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Though the law sometimes provides loopholes for citizens to break the law when necessary, there are a few scenarios in which we may be compelled to disobey the law as a matter of duty. Even the Declaration of Independence for the United States of America states that “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…when…the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government….”
Thus, our law system has the inherent task of facing righteous law-breakers.
The case of self-defense in a violent confrontation is one situation in which we may be required to disobey the law. Take, for example, the following situation: A man keeps an unregistered gun loaded on his bedside table. One night he wakes up to hear an armed burglar breaking into his home. When the man gets out of bed with his gun, he finds the burglar in his children’s room, where he aims his gun and shoots the burglar down. In this scene, the man has broken a couple of laws despite the fact that he acted like any of us might have in the same situation. Using his unregistered gun was illegal, and assault with a deadly weapon is illegal as well. Whereas the law makes the self-defense loophole available to justify the latter, using his gun may still stand as a violation in a court of law. Ethically, however, the man had a duty to act the way he did. He was charged with the responsibility to protect his life and the well being of his children, and though he knew his gun was unregistered, taking the time to wait for the police or find another weapon in the house may have been less successful, and the burglar could have done harm.
Also, in the military, it may be considered illegal to disobey commanding officers.
However, in the event that a soldier is commanded to do something that is clearly unethical and unnecessarily endangers human life, the soldier is charged with the duty to disobey their commanding officer because following such an order would be a negative against the greater good.
In the case of Abu Graib and the controversial prisoner abuse trials, we see soldiers who use the excuse of duty to justify their torturous actions; but the duty in this moral dilemma is truly to resist in order to preserve human life and dignity.
In the event that they really were commanded to humiliate and torture their prisoners, the soldiers should have the presence of mind to recognize the severe ethical transgression this command proposes. If they recognize this transgression, they would be required by a sense of morality and humanity to disobey their officers, despite the fact that this would be a violation of laws originally set down to protect them in urgent and dangerous situations.
A situation in which it is proposed that we must break the law would only have validity if the law violation was committed for the greater good of the people or to prevent death or destruction. When these standards are met, it is often in a situation where time for reason has been reduced to a matter of seconds, and the possibility of a mistake is a risk.
There is always the likelihood that while committed with the intention of preventing death or destruction, an illegal act could fail to meet these standards after the fact. Like, for example, if the man from the earlier scene shot the burglar in his children’s bedroom then discovered it was really his wife coming home late and checking on her kids. Still, because the reaction time in a situation like this would be so brief and the possibility of danger is there, one would still be under a duty to disobey the laws when one perceives such a threat.
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