Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: May the Use of Violent Civil On what ground could he locate the natural rights of persons, given his denigration of the property righta right affirmed in classical natural-rights philosophy as a direct corollary of the liberty of the person? It is a powerful means of combating unjust laws, and freeing society from oppressive restrictions. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? To gain a full, sympathetic understanding of Kings position, it is necessary, as King scholar Jonathan Rieder has commented, to think concretely about the distinction: In Birmingham, the lawbreakers [castrated] a black man; they bomb[ed] ordinary families . Here is the key point: Kings actions in Birmingham and elsewhere were born of a deep impatience, informed, as he wrote in the Letter, by a centuries-long history of injustice, including promises made and unfulfilled, that had taught him to equate slow or partial progress with no progress: Half a loaf is no bread.[REF] Despite his generally gracious recognition of NAACP efforts, King held that the courtroom victories won by that senior organization, along with the other apparent successes achieved in the electoral branches to that point, would prove practically worthless unless reinforced by further, stronger measures that would be enacted only in response to sustained, intensified pressure. The result of these shortcomings is that the argument of Kings Letter, while strong and clear enough to identify the injustice of racial segregation and disfranchisement, is also abstract and ambiguous enough to expose a broad range of positive laws to charges of injusticeand therefore, potentially, to acts of disobedient protest. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.[REF] He also rejected the error Kilpatrick had ascribed to him, a reliance on conscience to distinguish just and unjust laws that reduces in practice to a mere idiosyncratic choice. There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. I have one definition to give. Those two statutes constitute the most ambitious and effective civil- and political-rights guarantees in the nations history, and their enactment coincides with the onset of a profound reformation in Americans moral sentiments about race relations.
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