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Corruption and Civil Disobedience
The responsibilities of a person engaging in civil disobedience hinge on the distinction between and "unjust law" and an "illegitimate government."
In "The Crito", Plato said that someone who broke an unjust law had to accept punishment as part of the bargain.
But suppose an entire government is illegitimate and unjust? In such a case, saving a lawful government, preserving public order, is not a moral value to be factored into the civil disobedience equation. The rule of "The Crito" should not apply.
A bright voice of the Enlightenment, who inspired the first American Revolution, said that force may be used to oppose even the highest magistrates if they themselves are lawbreakers:
"May the commands then of a prince be opposed? [...] Force is to be opposed to nothing but to unjust and unlawful force."
Locke continues:
Is this not the distinction between a lawful government having unjust laws and an illegitimate government?
More recent scholarship has upheld this distinction between civil disobedience and what could be called "militant" action:
Please compare these two government edicts:
Hitler's rise to power was completely legal. [2] So why do many consider the Nazi government illegitimate? Because the Nazi's denied legal protection to entire classes of human beings. In this regard, is there any moral distinction between their policies and our own federal government's policy toward unborn children? The answer is no. Do those engaging in civil disobedience owe a duty of self-surrender to such a government? The answer must also be no.
Note well that the leaders of National Socialism rejected the Christian traditions of the German peoples, and instead embraced Wagner's Odinism and Nietzsche's atheism. John Paul II accurately described the Nazi mentality as "neo-pagan." This triptych of atheism, paganism and satanism is now being embraced by America."Wherever law ends, tyranny begins [...] and whoever in authority exceeds the power given to him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under his command [...] upon the subject which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate, and acting without authority, may be opposed as any other man who by force invades the right of another. And why this should not hold in the highest, as well as in the most inferior magistrate, I would gladly be informed."
John Locke Of Civil Government "Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs [...] many wrong and inconvenient laws will born by the people without mutiny [...] But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves."
"Civil disobedience [...] is clearly distinct from militant action [...] the militant does not accept [the existing political system] as one which is nearly just or reasonably so, he believes [...] that it departs widely from its professed principles [...] While his action is conscientious in its own terms, he does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power). Instead he seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption or resistance [...] to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to avoid the penalty [...] [since this would] express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which he is opposed. [...] Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified." [1] [Emphasis added]
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
"The Reichsgericht itself refused to recognize Jews living in Germany as persons in the legal sense" Supreme Court of Germany (1936) per Ernst Fraenkel, German legal scholar
"The word "person" as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn" Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 158 (1973) Justice Harold Blackmun writing for the Court
Footnotes:
[1] A Theory of Justice, p.367 Harvard University Press, 1971