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Pol 350
Boethius, machiavelli, hobbes
Civil disobedience:
To help us cultivate good conscience, state of mind or action, where our thoughts are good,
Helps us flourish, be at peace with each other,
What is conscience, what is good conscience, how do you cultivate it, how does civil disobedience connect to it,
Thoreau: conscience is a mental and emtional faculty that is connected to the divine. Thoreau is a special faculty that connects us to the divine, understanding of individuality and he claims its our moral responsibility to get clear about who we are and discover who we are.
In order to do that you have to separate yourself from the political environment, being absorbed in the city makes it difficult to doscover who you are and the moral conscience.
Because when we ar ein the city people tell us how to be, the more we submit to that the less we cultivate our conscience, the less we understand who we are, at some point we delinquish our humanity, and someone elses decided our existance for us.
The moral law speaks to you if you leave the city.
Civil disobedience is denying the city onceself, denying society he finacial resources, intelectual resources,
For Thoreau civil disobedience entails denying society the resources it is based on, it feed on.
For him the goal is, if everybody did that, than the machine couldn’t function.
If everyone denied taxes, genious, than the monster of the society would come to a halt.
Civil disobedicen is done for the individual.
Social byproduct,
Disobedience is initially a personal affair.
“How does a man stand for a government like this” “Not at all” => leaving and & ...