The right to disobedience: three angloamerican philosophers on political dissent: Raz, Dworkin, Rawls

Abstract

The article examines in a critical and comparative manner the ideas of J. Raz, R. Dworkin and J. Rawls on the possible and permissible forms of civil disobedience. Beginning with Raz’s inidally starting position that there is not even a prima facie obligation to obey the law, the article movers to explore Dworkin’s concepts of principle and policy-based forms of civil disobedience, and, finally, Rawls’s ideas about the nature and desirability of cecrtain forms of civil disobedience within an otherwise well-ordered and just society. The article highlihts similarties and divergences in the ideas of the three theorists, it goes on to underline the difficulty of legal systems to assimilate the practice of permissible civil disobedience and of legal theorists to work-out the idea of a permissible form of civil disobedience. The article concludes that this may be a paradigmatic difficulty, pointing to the fact that no existing form of human association can exheust or ven make room for all permissible forms of human moral experience.