Official Disobedience: Bureaucrats & Unjust Laws

A legitimate expectation in a liberal democracy is that public officials enforce the law regardless of its content; when they don't do so, their actions tend to be publicly condemned. This expectation puts street-level bureaucrats in a moral dilemma when they consider that a certain law is unjust: either they don't enforce the law and violate their duties to the citizenry, or they enforce it and become complicit in injustices. This paper argues for the legal permission of public officials to disregard legal mandates for moral reasons. Call it official disobedience. Contrary to common intuitions, I show that official disobedience would foster the principles of and improve governance in liberal democracies: it accommodates public officials' personal autonomy and yields three main democratic benefits. First, information about the outcomes of the law would become available for lawmakers; second, in the aggregate, it would protect citizens from injustices; third, it would improve the moral character of bureaucrats.