Is It Ever Morally Right To Break The Law?

Short answer is of course it is. But it’s not that simple. There is more to it than just that. So, I’m going to give examples.

You are in a country with no social programs and harsh punishment for even miner crimes. This country does not allow circumstances to be weighed in court; they literally don’t care why you did it. You have a child and can’t feed it. No one has the means to give you their food or they just don’t care. You need to steal food to feed the child, or it will starve to death. If you are convicted, you spend 10 years in prison, and your child will be on its own and will not survive.

There is only one path here that is moral, you take the food. There is deep risk to it, but if you do nothing, the child will die. The child may still die if you are arrested. However, obeying the law in this instance is morally incorrect.

Those who think it’s not ever OK to break the law then have to choose to let a child die instead of allowing the parent to help it. This can easily be seen as not only uncompassionate but actively causing the child’s death. The court knows that will happen to the child and there will be no help for it, but the law does not allow for justification for the crime. They actively sentence the child to die.

Let’s do one in our own land now, not in an abstract place. People literally ignore the reality of this scenario all the time in the so-called first world. It has to do with deportation.

There is a family who entered the country illegally and the government is set to send them back to their homeland as soon as they find them and can arrest them. However, it is known that they flee from a government who will literally have them murdered and the bodies vanished. This is certain to happen. As soon as they get off the plain the government agents will grab them and they are doomed to die a violent death.

To hide these people is not legal, it is in fact a criminal action. But if you turn them in you take part in their murder. The fact that they should have entered the country legally is not a valid argument here, because they did not and are already here. The courts have already said they are to be deported.

The moral and just thing to do is to shelter them or to get them to someone who can shelter them.

No one here is saying we should just break a law if you don’t like it. This is not the argument at all. The point is there can be valid justification to commit a crime.