I know there's a class of civic/legal philosophy that says that people should stick around and face the consequences of breaking unjust laws, even if the law is unjust.
I admit, despite hearing the position stated, I've never really been able to reconcile why this would be deemed a reasonable position at all.
Clearly it plays to the interests of the authorities enacting the unjust laws, who would want people to be within their grasp and thus punished when the law is broken. And it would be beneficial for such people to try to instill in the general populace, and the lawbreakers themselves, beliefs that they should just stick around and "get what's coming to them".
But as a general philosophy I admit it seems prima facie absurd to me. If you believe that a law is so unjust that its ok to break it, i really don't see how a reasonable person would expect that a perpetrator should hang around and be punished. Have the strategic option to choose to do so to further one's ends, sure. But a duty or expectation that one should be punished for breaking an unjust law...I just can't compute it.
People with a... err...i can't think of a more appropriate word apart from "hard-on", so forgive the vernacular...for authority, sure, i can understand and predict they would have such a position. But I wouldn't call that reasonable.
If anything, it sounds like a nice example for an intro into discussing Nietzchean master/slave morality, or even the Ted Kaczynski's concept of oversocialization :P
I know there's a class of civic/legal philosophy that says that people should stick around and face the consequences of breaking unjust laws, even if the law is unjust.
I admit, despite hearing the position stated, I've never really been able to reconcile why this would be deemed a reasonable position at all.
Clearly it plays to the interests of the authorities enacting the unjust laws, who would want people to be within their grasp and thus punished when the law is broken. And it would be beneficial for such people to try to instill in the general populace, and the lawbreakers themselves, beliefs that they should just stick around and "get what's coming to them".
But as a general philosophy I admit it seems prima facie absurd to me. If you believe that a law is so unjust that its ok to break it, i really don't see how a reasonable person would expect that a perpetrator should hang around and be punished. Have the strategic option to choose to do so to further one's ends, sure. But a duty or expectation that one should be punished for breaking an unjust law...I just can't compute it.
People with a... err...i can't think of a more appropriate word apart from "hard-on", so forgive the vernacular...for authority, sure, i can understand and predict they would have such a position. But I wouldn't call that reasonable.
If anything, it sounds like a nice example for an intro into discussing Nietzchean master/slave morality, or even the Ted Kaczynski's concept of oversocialization :P