The Lawfulness of Revolution

A link I saw today mirrors a discussion Tom and I were having in a couple of the posts below. We were talking about piracy; this is about revolution. The question is whether either can be in some sense "lawful," or if indeed having a State whose law approves of the action in any way improves or alters the morality of the action.

The distinction between piracy and revolution is potentially less than it seems. Pirates were often breakaway sailors who had turned against their own government, for example -- indeed, during the period that occasioned the discussion, supporters of the Stewarts often found themselves fighting against the English Civil War government that executed their king Charles I, and then for the new government that followed the restoration of Charles II, and then against the government that rejected James II in favor of William of Orange. Such men could go from being defined as 'privateers' to 'pirates' and back again. 

Likewise, men like Stede Bonnet, an English gentleman who was briefly part of the Republic of Pirates -- the one in Nassau, not the one on Old Providence isle, which is now a part of Colombia (the one with two 'o's, for those following AVI's blog also) before being pardoned and made an English privateer, after which he returned to pirating his own nation's ships as well. Those activities gave information and inspiration to the Revolutionary war American privateers, who were of course considered pirates -- and traitors, as they considered all 'revolutionaries' -- by the English. 

Some of the American revolutionary leaders gave serious attention to the question of whether or not what they were doing could be called lawful, rather than merely just or virtuous or proper. Per the article, they fell on exactly the distinction I mentioned in the comments to Tom:

If you want to impose a religious context on top of the social one, one might not have violated the natural law or the divine law but acted in an upright way as a husband or father defending his family; the murderer clearly has sinned through wrath or lust or whatever brought him to the murder. However, since the religious context introduces a sort-of legislation, it might muddy the point to add it.

Since the article is specifically about 'lawfulness,' in their version of the discussion this is immediately relevant rather than water-muddying. The Natural Law does seem to endorse revolutions -- as the Declaration of Independence frames it, sometimes as a right and sometimes as a duty.