fear of punishment is an example of one such mechanism: the consequence of committing a given crime out weighs the benefit and as such deters us from committing that crime. Within the realm of our own morality conscience can be seen perform this role, just ac if we contravene laws we must live with punishment, if we break our own morality we must live with our conscience. All of this is fine until a situation arises where our morality clashes with the law, and at that time we are faced with a stark choice, a choice between the punishment meted out by the state for infringement of the law and the punishment delivered by our own psyche - a straight choice between consequence and conscience. In fact in this situation the more relevant question might be are we ever justified in obeying laws which we consider to be immoral. Of course at some point the burden of the constitutional punishment is likely to become greater than the burden of conscience and we will find ourselves living with the burden of conscience.Another argument for moral justification in breaking immoral laws can be extrapolated from J. Rawls' "Theory of Civil Disobedience". Rawls outlines circumstances in which we may be considered to be constitutionally justified in breaking laws, which we consider to be unjust and ergo immoral. In fact Rawls goes as far as to suggest that we can even be justified in breaking laws other than those to which we object. Rawls states that in objecting to a law we are justified in committing acts of non-violent civil disobedience as a communicative act, which is designed to appeal to the sense of common justice assumed to be held by the majority in a nearly just society. Although he concedes that it is necessary to have attempted to change the law through due political course first. This civil disobedience is to be seen as a socially corrective measure and as such part of the democratic constitution. In this situation we are told that we may be ...
