Evaluation of Dworkins and Habermass Approach to Civil Disobedience E

Evaluation of Dworkin's and Habermas's Approach to Civil Disobedience The following essay will attempt to evaluate the approach taken by Dworkin and Habermas on their views of civil disobedience. The two main pieces of literature referred to will be Dworkin?s paper on 'Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest?' and Habermas's paper on 'Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State.' An outline of both Dworkin's and Habermas's approach will be given , further discussion will then focus on a reflective evaluation of these approaches. Firstly though, it is worth commenting on civil disobedience in a more general context. Most would agree that civil disobedience is a 'vital and protected form of political communication in modern constitutional democracies' and further the 'civil disobedience has a legitimate if informal place in the political culture of the community.' Civil disobedience can basically be broken down into two methods, either intentionally violating the law and thus incurring arrest (persuasive), or using the power of the masses to make prosecution too costly to pursue (non persuasive). Dworkin takes a categorical approach to civil disobedience, by breaking it down into a number of different types then applying certain conditions to each type to assess wether the disobedience should be allowed or not. He states that there are three different types of disobedience based on the motivations behind the action. These are integrity based, justice based and policy based civil disobedience. Briefly, integrity based disobedience is motivated when the law requires people to do something that goes against their personal integrity and is usually a matter of urgency. Dworkin gives an example of this as the Northern American citizen who covertly harbours and shelters slaves from the Southern citizens in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act.# The second type of disobedience, justice based, is motivated by a peoples desire to oppose unjust policy in the hopes of reversing the policy, for example the civilian protest about the war in Iraq recently. Thirdly, policy based disobedience is somewhat different to the first two in that it is usually activated by minority groups who think a policy is dangerously unwise. As Dworkin puts it ?they think they know what is in the majority?s own interests.? Given these three types of disobedie... ...rity is not necessarily a clear majority and also that majority decisions are quite often made under the pressures of time and lack of resources. Both Dworkin and Habermas have the same general views on civil disobedience (they both believe it is an essential form of political communication in a democratic state) but when they begin to examine the issues more closely, the differences in justification begin to become apparent between the two writers as outlined above. Bibliography. 1. Articles/Books/Reports Ronald Dworkin, ?Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest? in A Matter of Principle (1985) 104-16. JÃ ¼rgen Habermas, ?Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State? (1985) 30 Berkeley Journal of Sociology 95-116. 2. Other Sources Andrew Calabrese, Virtual non-violence? Civil disobedience and political violence in the information age (2004) 6 Emerald Info 326 available at http://spot.colorado.edu/~calabres/Calabrese%20(civl%20dis).pdf William Smith, Democracy, Deliberation and Disobedience (Paper presented at the UK Association for Legal and Social Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2003).