Abstract
This article connects two of my research fields: obeying the law (understanding the essence of civil disobedience and civil responsibility in democratic states), and flaws in reasoning (understanding the role of cognitive biases in ordinary and fateful decisions). Prof. Joseph Agassi made a decisive contribution to these research directions and accompanied me over many productive years.
My contribution deals with the ways in which our cognitive structure, the state, its organs, and those who cooperate with it (either consciously or unconsciously), obstruct the functioning of responsible citizens in a democratic state. I shall present the actions the state employs for this purpose, along with insights from research into cognitive biases. The paper represents a search for a more accurate presentation of the idea of civil responsibility in a democratic state, along with the state’s ways of obstructing responsible citizens’ attempts to realize their civil responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
On Agassi’s way of phrasing research questions and of teaching, see Ben-Noon 1997, 31–36.
- 2.
This is also how Agassi operates, in a spiral motion starting with renewed, broader examination of what has been written, rephrasing it to provide deeper meaning, and unceasingly striving for greater rationality.
- 3.
- 4.
The paper focuses on the obstruction methods that are employed with sophistication and malice rather than random actions or direct law enforcement. The paper does not deal, for example, with the arrest of responsible citizens during law breaking (the state’s use of the security forces) or direct orders to employees not to break the law (the case of Aristides Mendes described below).
- 5.
In such a democracy, it is not usually necessary to refuse to obey the law, because a law that people refuse to obey is probably a law that contravenes its principles anyway. On this, Marcuse wrote: “As existing democracies become directed and controlled democracies that legally (rather than illegally) restrict democratic rights and freedoms, so it becomes more necessary to add to these forms of opposition action also extra-parliamentary means of struggle” (Marcuse 1961, 72).
- 6.
H. D. Thoreau https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/henrydavid124849.html. One of the most important principles is the principle of the regime’s self-limitation. Such a limitation appears, for instance, at the base of the United States Constitution. Congress knows it is not entitled to legislate laws that contravene the Constitution. Furthermore, even if Congress represents the majority of citizens, there are laws it cannot legislate, even if the vast majority of the people support them.
- 7.
R. W. Emerson , https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/ralphwaldo134991.html/.
- 8.
The full story of Mendes and others is told by Avshalom Elizur, “The Power Drunkenness of General Consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes”, http://a-c-elitzur.co.il/site/siteArticle.asp?ar=140&stext=%F1%E5%E0%F8%F9&page=1.
- 9.
These include: Raoul Wallenberg , the Swedish ambassador who paid with his life for his intervention in support of Hungary’s Jews; Chiune Sugihara , Japan’s Consul in Lithuania, who lost his job due to helping local Jews; the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, Feng-Shan Ho , who was reprimanded for granting visas to Jews; Georg Duckwitz , the Nazi trade attaché in Copenhagen, who risked his life by warning the Jews of Denmark about the intention to send them to concentration camps. These and others together saved hundreds of thousands of Jews.
- 10.
For a shocking account of how environments shape humans, see Packard 1977 .
- 11.
The main finding indicated by Tversky and Kahneman , the pioneers of research into cognitive biases, is the uniform response of most humans to situations in which our cognition is biased. Our mistakes are systematic. Recent studies imply that intuitively operated probabilistic or statistical judgment is liable to systematic failings and is guided by thinking principles that deviate from the criteria that mathematics and formal logic determine for rationality. See Menashe 2008, 282–283.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 302.
- 13.
For example, Guy Rotkopf , a researcher from Tel Aviv University, became the Director General of the Justice Ministry, and David Haan moved from Bar Ilan University to head the Administrator General’s Department. Overseas, Cass Sunstein served as the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, and Richard Thaler headed the British Behavioral Insights Team under the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron .
- 14.
Tversky and Kahneman found that most people respond uniformly when taking intuitive decisions. They found that our mistakes are systematic.
- 15.
On the two-system theory, see: Kahneman 2003 . In my opinion, even though the professional literature presents these two systems as distinct, there may be some “leakage” of System 1 into System 2, and vice versa. In other words, the two systems operate in parallel, but there is a local “overpowering” in any given decision of one of the systems over the other. Support for this theory can be found in the model by Shane Frederick (and Daniel Kahneman ) whereby we make an intuitive judgment (System 1) that can be changed by consideration from System 2: “System 2 monitors the quality of these proposals, which it may endorse, correct, or override”. Shane 2005, 40.
- 16.
This diversion is described as a group diversion and termed “groupthink” by Janis and Mann . This type of thinking occurs when the influence of a “senior” group member over the rest makes the group support the “senior” member’s opinions. For our purposes, the senior member is the state or its organs. See Janis and Mann 1977.
- 17.
Great danger arises from the Supreme Court, under President Justice Aharon Barak , creating the “revolution of judicializing protest”. This revolution leads many organizations to turn from having social dominance to having a legalistic orientation. See Elbashan 2009, 146. This revolution is important in itself when the protest is legal, but may be an obstacle and a burden when it is not legal. The institutionalization and judicialization of protest is very important, as long as it does not contain civil disobedience.
- 18.
Breaking the law for ideological reasons, for example, could be named by the regime “an undemocratic act that harms state security”; total obedience to the law will be called “the state’s interest”; acts of civil disobedience can be described as “it is unthinkable that a citizen of the state, who is supposed to be loyal to it, could do such a thing”, and so on. See Marcuse 1961, 11–13 ; George Orwell 1949.
- 19.
Two serious examples that probably originated in incitement that eventually led to murder – even if it is difficult to find a direct line from the incitement to murder – are the murders of Emil Greenzweig and Yitzhak Rabin . See Ben-Noon 1993.
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Ben-Noon, C. (2017). Obstructing the Realization of Civil Responsibility: Political, Sociological, Historical, and Psychological Aspects of Civil Responsibility. In: Bar-Am, N., Gattei, S. (eds) Encouraging Openness. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 325. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_28
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