Moral questions surrounding Occupy Central's civil disobedience campaign
Shannon Gong and Olivia Gong ask whether an illegal act of civil disobedience as planned by the Occupy Central campaign can be justified, however noble its aims may seem to organisers
Lately, people toting vibrant banners bearing catchy slogans that either endorse or condemn the "Occupy Central" movement swarmed the streets of Hong Kong. They reflect a city deeply divided over electoral reform, ever since Professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting first proposed the campaign in a newspaper article in January this year. The proposal claims to be an act of civil disobedience with the ultimate goal of achieving "real" universal suffrage for the election of the Chief Executive in 2017 and of the Legislative Council in 2020.
Civil disobedience is the refusal to comply with certain laws as a peaceful form of political protest. The idea is to amass public sympathy to force the government to satisfy the dissenters' demands for "justice" - in this case "real" universal suffrage. Even a child knows breaking the law is wrong. So how, if ever, can breaking the law be justified?
University of Michigan philosophy professor Carl Cohen, author of Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics and the Law, suggests that we examine civil disobedience from two perspectives - legal and moral.
It is a higly complicated and weighty task for Professor Tai and his co-organisers
Take an example from Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Misérables. The character, Jean Valjean, stole a loaf of bread to save his dying nephew and was then held captive in jail for 19 years. In law, he committed the crime of theft. Common sense and logic tell us that, under the law, what he did was wrong. Yet our moral conscience suggests that his attempt to save his nephew was right. Natural human instincts dictate that in some very special circumstances, it might be "OK" to break the law.
It is impossible to make a legal justification for doing something illegal, so the only ground left to justify an illegal act is from a moral perspective. We can conveniently classify moral justifications into two branches - "higher law" and "utilitarian" justifications.
Higher law is the concept that some unwritten universal values exist above the law. These principles are in some way tied to moral conscience and are so significant that they outmatch any conflicting legal obligations.
For instance, Martin Luther King Jnr was well-known for repeatedly using the "higher-law" defence to justify his civil disobedience movement in the 1960s. In disobeying segregation laws that championed discrimination, he argued, "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws". The difference between a just and an unjust law is that an unjust law is out of harmony with the "moral" law. If certain universal moral standards are not met, one should be obliged to disobey that law.
In essence, organisers of Occupy Central bear the heavy burden to fully argue that some truly fundamental universal principles are so significant such that they morally propel the illegal occupying of a certain area in the Central district.