“You have not only a legal but also a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility not to obey unjust laws. ” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Aquinas` understanding of unjust laws, Martin Luther King believed that an unjust law is a man-made law that does not conform to the law of morality or the law of God. First, Aquinas and King may not have been able to determine how their formulation of the relationship between law and justice would develop in a diverse and plural religious country like India —where each religious community has distinct and distinct conceptualizations of “God” while coexisting with religions like Buddhism —that do not recognize the existence of a supreme God. So if different communities in a society believe in a particular reason or higher order, how does the state determine which divine law to conform to for a universal moral norm that applies to all subjects of a state? What is an unjust law? According to King, he is the one who humiliates rather than elevates humanity. The Jim Crow segregation laws were a prime example of unjust laws because “segregation distorts the soul and harms the personality,” as King noted. “This gives the segregater a false sense of superiority and segregation a false sense of inferiority.” It is a side of him that has been ignored or even conveniently excluded from the conversation. Meanwhile, there are people today who support unjust laws, but invoke King`s name when appropriate. They support policies that are directly directed against King`s dream of America, and choose his words without context to justify unjust laws.
Despite King`s efforts, however, he failed to achieve what dozens of philosophers and theologians also failed to do – to create a consensual measure that can be used to distinguish moral law from immoral law in a vast, diverse, and polarized society. King could not escape the reality that his distinction between just and unjust laws was inevitably controversial. Powell was right when he noted the danger posed by King`s certainty: Governor Ross Barnett, a fervent ecclesiastical Christian segregationist, was also full of certainty. Powell had ample opportunity to condemn racial segregation and other manifestations of racial abuse. He was a nationally renowned statesman-lawyer; was president of the Richmond School Board from 1952 to 1961 and president of the American Bar Association; It could be persistent on many issues. However, Powell was reluctant to condemn white supremacism. For example, while he noted that lawmakers and officials in the South may have initially flouted the law by rejecting court-ordered school integration, this observation is only a temporary digression. Powell`s main point was that the United States, for all its flaws, is a democracy that morally justifies the obedience of all its citizens, including blacks. An unjust law is not a law at all, the Latin Lex iniusta non est lex, is an expression of natural law that recognizes that authority is legitimate only if it is good and just. It has become a common legal maxim around the world.
A just law, he writes, “is a man-made code that conforms to the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that does not conform to the moral law. Any law that elevates the human personality is just. Any law that belittles the human personality is unjust. According to King, “All segregation laws are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. This gives the segregater a false sense of superiority and segregation a false sense of inferiority. To refine the distinction, King offers two indications revealing legal immorality. One of them is that unjust laws typically include “a code that a digital or power majority group forces a minority group to do, but does not make itself binding.” A second is that unjust laws generally include a code “imposed on a minority who did not participate in the adoption or development because of the denial of the right to vote.” As we have already mentioned, there cannot be a clear answer to the question of whether an unjust law is a law or not. This is because the complex interplay of justice, morality, divinity, and law can make it virtually difficult to categorically identify a law as just or unjust. The arguably Eurocentric approach of natural law philosophers like Aquinas and Augustine overlooks the complications that can arise when their conceptualizations of just laws are applied to a religiously diverse and pluralistic country like India.
Although the legal validity of a man-made positive right is not compromised by its moral justifiability, the complex concept of justice and its different conceptualizations make it difficult to determine concretely whether an apparently unjust law should have moral force through obedience; Especially if the disobedience of individuals and communities to the laws with the diversity of thoughts regarding its “justice” could lead to selective obedience to the laws, which could lead to the probable chaos and destruction of legal systems. And, of course, he sat in a prison cell in Birmingham and talked about how Alabama`s segregation laws, which prevented black citizens from voting, were introduced by an undemocratically elected state legislature (a majority of power). He pointed out that even in some predominantly black districts, not a single black person was registered to vote. Martin Luther King Jr.[3] referred to Augustine and Aquinas in a letter from Birmingham Prison, saying that Jim Crow laws were unjust and should be avoided to justify his justification of the goodness of civil disobedience. The Lex iniusta non est lex, the legal maxim that means “an unjust law is not a law,” was created and became famous by two Christian legal philosophers, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, respectively.] The maxim is considered central to the debate that distinguishes the natural school of legal philosophy from that of positivists. At the heart of the debate is the fundamental question of the role of moral norms/reasoning in the making of laws and the obligation of subjects to respect them; where natural jurists generally agree that the law is subject to moral norms, while positivists generally agree that morality does not affect the legal sanction of the law. This becomes all the more complicated when there are contradictory religious ideologies on a particular subject. For example, the Hindu community (mainly those of the upper caste) arguably claims that cows are sacred under Hinduism and that their slaughter for meat violates their religious principles, that is, their divine law.
On the other hand, beef is traditionally considered part of the nutritional culture of religious groups such as Muslims and Christians in India. How would the state then determine whether a beef ban would be fair or unfair? Moreover, how would the state accept contradictory interpretations of religious scripture by members of a single religious community? How, then, would God`s moral code be determined? In India, personal laws are guided by the religious practices of different religious communities, and personal laws usually also take into account different usual practices that are otherwise overlooked by dominant interpretations of religious practices. In a way, the state is arguably trying to adapt to the “divine law” of various religious groups and create space for the adaptation of different intra-religious interpretations of divine law. King chose a term — “law and order” — that would gain prominence in the sixties and beyond, writing that he “hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.” If the law is not fair, King explains, it can be correctly and not violently ignored. “I would agree with St. Augustine,” he said, “that an unjust law is not a law at all.” In determining whether “an unjust law is not a law,” it is important to determine how the term “law” is used in the maxim. The maxim in question could be understood as including two different conceptualizations of law: the first “right” can be understood as a positive law in relation to the society/institutions from which it originated, while the second use of the term “law” can be understood as a positive law in the context of natural law. Thus, the latter “law” is what Finnis would call a law in the focal sense; To make the first – the law in the secondary sense. With the implication of such identifications that the legal validity of an “unjust” law may remain unchanged by its moral indefensibleness, that is, an unjust law may remain a de facto law and be accepted by the courts as a valid law that has legal sanctions and therefore creates legal obligations even if it does not meet moral standards. The question that arises from the maxim therefore concerns the moral obligation to obey an apparently unjust law, despite its legal validity. A law is also unfair if a numerical majority or a majority of power imposes it on a minority, but the majority does not have to follow the law.