating conscience as a
necessary driver of such protest, leaving open the question of the particular motivations
of the agents involved in transformative political action of this kind.
The contributions by Christopher Cowley and Anita Chari further challenge current
conceptions of conscience. Cowley focuses on the problems created by Brownlee’s
strong dialogic model of civil disobedience and conscientious conviction, while Chari
draws out the interconnections between embodiment, emotions and conscience. Cowley
tackles the issue of conscientious objection in relation to the hypothetical case of a
general medical practitioner’s ethical objection to performing or authorizing abortion.
Engaging directly with Brownlee’s reformulation of conscientious objection, he argues
that her communicative and dialogic conditions become problematic when applied to
particular cases of conscience-based ethical disagreement.10 Cowley contends that these
conditions are too demanding and categorize ethical issues and disagreements too starkly
and divisively. In his view, Brownlee assumes too hastily that subjects are always
compelled to hold others to account in line with their own principles and moral convic-
tions, as opposed to accepting a degree of ethical plurality and incommensurability.
Where Cowley urges for humility and mutual awareness of incommensurability in
matters of conscience, Anita Chari draws attention to the interrelation between con-
science, embodied feeling and responsiveness towards others. She argues that such
intercorporeal ethical relations can be fostered only through practices of embodied and
emotional self-cultivation, which in turn foster the development of individual con-
science. In this way, Chari challenges views of conscience based solely on cognitive
capacities or moral reasoning and judgement, and argues instead for an integrated
embodied understanding of conscience. Moreover, Chari argues that the development
of embodied consciousness as a form of responsivity to others and the world is central to
the cultivation of critical capacities, which are overlooked in most conventional
approaches but which are fundamental to ethical and political-philosophical inquiry.
These articles engage with the most recent debates surrounding civil disobedience
and conscientious objection, opening up original new paths for thinking about such
forms of protest. They also reveal disagreements about how to understand civil disobe-
dience and about the place of conscience in political protest, inviting further reflection on
and discussion of these questions and issues.

Notes
Danielle Petherbridge wishes to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council and the
European Commission (Marie Curie Actions) for funding this research. Maeve Cooke received no
financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Cooke and Petherbridge 5

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, intro. Michael Meyer (Harmonds-
worth, Mx: Penguin, 1983); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971).
2. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, ‘Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic
Constitutional State’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 30 (1985): 95–116.
3. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, § 56, pp. 368–9.
4. Kimberley Brownlee, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 83.
5. ibid.: 23–4.
6. William E. Scheuerman, ‘Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience: The Case of Edward Snow-
den’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 40(7) (2014): 609–28.
7. Brownlee, Conscience and Conviction.
8. Hannah Arendt, ‘Civil Disobedience’, in her Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1969) pp. 49–102.
9. M. Cooke, ‘Conscience in Public Life’, in C. Laborde and A. Bardon (eds) Religion in Liberal
Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming [2016]).
10. See Brownlee, Conscience and Conviction, pp. 29–47.