Bernstein Writes on MLK, ‘Civil Disobedience: Towards a Kantian Conception’

Dr. Alyssa Bernstein

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a focus of the discussion in Dr. Alyssa Bernstein’s forthcoming article, “Civil Disobedience: Towards a Kantian Conception.” The article’s publication in March 2018 will coincide with the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination on April 4th, 1968.

Bernstein’s article will be published in an anthology about Kant’s moral, political, and legal philosophy, Kant’s Doctrine of Right in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Larry Krasnoff, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, and Paula Satne (Cardiff:  University of Wales Press).

In this article Bernstein surveys Immanuel Kant’s claims about revolution, inalienable rights, law, and the limits of political obligation. She examines several interpretations that seem to find a basis for morally permissible civil disobedience in Kant, and argues that each of them is inadequate. She then sketches a new Kantian conception of permissible civil disobedience, based partly on the example of the participation by King in the protest march discussed in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Walker v. City of Birmingham. 

She concludes by briefly comparing John Rawls’s conception of permissible civil disobedience.