"I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends."
Those words from Martin Luther King Jr's call to mind another American thinker who was also opposed to legalized injustice, Henry David Thoreau. In his seminal essay, On Civil Disobedience Thoreau found both slavery and the Mexican American war, while formally 'legal' to be morally repugnant, but he found equally repugnant the idea that one should break the law and then act dishonestly by not admitting to it. His essay is a call for principled behavior at the individual level to resist immoral laws.
