Last week, in “A Little Creative Misdirection and Misunderstanding,” we addressed the issue of whether people should decide for themselves which laws they want to obey. Of course, ultimately that is something everyone does anyway, but we were looking at it from the perspective of people as members of society, not as individuals with no connection to others.
Aristotle
Because human beings are, as Aristotle noted, “political animals” living by nature in consciously structured social environments, a network of institutions we call the common good, people must ordinarily act in conformity with those institutions, or society will cease to function. Institutions are social habits. Living in groups means people should, indeed ordinarily must go along not just to get along, but to realize their fullest possible humanity or (in philosophical language) become virtuous.
Breaking a law because you find it convenient to do so or think it benefits you personally is directly contrary to one of the “laws” of social justice. That is that the common good be kept inviolate. To attack or to endanger the common good to attain some private end, no matter how good or how necessary this latter may be in its own order, is socially unjust and is wrong. This “goes double” when the private end is potentially harmful to oneself and others, such as disabling or circumventing the emission controls on an automobile.
There is some slack when a law is clearly unjust or even nonsensical, but even then, breaking the law has consequences far beyond the individual act of simply breaking the law. It should never be done for mere personal advantage, but when forced to, to preserve life, liberty, or property, or the injustice is such that breaking the law is the right thing to do . . . and even then, it has consequences, and the decision must be made whether the cost is worth it.
Rosa Parks
True, many people especially these days when “social justice” generally means redistribution to satisfy individual wants and needs and not reforming the institutions of the social order to provide the environment within which individual wants and needs — especially virtue — can be satisfied, think this is nonsense. They assume as a matter of course that what is good for them (or that they think is good for them) must be okay. In a sort of reverse stoicism, they somehow believe what they do is of no concern to others because those others do not matter; nothing matters except the self.
That is why we were not really surprised when one of our readers protested last week’s posting. As this individual said, “Sometimes absurd or dangerous laws that violate a person’s civil rights should be broken. An example was when a Black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a White passenger. You pay the consequences, but you call attention to the law by your civil disobedience. You will also recall Ghandi did the same in the 1940s by harvesting sea salt when a British law decreed salt harvesting was a state monopoly.”
We thought we had already addressed this issue in both the first and second postings (and again, above). As we said, when you break a law, even for the best reasons, you accept the consequences. If done for the right reason, it becomes part of the message you are sending. The point we were making is that it cannot stop with disobedience and often shouldn’t start there. That is what the act of social justice is about.
Dorothy Day
Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a White passenger would have been meaningless if it had not led to action that ended by changing the law — preceded by acts of social justice to get people to accept the change, first. We underscored this by noting Dorothy Day actively accepted the consequences of breaking the law.
The point today is that Dorothy Day’s actions were typically an incomplete act of social justice. Admirable, even essential as they were, they were individual acts. They accomplished nothing other than to focus attention on the situation, and — above all — were demands that someone else do something. (This was possibly an aspect of what she regarded as her anarchism, but that is the subject for another time.)
Social justice, while specifically social, is also a personal responsibility, not something you pass off to others. Day’s refusal to vote to elect representatives who would change the laws she believed to be unjust was contrary to social justice because it left matters up to others. She provided a catalyst, but nothing more. Such activism, as CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree pointed out, may give the activist a great feeling of personal virtue, but it puts the work of actually changing the system onto others.
Mahatma Gandhi
In any event, breaking even an unjust law is a two-edged sword. It can lead to changing the law, but as was the case with the Volstead Act, which led to giving organized crime an immense boost, can cause more harm than good.
So, what is the proper, socially just response to a bad law or even a bad system? Father Ferree addressed this when describing a characteristic of social justice: that, socially speaking, no one is ever helpless when confronted with a social injustice. As he said, in this heavily edited extract from his pamphlet Introduction to Social Justice (1948),
Father William Ferree, S.M., Ph.D.
Another characteristic of Social Justice is that in Social Justice there is never any such thing as helplessness! No problem is ever too big or too complex; no field is ever too vast. Let us take an actual example of such an insoluble problem of the past.
The following problem was proposed on a national religious radio hookup. A businessman was lamenting “that too rivals reduced business ethics three principles: 1) Everybody is doing it; 2) If you don’t do it, someone else will; and 3) You can’t do business nowadays with old-fashioned principles.”
“It’s easy enough,” they add, “for you preachers to tell us to stand firm, but we must do what the others do or be sunk.”
The radio preacher happened to be an individualist; his individualistic solution: “Right is right if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong if everybody does it. What the businessman needs, and what the professional man needs is a new declaration of independence.”
Notice the first part of this answer dodges the question. If the businessman had not known already the difference between right and wrong, he would not have called the system wrong!
The second part of the reply is more to the point; but that “new declaration of independence” which sounds so nice in a speech, is precisely what the businessman meant by the last three words of his complaint: “We must do what the others do or be sunk.”
No other answer — except a frank admission that the problem is insoluble — could be given from an individualistic point of view. The answer which Pope Pius XI gave to his own statement of the same problem was not individualistic at all — it was social.
Pius XI pointed out the employer who found himself helpless to ensure justice had a duty to organize, among the other employers, institutions which would make the practice of justice possible.
So, while it might seem allowing people to break the law for personal gain is a great and noble thing to do, it is harmful both individually and socially, even if the law is a bad or silly law. And if the law is not unjust, then allowing somebody to break it with impunity does far more harm than any presumable good gained.
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