Dig, if you will, a picture:
Sometime in the future, you are moved to act against a serious problem in your community.
Your actions boldly defy the opinions, norms, or even laws of your community.
You are accused of injustice — of being an enemy of your community and its values.
Refusing to apologize for your dedication to truth and justice, you offer an “Apology.”
You draw on readings from your Power & Justice course to make your case.
For this paper, you will defend yourself against this (imaginary) charge of injustice. To prepare, you will need to decide (1) what the problem was, (2) what your actions were, (3) why you took those actions, (4) how they ran afoul of your community, & (5) what your defense will be.
Perhaps you are a corrupter of the youth like Socrates; perhaps you brazenly refused to follow an unjust order like Antigone; perhaps you persisted in speaking the truth against public pressure like Dr. Stockmann; perhaps you engaged in political revolution like Gandhi; perhaps you broke an unjust law to move the consciences of your contemporaries like King; or maybe it’s something else entirely.
Whether you have broken a law, defied an acknowledged norm, or simply found yourself on the wrong side of an aggrieved majority, your job in this paper is to defend your actions against the accusation that you are somehow an enemy of all that is just and good and decent.
Please note:
You are not innocent or falsely accused—you should dispute the meaning of your actions (i.e. whether they were unjust) rather than the facts of the accusation (i.e. what you did).
Your focus must be on your own community (whatever that may be). This community may be as large as a country or as small as a family or group friends, but it should be one of which you understand yourself to be, and would like to continue to be, a member. In other words: don’t write about upsetting people you already don’t respect or care about; the object is not to antagonize your enemies, but to challenge your friends.
It should be clear to a reader of your paper what audience you are addressing, what you have been accused of, who your accusers are, what your actions were, what reasons you had for taking those actions, and why your audience should change their minds and declare you an agent of justice rather than injustice. Your defense should draw explicitly on one or more course texts to help justify your actions. You may also choose to model your paper on one of the course texts, or you may employ a form of your own design. I encourage you to be as creative as possible.
Your paper should involve serious and substantive engagement with the texts, which means direct quotes that you interpret and analyze carefully. I’m expecting your papers to be somewhere around 5 pages, which can vary depending on the form it takes.
The sources that you will be using are Plato, the apology; Alexis de Tocquiville, Democracy in America; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
