Does Rawls successfully argue that civil disobedience can be stabilizing mechanism and for that reason ought to be accepted in a constitutional system?
Rawls claims, “There can, in fact, be considerable differences in citizens’ conceptions of justice provided that these conceptions lead to similar political judgments” (340). But if civil disobedience is justified precisely because it appeals to common notions of justice, then how can it be consistent with his idea of an overlapping consensus?
Is the (somewhat narrow) notion of civil disobedience Rawls is working with rooted in a particular historical context? Is it relevant for our time? I ask this in light of my perception of the many activists I’ve encountered, who I suspect would be unwilling to admit that our political system is “nearly just or reasonably so,” whose acts may seem like civil disobedience but whose justifications fall more into what Rawls calls “militant” - i.e. believing that the political system either “departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistaken conception of justice altogether” (322).
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