The Objectors
Santoni, Ronald E.
The Objectors A Conflict of Loyalities: The Case for Selective Conscientious Objection, edited by James Finn. Pegasus. 287 pp. $6 cloth; $1.95 paperback. Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice,...
...Ramsey seems obsessed by the possibility that the selective CO...
...It raises and speaks to some highly significant questions...
...Moreover, a number of the authors, without distinguishing sufficiently between a command to kill and a command, for example, to pay war taxes, tend to over-dramatize selective conscientious objection as a "potentially explosive principle," one which would invite general disobedience to law and, thus, anarchy...
...All but one of the essays were written expressly for this volume...
...Beginning with Thoreau's classic essay on civil disobedience, Bedau proceeds to order his materials around the acts of disobedience and fundamental issues raised by the civil rights and peace movements...
...Yet, however one thinks about the issue, one leaves Finn's book with the feeling that general civil disobedience has been one of the central worries of many of the authors...
...General Her-shey's quoted statement that "the conscientious objector by my theory is best handled if no one hears of him," or even former Vice President Hubert Humphrey's 1967 comment that "I don't think you can leave it up to individuals as to which wars they want to fight," hardly give one the impression that American society has recognized the urgency or faced the agonizing seriousness of these matters of conscience...
...I say this in spite of my impression that the process by which Ramsey and O'Brien warm up to selective conscientious objection seems to bestow on it what the philosopher Antony Flew has called "the death by a thousand qualifications...
...Provocative answers to this "worry" are also offered in Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, edited by Hugo Bedau, chairman of the department of philosophy at Tufts University...
...Special note must be made of Rawls' penetrating essay, in which he struggles to delineate the conditions which justify civil disobedience in a constitutional democracy, and of Pech's perceptive essay, where he strives to offer an understanding of the radical disobedience of the Black Power movement and other groups which refuse to address their grievances to "the institutionalized avenues of due process and redress...
...cannot ground his case on them...
...Both of these books substantially illuminate topics about which too many Americans know too little...
...It offers both a study of civil disobedience and an account of some of the differences among dissent, civil disobedience, and resistance...
...Is civil disobedience an obligation or a right...
...Is one actually committing civil disobedience when one is disobeying laws which are obviously unjust and constitutionally unsound...
...Although a few of the essays stray too far from the main issue of the book, and others show a surprising sympathy for the arguments against selective conscientious objection, the total presentation not only represents a searching and engaging debate but supports the rights of the selective CO...
...There are other noteworthy features of this book...
...And to this may be added the sensitive and astute observation of John Rawls that, even if "legitimate civil disobedience" does pose a threat to civil peace, "the responsibility falls not so much on those who protest as upon those whose abuse of authority and power justifies such opposition...
...Reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni The civil rights movement, black militancy, and an unspeakably horrible Vietnam war have combined to make the issues of civil disobedience and selective conscientious objection among the most important and urgent concerns of our time...
...To the claim that any act of civil disobedience might lead to general disobedience of all laws, Richard Wasser-strom offers a succinct judgment: "At a minimum," he contends, "the appeal to 'But what if everyone did that?' cannot by itself support the claim that one has an absolute obligation to obey the law—that disobeying the law can never be truly justified...
...The contributors include Michael Harrington, Arnold Kaufman, John Courtney Murray, William V. O'Brien, Quentin L. Quade, Paul Ramsey, and Mulford Sibley...
...7.50 cloth...
...Bedau's book, viewed as a whole, challenges us to think of the law as more a question than an absolute oracle, as more a fallible voice of our body politic than an infallible command...
...These are but illustrations of the queries...
...Is civil disobedience justifiable by "the appeal to conscience...
...Too many of the writers seem to me to be institutionalized by concerns of the establishment and of national self-interest...
...To these thinkers and to the millions of others in American society who think similarly, Kaufman offers a challenging response: "Those who spend energies worrying about the threat of anarchy would normally be better advised to spend their time remedying injustice...
...He devotes the final portion of his anthology to a kind of philosophical symposium on the meaning and justifiability of civil disobedience...
...282 pp...
...In A Conflict of Loyalties: The Case for Selective Conscientious Objection, James Finn, editor of Worldview, brings together nine essays dealing with moral, philosophical, theological, legal, and political aspects of the problem posed by the conscientious objector to a particular war...
...Yet they hardly set the permeating tone of the book...
...It is my belief that in a nuclear age nationalism is an anachronism—perhaps even a disease—and that man, if he is to survive, must subordinate his tribal interests to man's needs...
...At least two of the contributors, Kaufman and Quade, criticize the majority report of the President's National Advisory Commission on Selective Service...
...This collection includes not only celebrated essays by Harris Wofford, Jr., A. J. Muste, and Bertrand Russell, and testimonies of conscientious disobedience from individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Bigelow, and Richard M. Boardman, but also technical, theoretical analyses by H. B. Acton, John Rawls, Richard Wasser-strom, and Bruce Pech...
...Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, edited by Hugo Adam Be-dau...
...While these issues convulse our society, we cannot afford to remain uninformed, to respond mainly at a visceral level, or to ignore literature of this sort...
...may not indeed be "conscientious...
...Does civil disobedience imply a commitment of any extent to non-violence...
...O'Brien appears to succumb to the disturbing logic that because, literally interpreted, the Nuremberg principles are widely violated in contemporary warfare, therefore the selective CO...
...It is therefore heartening to read two books which, despite certain shortcomings, attempt to represent the depth and complexities of these issues, and show prominent thinkers of varied persuasions struggling to confront them at a penetrating and intense level...
Vol. 34 • February 1970 • No. 2
