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women, who would have been killed, are alive today. |
290 |
Ends and Means |
In 1976 Bob Brown, then a young medical practitioner, rafted |
down the Franklin river, in Tasmania's southwest. The wild |
beauty of the river and the peace of the undisturbed forests |
around it impressed him deeply. Then, around a bend on the |
lower reaches of the river, he came across workers for the |
Hydro-Electric Commission, studying the feasibility of building |
a dam across the river. Brown gave up his medical practice |
and founded the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, with the object |
of protecting the state's remaining wilderness areas. Despite |
vigorous campaigning, the Hydro-Electric Commission recommended |
the building of the dam, and after some vacillation the |
state government, with support both from the business community |
and the labour unions, decided to go ahead. The Tasmanian |
Wilderness Society organized a non-violent blockade |
of the road being built to the dam site. In 1982, Brown, along |
with many others, was arrested and jailed for four days for |
trespassing on land controlled by the Hydro-Electric Commission. |
But the blockade became a focus of national attention, |
and although the Australian federal government was not direcdy |
responsible for the dam, it became an issue in the federal |
election that was then due. The Australian Labor Party, in opposition |
before the election, pledged to explore constitutional |
means of preventing the dam from going ahead. The election |
saw the Labor party elected to office, and legislation passed to |
stop the dam. Though challenged by the Tasmanian government, |
the legislation was upheld by a narrow majority of the |
High Court of Australia on the grounds that the Tasmanian |
southwest was a World Heritage area, and the federal government |
had constitutional powers to uphold the international |
treaty creating the World Heritage Commission. Today the |
Franklin still runs free. |
Do we have an overriding obligation to obey the law? Oskar |
Schindler, the members of the Animal Liberation Front who |
291 |
Practical Ethics |
took Gennarelli's videotapes, Joan Andrews of Operation Rescue, |
and Bob Brown and those who joined him in front of the |
bulldozers in Tasmania's southwest were all breaking the law. |
Were they all acting wrongly? |
The question cannot be dealt with by invoking the simplistic |
formula: 'the end never justifies the means'. For all but the |
strictest adherent of an ethic of rules, the end sometimes does |
justify the means. Most people think that lying is wrong, other |
things being equal, yet think it right to lie in order to avoid |
causing unnecessary offence or embarrassment - for instance, |
when a well-meaning relative gives you a hideous vase for your |
birthday, and then asks if you really like it. If this relatively |
trivial end can justify lying, it is even more obvious that some |
important end - preventing a murder, or saving animals from |
great suffering - can justify lying. Thus the principle that the |
end cannot justify the means is easily breached. The difficult |
issue is not whether the end can ever justify the means, but |
which means are justified by which ends. |
INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE AND THE LAW |
There are many people who are opposed to damming wild |
rivers, to the exploitation of animals, or to abortion, but who |
do not break the law in order to stop these activities. No doubt |
some members of the more conventional conservation, animal |
liberation, and anti-abortion organizations do not commit illegal |
acts because they do not wish to be fined or imprisoned; but |
others would be prepared to take the consequences of illegal |
acts. They refrain only because they respect and obey the moral |
authority of the law. |
Who is right in this ethical disagreement? Are we under any |
moral obligation to obey the law, if the law protects and sanctions |
things we hold utterly wrong? A clear-cut answer to this |
question was given by the nineteenth-century American radical, |
292 |
Ends and Means |
Henry Thoreau. In his essay entitled 'Civil Disobedience' - perhaps |
the first use of this now-familiar phrase - he wrote: |
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign |
his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, |
then? I think we should be men first and subjects afterwards. It |
is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for |
the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is |
to do at any time what I think right. |
The American philosopher Robert Paul Wolff has written in |
similar vein: |
The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The |
primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled, |
It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict |
between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority |
of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to |
make himself the author of his decisions, he will resist the state's |
claim to have authority over him. |
Thoreau and Wolff resolve the conflict between individual and |
society in favour of the individual. We should do as our conscience |
dIctates, as we autonomously decide we ought to do: |
not as the law directs. Anything else would be a denial of our |
capacity for ethical choice. |
Thus stated, the issue looks straightforward and the ThoreauWolff |
answer obviously right. So Oskar Schindler, the Animal |
Liberation Front, Joan Andrews, and Bob Brown were fully |
justified in doing what they saw to be right, rather than what |
the state laid down as lawful. But is it that simple? There is a |
sense in which it is undeniable that, as Thoreau says, we ought |
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