What does Henry David Thoreau say about civil disobedience?
Thoreau argued that the government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens. As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious individuals must choose whether to pay their taxes or to refuse to pay them and defy the government.
What does just and unjust laws mean?
“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of Harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
What should happen if a government violates people’s natural rights?
If a sovereign violated these rights, the social contract was broken, and the people had the right to revolt and establish a new government. Less than 100 years after Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government, Thomas Jefferson used his theory in writing the Declaration of Independence.
What led to the civil disobedience movement?
On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India. Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet.
How are our natural rights protected?
The reason that governments are “instituted among men” is to protect our natural rights, as the Declaration of Independence states. Those natural rights of life, liberty, and property protected implicitly in the original Constitution are explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights.
What is the opposite of natural law?
The concept of positive law is distinct from “natural law”, which comprises inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by “God, nature, or reason.” Positive law is also described as the law that applies at a certain time (present or past) and at a certain place, consisting of statutory law, and case law …
Are human rights and natural rights the same?
Natural rights were traditionally viewed as exclusively negative rights, whereas human rights also comprise positive rights. Even on a natural rights conception of human rights, the two terms may not be synonymous.