Good Citizens and Bad Laws

Recently, while driving on the Frigate-Bay Road, I was listening to my car radio and one of the radio talk shows was on. I heard the host of the show said that at the last parliament sitting the laws which were passed in the house are illegal and immoral. The host also spoke about the Constituency Boundaries Commission Report and stated that His Lordship Darshan Ramdhandi ruled that the said report is ‘null and void and of no effect’.  

 

The host did not mentioned that the case was based on three grounds i.e. the information used for the decision to change the boundaries should be of preliminary census, which it is was; that the chairperson was bias; which the chairperson was not, according to the His Lordship; and that the commission failed in its consultation process, which it did, according to His Lordship. As a result the ‘Claimants’ claimed it as a victory because the boundaries remained unchanged and the commission has to go back to the drawing board. However, the host also stated that the government is illegal and all laws passed by this government in parliament are illegal and immoral. 

 

Having heard this, my thoughts journeyed back to laws passed during to the Spanish Inquisition that permitted large numbers of people to be tortured and killed for having different religious beliefs from the crown and the laws of Nazi Germany that demanded Jews to give themselves up to be transported to concentration camps and often killed.  Yes, my thoughts journeyed back to my people who was stolen from Africa and brought to St. Kitts-Nevis under immoral laws and governmental edicts, where some were killed and the remainders really suffered even under colonial rule which still exist today.  

 

Having journeyed back, I asked myself the question; can one be a good or moral citizen while enforcing or obeying a bad or immoral law? Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau agreed with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all. There is a well-known story about Henry David Thoreau, who was jailed for non-payment of what he considered unfair taxes. When he was asked by a friend, “What are you doing in jail?” He answered, “What are you doing out of jail?”  The point of the story is that if a law is wrong, a good or moral citizen is honour-bound to disobey that law. In support of this statement, Fink (1977: 190) in his book ‘Moral Philosophy’ noted “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”.  If this is true, what would happen to the stability of our Federation?  

 

Hence, while to follow all laws regardless of their intrinsic morality may set up a situation like Nazi Germany, if we as good citizens of this federation agree with the proposition that an unjust law is no law at all, we may set up a situation in which all citizens follow or disobey laws at will depending on their own conscience. If one held a relativist view of morality, specifically the belief that one can intuit morals or decide morality on an individual basis, then two people holding different moral positions could both be right even though one position might be inconsistent with the law.  

 

Let us look at it from an absolutist view, which holds that there is only one universal truth, which would mean that if one knew a law to be wrong based on this universal truth, then that person would be morally obliged to disobey the law. Evidentially, either position could support civil disobedience. 

 

A good example of this is Martin Luther King, Jr., who advocated breaking certain laws thought to be wrong. Notice how he defends his law breaking in the following quote (cited by Barry 1985, ii): 

 

[T]here are two types of laws [:] just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

 

 In closing, it is safe to say that many  good and moral citizens of this federation follows a higher law of behavior that usually, but not necessarily, conforms to human law. However, it is an exceptional person who willfully and publicly disobeys laws he or she believes to be wrong.