Civil disobedience

In plain terms

Breaking a law to change it is a strange thing to defend. If the law is legitimate, you should obey it; if it is not, why frame the breach as an appeal rather than as resistance?

The answer is in the details of how it is done. Civil disobedience is public rather than covert, non-violent, aimed at a specific injustice rather than at the system, and undertaken by people who accept the penalty. Each of those is doing work: they distinguish the act from ordinary lawbreaking and make it legible as an argument rather than as an assault.

Accepting the penalty is the part most often dropped and the part that carries the most weight. Someone who breaks a law and submits to punishment is demonstrating that they take the legal order seriously enough to bear its cost, which is what makes the appeal to the majority's conscience credible.

As a philosopher would put it

Rawls's definition: a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of government. It is addressed to the sense of justice of the majority, presupposes a nearly just society, and is a last resort after normal channels have failed.

The conditions are demanding and contested. The near-justice requirement excludes the cases where injustice is gravest; the last-resort condition can be used indefinitely to defer action; and the acceptance of punishment, which Rawls treats as expressing fidelity to law, has been criticised as requiring a sacrifice from precisely those with least to give.

King's Letter from Birmingham Jail argues the practice from inside it, distinguishing just from unjust laws and answering the charge of untimeliness. Later work broadens the category to include covert and property-destroying action, which stretches the concept and forfeits the feature that made it distinctive.

What is actually disputed

Whether the standard conditions are too restrictive.

Rawls's account fits a well-ordered society with functioning channels and a majority whose sense of justice can be appealed to. Where those do not hold - and in the historical cases most often cited, they did not - the conditions describe a practice unavailable to the people who most needed it.

Critics also press the acceptance of punishment. Treating it as a mark of fidelity turns a strategic choice into a moral requirement, and it asks most from those least able to afford a conviction. Defenders reply that without it the act is indistinguishable from ordinary evasion.

The hardest current question is the boundary. If sabotage, covert action or property destruction count, then the category includes acts whose whole justification rested on their being public and non-violent - and the concept stops doing the work it was invented for.