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Conscientious Objection

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Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook

Abstract

In a democracy, as a general rule, minorities should obey the law, which in principle is the will of the majority. There are two main exceptions. The first is in the case of an unjust law, because it offends human rights, which are more “fundamental” than the pretended rights created by such a law. This leads to a conflict between the principle of democratic order and the principle of the rule of law. But as these are both principles of democracy, as a system of principles, the conflict is solved by considering the law invalid or subject to judicial review, exposing it to civil disobedience or to a right of resistance, or even capable of justifying revolution. The second exception occurs when the law is a just law and an unassailable expression of the general will, in spite of which affected minorities may in good faith refuse to “surrender to the popular will,”1 in the words of Justice Stone in a famous dissenting opinion in a Supreme Court case. This is the premise of conscientious objection. It provides the basis in a modern constitutional state for minorities to be able to assert a right to tolerance. In earlier times they had only the last recourse of political dissenters: the right to emigrate,2 which in the case of the United States could easily be correlated with a right of free movement from state to state.

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Authors
  1. José de Sousa e Brito
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Tore Lindholm W. Cole Durham Jr. Bahia G. Tahzib-Lie Elizabeth A. Sewell Lena Larsen

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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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de Sousa e Brito, J. (2004). Conscientious Objection. In: Lindholm, T., Durham, W.C., Tahzib-Lie, B.G., Sewell, E.A., Larsen, L. (eds) Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-04-13783-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-017-5616-7

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