In my mind civil disobedience, as an ethical concept, is about refusing to comply with one or more laws that you believe to be unjust. Disregarding the Jim Crow laws seems to be the "textbook" example in this regard.
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?
I would add that another component of civil disobedience is a willingness to accept the consequences, to be arrested without violence or any resistance. I should have included that in my original comment.
> to be arrested without violence or any resistance.
Again, why are people insisting on redefining words because they don't like their meaning? Chaining yourself to a physical structure like a building or tree, and going so far as to make cutting those chains difficult, is one of the prototypical examples of civil disobedience. The whole point is to make it difficult for police to arrest and remove the protestors in those situations.
I would argue that those are examples of non-violent approaches. Another tactic is to "play dead" so that the protesters have to be physically carried away, tedious and time consuming.
But those tactics are very different than what is going on and I think it is quite easy to distinguish between that sort of thing and rioting.
Sorry, I was feeling adversarial last night because of Jacob Blake. Discussion about the right way to protest without the context of the actions precipitating it isn’t getting the job done.
Perhaps I focused too much on one type of civil disobedience. The examples you cite are useful in illustrating that the disobedience has to be peaceful. Or perhaps it might be better to say that the moral authority or message of the protest is vastly strengthened by peaceful disobedience. The willingness to be arrested without resisting is also an important component as it communicates a concurrent belief in the rule of law while still protesting.
When the disobedience includes assault, vandalism, arson, looting, and so on, it is no longer a protest, it is a riot and it looses all its moral legitimacy as a protest in my mind.
It is an interesting question. My first thought is that a core element of the Boston Tea Party was that the colonist had no representation, there was no legitimate way for them to participate in their governance and they were protesting specific laws/taxes that were being imposed without their consent.
I don't think that the current situation in the US is analogous. There are lots of ways to affect change without resorting to violence: peaceful protest, drafting new laws, voting for more police funding, voting for different representatives, voting for different executives.
The idea that all those options have been exhausted and the only solution is to physically and economically destroy communities in order to draw attention to the problem is illogical and self-defeating. In an even more bizarre twist, the story that seems to be emerging is that the rioter's demands are to make changes that aren't wanted by the people in the communities that the rioters purport to represent (see recent polls that minority communities want more police, not less).
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?