11 Civil Disobedience, Violence and Terrorism

We have examined a number of ethical issues. We have seen that many accepted practices are open to serious objections. What ought we to do about it? This, too, is an ethical issue. Here are five cases – all ones that actually happened – to consider.

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Oskar Schindler was a minor German industrialist. During the war, he ran a factory near Cracow, Poland. At a time when Polish Jews were being sent to death camps, he assembled a labour force of Jewish inmates from concentration camps and the ghetto, considerably larger than his factory needed, and used several illegal stratagems, including bribing members of the SS and other officials, to protect them. He spent his own money to buy food on the black market to supplement the inadequate official rations he obtained for his workers. By these methods, he was able to save the lives of about 1,200 people.

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Dr. Thomas Gennarelli directed a Head Injury Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. Members of an underground organization called the Animal Liberation Front knew that Gennarelli inflicted head injuries on monkeys there and had been told that the monkeys underwent the experiments without being properly anaesthetised. They also knew that Gennarelli and his collaborators videotaped their experiments to provide a record of what happened during and after the injuries they inflicted. They tried to obtain further information through official channels but were unsuccessful. In May 1984, they broke into the laboratory at night and found thirty-four videotapes. They then systematically destroyed laboratory equipment before leaving with the tapes. The tapes clearly showed conscious monkeys struggling as they were being strapped to an operating table where head injuries were inflicted; they also showed experimenters mocking and laughing at frightened animals about to be used in experiments. When an edited version of the tapes was released to the public, it produced widespread revulsion. Nevertheless, it took a further year of protests, culminating in a sit-in at the headquarters of the government organization that was funding Gennarelli's experiments, before the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services ordered that the experiments stop.

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In 1986, Joan Andrews entered an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, and damaged a suction abortion apparatus. She refused to be represented in court, on the grounds that ‘the true defendants, the pre-born children, received none, and were killed without due process’. Andrews was a supporter of Operation Rescue, an American organization that takes its name, and its authority to act, from the biblical injunction to ‘Rescue those who are drawn toward death and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter.’ Operation Rescue was, at the time, using civil disobedience to shut down abortion clinics, thus, in its view, ‘sparing the lives of unborn babies whom the Rescuers are morally pledged to defend’. Participants blocked the doors of the clinics to prevent physicians and pregnant women seeking abortion from entering. They attempted to dissuade pregnant women from approaching the clinic by ‘sidewalk counselling’ on the nature of abortion. Gary Leber, then an Operation Rescue director, said that between 1987 and 1989 alone, as a direct result of such ‘rescue missions’, at least 421 women changed their minds about having abortions, and the children of these women, who would have been killed, are alive today. Charged with the damage she caused to the Pensacola clinic, Andrews, who had been arrested more than 130 times for her anti-abortion activities, refused to sign a statement promising not to continue her protests. She was sentenced to five years in prison. Since serving that sentence, she has continued to protest, was frequently arrested, and has served more time in prison. Meanwhile, Operation Rescue changed its leadership and its strategy, restricting itself to opposing abortion by legal means. Andrews is no longer associated with the organization.

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In 1976, a young medical practitioner named Bob Brown rafted down the Franklin River in Tasmania's southwest. The wild beauty of the river and the peace of the undisturbed forests around it impressed him deeply. Then, around a bend on the lower reaches of the river, he came across workers for the Hydro-Electric Commission studying the feasibility of building a dam across the river. Brown gave up his medical practice and founded the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, with the object of protecting the state's remaining wilderness areas. Despite vigorous campaigning, the Hydro-Electric Commission recommended the building of the dam, and after some vacillation the State Government, with support from both the business community and the labour unions, decided to go ahead. The Tasmanian Wilderness Society organized a non-violent blockade of the road being built into the dam site. In 1982, Brown, along with many others, was arrested and jailed for four days for trespassing on land controlled by the Hydro-Electric Commission. The blockade turned the dam into a major issue in the Federal election that was then due. The Australian Labor Party, in opposition prior to the election, pledged to explore constitutional means of preventing the dam from going ahead. The election saw the Labor Party elected to office, and legislation passed to stop the dam. Though challenged by the Tasmanian Government, the legislation was upheld by a narrow majority of the High Court of Australia on the grounds that the Tasmanian Southwest was a World Heritage area, and the Federal Government had constitutional powers to uphold the international treaty creating the World Heritage Commission. Today, the Franklin still runs free. Senator Bob Brown leads the Australian Greens in the Australian Senate, where he represents Tasmania.

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On a snowy March day in 2009, 2,500 activists surrounded the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant in Washington DC and shut it down for a few hours in protest against the government's inadequate response to global warming. It was the largest act of civil disobedience for climate change to have taken place in the United States. In an open letter released before the protest, Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry, two of America's most thoughtful writers on environmental questions, wrote: ‘There are moments in a nation's – and a planet's – history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction.’ They believed that that time had come, they said, in regard to climate change, and they were willing to make sacrifices themselves, ‘even if it's only a trip to the jail’. (The protesters stepped over the property line of the plant and invited arrest, but police did not intervene and no one was arrested.) The protest had no noticeable effect on U.S. policy on climate change; but in the days leading up to it, it was announced that the plant would be converted from coal to natural gas, which will reduce its contribution to climate change.

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Do we have an overriding obligation to obey the law? Oskar Schindler, the members of the Animal Liberation Front who took Gennarelli's videotapes, Joan Andrews of Operation Rescue, Bob Brown and those who joined him in front of the bulldozers in Tasmania's southwest, and the protesters who blockaded the Capitol Power Plant were all breaking the law. Were they all acting wrongly?

The question cannot be dealt with by invoking the simplistic formula: ‘The end never justifies the means.’ For all but the strictest adherent of an ethic of rules, the end sometimes does justify the means. Most people think that lying is wrong, other things being equal, yet consider it right to lie in order to avoid causing unnecessary offence or embarrassment – for instance, when a well-meaning relative gives you a hideous vase for your birthday, and when you thank her politely she asks if you really like it. If this relatively trivial end can justify lying, it is even more obvious that some important end – preventing a murder, or saving animals from great suffering – can justify lying. Thus, the principle that the end cannot justify the means is easily breached. The difficult issue is not whether the end can ever justify the means, but which means are justified by which ends?

Individual conscience and the law

There are many people who are opposed to damming wild rivers, to the exploitation of animals, to abortion and to power plants that emit large quantities of greenhouse gases, but they do not break the law in order to stop these activities. No doubt some members of the more conventional conservation, animal liberation and anti-abortion organizations do not commit illegal acts because they do not wish to be fined or imprisoned; but others would be prepared to take the consequences of illegal acts. They refrain only because they respect and obey the moral authority of the law.

Who is right in this ethical disagreement? Are we under any moral obligation to obey the law if the law protects and sanctions things we hold utterly wrong? A clear-cut answer to this question was given by the nineteenth-century American radical, Henry Thoreau. In his essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ – perhaps the first use of this now familiar phrase – he wrote:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

In similar vein, the American philosopher Robert Paul Wolff wrote:

The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the author of his decisions, he will resist the state's claim to have authority over him.

Thoreau and Wolff resolve the conflict between individual and society in favour of the individual. We should do as our conscience dictates, as we autonomously decide we ought to do, not as the law directs. Anything else would be a denial of our capacity for ethical choice.

Thus stated, the issue looks straightforward and the Thoreau-Wolff answer obviously right. So Oskar Schindler, the Animal Liberation Front, Joan Andrews, Bob Brown, Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben were fully justified in doing what they saw to be right rather than what the state laid down as lawful. Is it that simple? There is a sense in which it is undeniable that, as Thoreau says, we ought to do what we think right or, as Wolff puts it, make ourselves the authors of our decisions. Faced with a choice between doing what we think right and what we think wrong, of course we ought to do what we think right. This, though true, is not much help. What we need to know is, not whether we should do what we decide to be right, but how we should decide what is right.

Think about the difference of opinion between members of groups like the Animal Liberation Front and more law-abiding members of organizations like the Humane Society of the United States or Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: ALF members think inflicting pain on animals is, unless justified by extraordinary circumstances, wrong, and if the best way to stop it is by breaking the law then they think that breaking the law is right. HSUS and RSPCA members – let us assume – also think that inflicting pain on animals is wrong, unless justified by extraordinary circumstances, but they think breaking the law is wrong too, and they think that the wrongness of breaking the law cannot be justified by the goal of stopping the unjustifiable infliction of pain on animals. Now suppose there are people opposed to inflicting pain on animals who are uncertain whether they should join the militant lawbreakers or the more conventional animal welfare group. How does telling these people to do what they think right, or to be the author of their own decisions, resolve their uncertainty? The uncertainty is an uncertainty about what is the right thing to do, not about whether to do what one has decided to be right.

This point can be obscured by talk of ‘following one's conscience’ irrespective of what the law commands. Some who talk of ‘following conscience’ mean no more than doing what, on reflection, one thinks right – and this may, as in the case of our imagined HSUS or RSPCA members, depend on what the law commands. Others mean by ‘conscience’, not something dependent on critical reflective judgment, but a kind of internal voice that tells us that something is wrong and may continue to tell us this despite our careful reflective decision, based on all the relevant ethical considerations, that the action is not wrong. In this sense of ‘conscience’, an unmarried woman brought up as a strict Roman Catholic to believe that sex outside marriage is always wrong may abandon her religion and come to hold that there is no sound basis for restricting sex to marriage – yet continue to feel guilty when she has sex. She may refer to these guilt feelings as her ‘conscience’, but if that is her conscience, should she follow it?

To say that we should follow our conscience is unobjectionable – but unhelpful – when ‘following conscience’ means doing what, on reflection, one thinks right. When ‘following conscience’ means doing as one's ‘internal voice’ prompts one to do, however, to follow one's conscience is to abdicate one's responsibility as a rational agent, to fail to take all the relevant factors into account and act on one's best judgment of the rights and wrongs of the situation. The ‘internal voice’ is more likely to be a product of one's upbringing and education than a source of genuine ethical insight.

Presumably neither Thoreau nor Wolff wishes to suggest that we should always follow our conscience in the ‘internal voice’ sense. They must mean, if their views are to be at all plausible, that we should follow our judgment about what we ought to do. In this case, the most that can be said for their recommendations is that they remind us that decisions about obeying the law are ethical decisions that the law itself cannot settle for us. We should not assume, without reflection, that if the law prohibits, say, stealing videotapes from laboratories, it is always wrong to do so – any more than we should assume that if the law prohibits hiding Jews from the Nazis, it is wrong to do so. Law and ethics are distinct. On the other hand, this does not mean that the law carries no moral weight. It does not mean that any action that would have been right if it had been legal must be right although it is in fact illegal. That an action is illegal may be of ethical, as well as legal, significance. Whether it really is ethically significant is a separate question.

Law and order

If we think that a practice is very seriously wrong, and if we have the courage and ability to disrupt this practice by breaking the law, how could the illegality of this action provide an ethical reason against it? To answer a question as specific as this, we should first ask a more general one: why have laws at all?

Human beings are social in nature, but not so social that we do not need to protect ourselves against the risk of being assaulted or killed by our fellow humans. We might try to do this by forming vigilante organizations to prevent assaults and punish those who commit them, but the results would be haphazard and liable to grow into gang warfare. Thus, it is desirable to have, as John Locke said long ago, ‘an established, settled, known law’, interpreted by an authoritative judge and backed with sufficient power to carry out the judge's decisions.

If people voluntarily refrained from assaulting others, or acting in other ways inimical to a harmonious and happy social existence, we might manage without judges and sanctions. We would still need conventions about such matters as which side of the road one drives on. Even an anarchist utopia would have some settled principles of cooperation. So we would have something rather like law. In reality, not everyone is going to voluntarily refrain from behaviour, like assaults, that others cannot tolerate. Nor is it only the danger of individual acts like assaults that make law necessary. In any society there will be disputes: about how much water farmers may take from the river to irrigate their crops, about the ownership of land, about the custody of a child, about the control of pollution and about the level of taxation. Some settled decision procedure is necessary for resolving such disputes economically and speedily, or else the parties to the dispute are likely to resort to force. Almost any established decision procedure is better than a resort to force; for when force is used, people get hurt and the desire for retaliation is likely to lead to more violence. Moreover, most decision procedures produce results at least as beneficial and just as a resort to force.

So laws and a settled decision procedure to generate them are a good thing. This gives us one important reason for obeying the law. By obeying the law, I can contribute to the respect in which the established decision procedure and the laws are held. By disobeying, I set an example to others that may lead them to disobey too. The effect may multiply and contribute to a decline in law and order. In an extreme case, it may lead to civil war.

A second reason for obedience follows immediately from this first. If law is to be effective, then – given the way humans are – there must be some machinery for detecting and penalizing lawbreakers. This machinery will cost something to maintain and operate, and the cost will have to be met by the community. If I break the law, the community will be put to the expense of enforcement.

These two reasons for obeying the law are neither universally applicable nor conclusive. They are not, for instance, applicable to breaches of the law that remain secret. If, late at night when the streets are deserted, I cross the road against the red light, there is no one to be led into disobedience by my example and no one to enforce the law against me. But this is not the kind of illegality we are interested in.

In the absence of reasons for disobeying the law, these two reasons for obeying the law are sufficient to resolve the issue; but where there are conflicting reasons, we must assess each case on its merits in order to see if the reasons for disobedience outweigh these reasons for obedience. If, for instance, illegal acts were the only way of preventing many painful experiments on animals, of saving significant areas of wilderness, or of bringing about deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the importance of the ends would justify running some risk of contributing to a general decline in obedience to law.

Democracy

At this point, some will say: the difference between Oskar Schindler's heroic deeds and the indefensible illegal actions of the Animal Liberation Front, Joan Andrews, the opponents of the Franklin dam, and those who commit civil disobedience to spur action on climate change, is that in Nazi Germany, there were no legal channels that Schindler could use to bring about change. All of the others were living in a democracy and could have made use of legal means of stopping what they considered to be wrong. The existence of legal procedures for changing the law makes the use of illegal means unjustifiable.

It is true that in democratic societies there are legal procedures that can be used by those seeking reforms, but this in itself does not show that the use of illegal means is always wrong. Legal channels may exist, but the prospects of using them to bring about change in the foreseeable future may be very poor. While one makes slow and painful progress – or perhaps no progress at all – through these legal channels, the indefensible wrongs one is trying to stop will be continuing. Prior to the successful struggle to save the Franklin River, an earlier campaign had been fought against a proposal by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission to flood Lake Peddar, a pristine alpine lake situated in a national park. This campaign employed more orthodox political tactics. It failed, and Lake Peddar disappeared under the waters of the dam. Dr. Thomas Gennarelli's laboratory had carried out experiments for several years before the Animal Liberation Front raided it. Without the evidence of the stolen videotapes, it would probably have functioned for many more years. Similarly, Operation Rescue was founded after fourteen years of more conventional political action had failed to reverse the permissive legal situation regarding abortion that has existed in the United States since the Supreme Court declared restrictive abortion laws unconstitutional in 1973. During that period, according to Operation Rescue's Gary Leber, ‘twenty-five million Americans’ were ‘“legally” killed’. The climate change protesters believe, on good evidence, that it will soon be too late to stop dangerous and irreversible climate change. When we take the perspectives of those involved in disobedience, it is easy to see why the existence of legal channels for change does not solve the moral dilemma. An extremely slim chance of bringing about change by legal means is not a strong reason against using illegal means if they are more likely to succeed. The most that can follow from the mere existence of legitimate channels is that because we cannot know, until we have tried them, whether using them will lead to the desired change, their existence is a reason for postponing illegal acts until legal means have been tried and have failed.

Here, the upholder of democratic laws can try another tack: if legal means fail to bring about reform, it shows that the proposed reform does not have the approval of the majority of the electorate; and to attempt to implement change by illegal means against the wishes of the majority would be a violation of the central principle of democracy, majority rule.

The protester can challenge this argument on two grounds, one factual and the other philosophical. The factual claim in the democrat's argument is that a reform that cannot be implemented by legal means lacks the approval of the majority of the electorate. Perhaps this would hold in a direct democracy, in which the electorate voted on each issue, but it is certainly not always true of modern representative democracies. There is no way of ensuring that on any given issue a majority of representatives will take the same view as a majority of their constituents. One can be reasonably confident that a majority of those Americans who saw, on television, excerpts from Gennarelli's videotapes would not have supported the experiments. That, however, is not how decisions are made in a democracy. In choosing between representatives – or in choosing between political parties – voters elect to take one ‘package deal’ in preference to other package deals on offer. It will often happen that in order to vote for policies they favour, voters must go along with other policies they are not keen on. It will also happen that policies voters favour are not offered by any major party. In the case of abortion in the United States, the crucial decision was not made by a majority of voters, but by the Supreme Court. It cannot be overturned by a simple majority of the electors, but only by the Court itself or by the complicated procedure of a constitutional amendment, which can be thwarted by a minority of the electorate.

What if a majority did approve of the wrong that the protesters wish to stop? Would it then be wrong to use illegal means? Here, we have the philosophical claim underlying the democratic argument for obedience, the claim that we ought to accept the majority decision.

The case for majority rule should not be overstated. No sensible democrat would claim that the majority is always right. If 49 percent of the population can be wrong, so can 51 percent. Whether the majority supports the views of the Animal Liberation Front or of Operation Rescue or of the protesters against climate change does not settle the question of whether these views are morally sound. Perhaps the fact that these groups are in a minority – if they are – means that they should reconsider their means. With a majority behind them, they could claim to be acting with democratic principles on their side, using illegal means to overcome flaws in the democratic machinery. Without that majority, all the weight of democratic tradition is against them, and it is they who appear as coercers, trying to force the majority into accepting something against its will. But how much moral weight should we give to democratic principles?

Thoreau, as we might expect, was not impressed by majority decision making. ‘All voting,’ he wrote, ‘is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions.’ In a sense Thoreau was right. If we reject, as we must, the doctrine that the majority is always right, to submit moral issues to the vote is to gamble that what we believe to be right will come out of the ballot with more votes behind it than what we believe to be wrong; and that is a gamble we will often lose.

Nevertheless, we should not be too contemptuous about voting, or even gambling, when the alternative is something worse. Cowboys who agree to play poker to decide matters of honour do better than cowboys who continue to settle such matters in the traditional style of Western movies. A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets – which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting. To some extent, this is a point we have already encountered under the heading ‘law and order’. It applies to any society with an established, peaceful method of resolving disputes; but in a democracy, there is a subtle difference that gives added weight to the outcome of the decision procedure. A method of settling disputes in which no one has greater ultimate power than anyone else is a method that can be recommended to all as a fair compromise between competing claims to power. Any other method must give greater power to some than to others and thereby invites opposition from those who have less. That, at least, is true in the egalitarian age in which we live. In a feudal society in which people accept as natural and proper their status as lord or vassal, there is no challenge to the feudal lord and no compromise would be needed. (I am thinking of an ideal feudal system, as I am thinking of an ideal democracy.) In most parts of the world, those times seem to be gone forever. The breakdown of traditional authority created a need for political compromise. Among possible compromises, giving one vote to each person is uniquely acceptable to all. As such, in the absence of any agreed procedure for deciding on some other distribution of power, it offers, in principle, the firmest possible basis for a peaceful method of settling disputes.

To reject majority rule, therefore, is to reject the best possible basis for the peaceful ordering of society in an egalitarian age. Where else should one turn? To a meritocratic franchise, with extra votes for the more intelligent or better educated, as John Stuart Mill once proposed? Could we agree on who merits extra votes? To a benevolent despot? Many would accept that – if they could choose the despot. In practice, the likely outcome of abandoning majority rule is none of these: it is the rule of those who command the greatest force. Those who carry out disobedience on one issue – say, animal rights – should remember that there will be other issues on which they support the law and want it enforced against those who seek to stop a practice of which they approve. Many people in the animal rights movement believe that women should be able to obtain safe and legal abortions, and many people in the anti-abortion movement see nothing wrong with experimenting on animals, nor with slaughtering them for food. These members of the Animal Liberation Front therefore will want the law enforced against Operation Rescue, and vice versa.

So the principle of majority rule does carry substantial moral weight. Disobedience is easier to justify in a dictatorship like Nazi Germany than in a democracy like those of North America, Europe, India, Japan or Australia today. In a democracy, we should be reluctant to take any action that amounts to an attempt to coerce the majority, for such attempts imply the rejection of majority rule, to which there is no acceptable alternative. There may, of course, be cases where the majority decision is so appalling that coercion is justified, whatever the risk. The obligation to obey a genuine majority decision is not absolute. We show our respect for the principle, not by blind obedience to the majority, but by regarding ourselves as justified in disobeying only in extreme circumstances.

Disobedience, civil or otherwise

If we draw together our conclusions on the use of illegal means to achieve laudable ends, we shall find that: (1) there are reasons why we should normally accept the verdict of an established peaceful method of settling disputes; (2) these reasons are particularly strong when the method is democratic and the verdict represents a genuine majority view; but (3) there are still situations in which the use of illegal means can be justified.

We have seen that there are two distinct ways in which one might try to justify the use of illegal means in a society that is broadly democratic. The first is on the grounds that the decision one is objecting to is not a genuine expression of majority opinion. The second is that although the decision is a genuine expression of the majority view, this view is so seriously wrong that action against the majority is justified. It is disobedience on the first ground that best merits the name ‘civil disobedience’. Here, the use of illegal means can be regarded as an extension of the use of legal means to secure a genuinely democratic decision. The extension may be necessary because the normal channels for securing reform are not working properly. On some issues, elected representatives are overly influenced by special interest groups with large sums to donate to their re-election campaigns. On others, the public is unaware of what is happening. Perhaps the legitimate interests of a minority are being ignored by prejudiced officials. In all these cases, the standard forms of civil disobedience – passive resistance, marches or sit-ins – are appropriate. The blockade of the Hydro-Electric Commission's road into the site of the proposed Franklin River dam, and the protest at Capitol Power Plant, were cases of civil disobedience in this sense.

In these situations, disobeying the law is not an attempt to coerce the majority. Instead, disobedience attempts to inform the majority, to persuade elected representatives that large numbers of electors feel very strongly about the issue, to draw national attention to an issue previously left to bureaucrats, or to appeal for reconsideration of a decision too hastily made. Civil disobedience is an appropriate means to these ends when legal means have failed, because, although it is illegal, it does not threaten or attempt to coerce the majority (though it will usually impose some extra costs or inconvenience on them). By not resisting the force of the law, by remaining non-violent and by accepting the legal penalty for their actions, those who engage in civil disobedience make manifest both the sincerity of their protest and their respect for the rule of law and the fundamental principles of democracy.

So conceived, civil disobedience can often be justified. The justification does not have to be strong enough to override the obligation to obey a democratic decision, because disobedience is an attempt to restore, rather than frustrate, the process of democratic decision making. Disobedience of this kind could be justified by, for instance, the aim of making the public aware of the loss of irreplaceable wilderness caused by the construction of a dam, or of how animals are treated in the laboratories and factory farms that few people ever see.

The use of illegal means to stop something that is undeniably in accordance with the majority view is harder – but not impossible – to justify. We may think it unlikely that a Nazi-style policy of genocide could ever be approved by a majority vote, but if that were to happen it would be carrying respect for majority rule to absurd lengths to regard oneself as bound to accept the majority decision. To oppose evils of that magnitude, we are justified in using virtually any means likely to be effective.

Genocide is an extreme case. To grant that it justifies the use of illegal means even against a majority concedes very little in terms of practical political action. Yet admitting even one exception to the obligation to abide by democratic decisions raises further questions: where is the line to be drawn between evils like genocide, when the obligation is clearly overridden, and less serious issues, when it is not? Moreover, who is to decide on which side of this imaginary line a particular issue falls? Gary Leber, of Operation Rescue, wrote that in the United States alone, since 1973, ‘we've already destroyed four times the number of people that Hitler did’. Ronnie Lee, one of the founders of the Animal Liberation Front in Britain, has also used the Nazi metaphor for what we do to animals, saying: ‘Although we are only one species among many on earth, we've set up a Reich totally dominating the other animals, even enslaving them.’ It is not surprising, then, that these activists consider their disobedience justified; but are they the ones who should be making this decision? If not, who is to decide when an issue is so serious that, even in a democracy, the obligation to obey the law is overridden?

The only answer this question can have is: we must decide for ourselves on which side of the line particular cases fall. There is no other way of deciding, because the society's method of settling issues has already made its decision. The majority cannot be judge in its own case. If we think the majority decision wrong, we must make up our own minds about how gravely it is wrong.

This does not mean that any decision we make on such an issue is subjective or arbitrary. In this book, I have offered arguments about a number of moral issues. If we apply these arguments to the five cases with which this chapter began, they lead to specific conclusions. The racist Nazi policy of murdering Jews was obviously an atrocity, and Oskar Schindler was entirely right to do what he could to save some Jews from falling victim to it. (Given the personal risks he ran, he was also morally heroic to do so.) On the basis of the arguments put forward in Chapter 3 of this book, the experiments that Gennarelli conducted on monkeys were wrong, because they treated sentient creatures as mere things to be used as research tools. To stop such experiments is a desirable goal, and if breaking into Gennarelli's laboratory and stealing his videotapes was the only way to achieve it, that was justifiable. Similarly, for reasons explored in Chapter 10, to drown the Franklin valley in order to generate a relatively small amount of electricity could only have been based on values that took a short-term perspective and were indefensibly human-centred. Civil disobedience was an appropriate means of testifying to the importance of the values that had been overlooked by those who favoured the dam. The same can be said about civil disobedience against climate change – indeed here, given the extent of the disaster likely to occur if greenhouse gases are not cut very sharply over the next few years, the question that might be asked is: why has there, as yet, been so little civil disobedience?

On the other hand, in Chapter 6 we found that the arguments that lie behind Joan Andrews’ activities are flawed. The human fetus is not entitled to the same sort of protection as older human beings, and those who think of abortion as morally equivalent to murder are wrong. On this basis, a campaign of civil disobedience against abortion is not justifiable. But it is important to realise that the mistake lies in Andrews’ moral reasoning about abortion, not in her moral reasoning about civil disobedience. If abortion really were morally equivalent to murder, we all ought to be out there blocking the doors to the abortion clinics.

This makes life difficult, of course. It is not likely that Andrews will be convinced by the arguments in this book. Her reliance on biblical quotations suggests that her opposition to abortion is fundamentally religious, so there is no easy way of convincing her that her civil disobedience is unjustified. We may regret this, but there is nothing to be done about it. There is no simple moral rule that will enable us to declare when disobedience is justifiable and when it is not, without going into the rights and wrongs of the target of the disobedience. (As we saw, however, Operation Rescue no longer practices civil disobedience, perhaps because it came to the conclusion that those tactics were not helping it to achieve its goal of ending abortion in America.)

When we are convinced that we are trying to stop something that really is a serious moral wrong, we still have other moral questions to ask ourselves. We must balance the magnitude of the evil we are trying to stop against the possibility that our actions will contribute to a decline in respect for law and for democracy. We must also take into account the likelihood that our actions will fail in their objective and provoke a reaction that will reduce the chances of success by other means. (For instance, violent attacks on experimenters enable defenders of research on animals to brand all critics of animal experimentation as terrorists.)

One result of a consequentialist approach to this issue that may at first seem odd is that the more deeply ingrained the habit of obedience to democratic rule, the more easily disobedience can be defended. There is no paradox here, however, merely another instance of the homely truth that young plants need to be cosseted, but well established specimens can take rougher treatment. Thus, on a given issue disobedience might be justifiable in Britain or the United States but not in a country that has recently been through dictatorship and civil war and is seeking to establish a democratic system of government.

Every case differs, and these issues cannot be settled in general terms. When the evils to be stopped are neither utterly horrendous (like genocide) nor relatively harmless (like the design for a new national flag), reasonable people will differ on the justifiability of attempting to thwart the implementation of a considered democratic decision. Where illegal means are used with this aim, an important step has been taken, for disobedience then ceases to be ‘civil disobedience’ if by that term is meant disobedience that is justified by an appeal to principles that the community itself accepts as the proper way of running its affairs. It may still be best for such obedience to be civil in the other sense of the term, which makes a contrast with the use of violence or the tactics of terrorism.

Violence and terrorism

As we have seen, civil disobedience intended as a means of attracting publicity or persuading the majority to reconsider is much easier to justify than disobedience intended to coerce the majority. Violence is obviously harder still to defend. Some go so far as to say that the use of violence as a means, particularly violence against people, is never justified, no matter how important the end.

Opposition to the use of violence can be on the basis of an absolute rule or an assessment of its consequences. Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other ‘no matter what’ prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent. Suppose we have an opportunity to assassinate a tyrant who is systematically murdering those he suspects of being opposed to his rule. We know that if the tyrant dies he is very likely to be replaced by a popular opposition leader, now in exile, who will restore the rule of law. If we say that violence is always wrong, and refuse to carry out the assassination, mustn't we bear some responsibility for the tyrant's future murders? If the objections made to the acts and omissions distinction in Chapter 7 were sound, those who do not use violence to prevent greater violence have to take responsibility for the violence they could have prevented. Thus, the rejection of the acts and omissions distinction makes a crucial difference to the discussion of violence, for it opens the door to a plausible argument in defence of violence.

Marxists used this argument to rebut attacks on their support for violent revolution. In his classic indictment of the social effects of nineteenth-century capitalism, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels wrote:

If one individual inflicts a bodily injury upon another which leads to the death of the person attacked we call it manslaughter; on the other hand, if the attacker knows beforehand that the blow will be fatal we call it murder. Murder has also been committed if society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to premature and unnatural ends. Their death is as violent as if they had been stabbed or shot…Murder has been committed if thousands of workers have been deprived of the necessities of life or if they have been forced into a situation in which it is impossible for them to survive…Murder has been committed if society knows perfectly well that thousands of workers cannot avoid being sacrificed so long as these conditions are allowed to continue. Murder of this sort is just as culpable as the murder committed by an individual. At first sight it does not appear to be murder at all because responsibility for the death of the victim cannot be pinned on any individual assailant. Everyone is responsible and yet no one is responsible, because it appears as if the victim has died from natural causes. If a worker dies no one places the responsibility for his death on society, though some would realize that society has failed to take steps to prevent the victim from dying. But it is murder all the same.

One might object to Engels’ use of the term ‘murder’. The objection would resemble the arguments discussed in Chapter 8, when we considered whether our failure to aid the starving makes us murderers. We saw that there is no intrinsic significance in the distinction between acts and omissions; but from the point of view of motivation and the appropriateness of blame, most cases of failing to prevent death are not equivalent to murder. The same would apply to the cases Engels describes. Engels tries to pin the blame on ‘society’, but society is not a person or a moral agent and cannot be held responsible in the way an individual can.

Still, this is nit-picking. Whether or not ‘murder’ is the right term, whether or not we are prepared to describe as ‘violent’ the deaths of malnourished workers in unhealthy and unsafe factories, Engels’ fundamental point stands. These deaths are a wrong of the same order of magnitude as the deaths of hundreds of people in a terrorist bombing. It would be one-sided to say that violent revolution is always absolutely wrong, without taking account of the evils that the revolutionaries are trying to stop. If violent means had been the only way of changing the conditions Engels describes, those who opposed the use of violent means would have been responsible for the continuation of those conditions.

Some of the practices we have been discussing in this book are violent, either directly or by omission. In the case of nonhuman animals, our treatment is often violent by any description. Those who regard the human fetus as a moral subject will obviously consider abortion to be a violent act against it. In the case of humans at or after birth, what are we to say of an avoidable situation in which some countries have infant mortality rates twenty times higher than others, and a person born in one country can expect to live thirty years more than someone born in another country? Is this violence? As we saw in Chapter 9, President Museveni of Uganda has said that by their release of greenhouse gases, the industrialized nations are committing aggression against developing nations in tropical regions. Again, it doesn't really matter what term we use: in their effects, these practices are as terrible as violence.

Absolutist condemnations of violence stand or fall with the distinction between acts and omissions. Therefore they fall. There are, however, strong consequentialist objections to the use of violence. We have been premising our discussion on the assumption that violence might be the only means of changing things for the better. Consequentialists must ask whether violence ever is the only means to an important end or, if not the only means, the swiftest means. They must also ask about the long-term effects of pursuing change by violent means. Could one defend, on consequentialist grounds, a condemnation of violence that is in practice, if not in principle, as all-encompassing as that of the absolute pacifist? One might attempt to do so by emphasizing the hardening effect that the use of violence has: how committing one murder, no matter how ‘necessary’ or ‘justified’ it may seem, lessens the resistance to committing further murders. Is it likely that people who have become inured to acting violently will be able to create a better society? This is a question on which the historical record is relevant. The course taken by several revolutions – from the French revolution of 1789 to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and, perhaps most horrifically of all, the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia – must shake the belief that a burning desire for social justice provides immunity to the corrupting effects of violence. There are, admittedly, other examples that may be read the other way; but it would take a considerable number of examples to outweigh the legacy of Robespierre, Stalin and Pol Pot.

The consequentialist pacifist can also use another argument – similar to the argument I urged against the suggestion that we should allow starvation to reduce the populations of the poorest nations to the level at which they could feed themselves. Like this policy, violence involves the certainty of causing harm, which is said to be justified by the prospects of future benefits. The future benefits, however, can never be certain; and even in the few cases where violence does bring about desirable ends, we can rarely be sure that the ends could not have been achieved equally soon by non-violent means. What, for instance, was achieved by the thousands of deaths and injuries caused by the decades of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland? Only counter-terrorism by extremist Protestant groups. Or think of the completely pointless death and suffering caused by the Baader-Meinhoff gang in Germany, or the Red Brigade in Italy. What has the cause of the Palestinian people gained from terrorism, other than a less compromising, more ruthless Israel than the one against which they began their struggle so many years – and lives – ago? For all the spectacular operational success that Al Qaeda achieved on September 11, 2001, it seems wildly unlikely that its murder of thousands of Americans will have brought it any closer to achieving an end to American military dominance in the Middle East, let alone coercing the United States into becoming an Islamic state. One may sympathize with the ends for which some – not all! – of these groups were or are fighting, but if the means used involve undeniable harm to innocent people, and hold no promise of gaining their ends, it is wrong to use them. These consequentialist arguments add up to a strong case against the use of violence as a means, particularly when the violence is indiscriminately directed against ordinary members of the public, as terrorist violence typically is. For sound practical reasons, terrorism is never justified.

There are other kinds of violence that cannot be ruled out so convincingly. There is, for instance, the previously mentioned assassination of a murderous tyrant. Here, provided the murderous policies are an expression of the tyrant's personality rather than part of the institutions he commands, the violence is strictly limited, the aim is to end much more widespread violence, there is no other way to stop the more widespread violence, and success from a single violent act may be highly probable, violence is justifiable.

Violence may be limited in a different way. The cases we have been considering have involved violence against people. These are the standard cases that come to mind when we discuss violence, but there are other kinds of violence. Animal Liberation Front members have damaged laboratories, cages and equipment used to confine, hurt or kill animals, but they avoid violent acts against any animal, human or nonhuman. (Not all militant animal rights organizations have followed this policy – at least two people have been injured by explosive devices left by people claiming to be acting in defence of animals. These actions have been condemned by other groups, including the Animal Liberation Front.)

Damage to property is not as serious a matter as injuring or killing; hence, it may be justified on grounds that would not justify anything that caused harm to sentient beings. This does not mean that violence to property is of no significance. Property means a great deal to some people, and one would need to have strong reasons to justify destroying it. But such reasons may exist. The justification might not be anything so epoch-making as transforming society. As in the case of the raid on Gennarelli's laboratory, it might be the specific and short-term goal of saving a number of animals from a painful experiment performed on animals only because of society's speciesist bias. Again, whether such an action would really be justifiable from a consequentialist point of view would depend on the details of the actual situation. Someone lacking expertise could easily be mistaken about the value of an experiment or the degree of suffering it involved. Moreover, will not the result of damaging equipment and liberating one lot of animals simply be that more equipment is bought and more animals are bred? What is to be done with the liberated animals? Will illegal acts mean that the government will resist moves to reform the law relating to animal experiments, arguing that it must not appear to be yielding to violence? All these questions would need to be answered satisfactorily before one could come to a decision in favour of damaging a laboratory.

Violence is not easy to justify, even if it is violence against property rather than against sentient beings or violence against a dictator rather than indiscriminate violence against the general public. Nevertheless, the differences between kinds of violence are important, because only by observing them can we condemn one kind of violence – the terrorist kind – in virtually absolute terms. The differences are blurred by sweeping condemnations of everything that falls under the general heading ‘violence’.