Question

explain how Dr Kings Letter from a Birmingham City Jail gives a natural law ethics that is similar to the natural law ethics explained in the reading

Answer 1

Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter titled “Letter from a Birmingham jail” was one of the finest example of Natural Law Ethics.In that said Letter, he wrote: “I would agree with St. Augustine that, an unjust law is no law at all.” Moreover, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As such, “One has . . . a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

King’s analysis, obviously, raises the question about one important aspect of law and that is how to determine whether a law is just. Here, King advocated natural law. While explaining   a Just Law he said that “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” He then took a reference of St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of unjust Law. Applying that definition to the present context, King moved on to explain that since segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality of an individual, all segregation statutes are unjust. He further said that It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

Directly responding to the clergymen, King said that it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. King further said “Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber”.King also explained that “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.

Moreover, in that letter King said that it is wrong to use means to attain moral ends at the same time it is also wrong to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

King’s letter certainly struck a chord. Some have called it the turning point of the civil rights movement. It also contains the essence of Natural law and its ethics.