Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis

Ethics and Morals To be considered ethical you must act in a way that harm is minimized. To be considered moral you must do what is considered to be “right”. I believe that in both cases it is a judgment call. What is moral or ethical to one may not be to another. In his writing of Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau focusses on his views of the government and how he believed it to be unjust and unfair. Ethics and morality come to question throughout his writing. Thoreau talks of the laws being established by the majority and that those who stood up for a change were the minority. Thoreau points out, “Unjust laws exist: Shall we be content to obey them or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall
The government was charging a poll-tax on the citizens in Massachusetts. A poll-tax was a “per head” tax imposed on all citizens to help support the war in Mexico (Jacobus, 302). Because Thoreau did not agree with the war, he did not feel it necessary to pay the poll-tax. Thoreau contends, “I have paid no poll-tax in six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck by the foolishness of that institution which treated me as I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up” (316). He continued, “I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waist of stone and mortar” (316). Thoreau stood up for what he thought to be morally correct, and being put in the county jail was not going to stop him. He was considered the minority but he was not concerned with that. He knew that in order to make a change, you had to be a part of it. Thoreau used his words to convince his audience that it was their ethical responsibility to stand up against the immoral